Turning Digitised Newspapers into Networks of Political Elites

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 567-587
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Hicks ◽  
Vincent A. Traag ◽  
Ridho Reinanda
Keyword(s):  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computational Sciences ◽  
Computational Identification

This paper introduces the Elite Network Shifts (ENS) project to the Asian Studies community where computational techniques are used with digitised newspaper articles to describe changes in relations among Indonesian political elites. Reflecting on how “political elites” and “political relations” are understood by the elites, as well as across the disciplinary boundaries of the social and computational sciences, it suggests ways to operationalise these concepts for digital research. It then presents the results of a field trip where six Indonesian political elites were asked to evaluate the accuracy of their own computational networks generated by the project. The main findings of the paper are: (1) The computational identification of political elites is relatively successful, while much work remains on categorising their relations, (2) social scientists should focus on capturing single dimensions of complex social phenomena when using computational techniques, and (3) computational techniques are not able to capture multiple understandings of social concepts.

Determinism, Predictions, and Probabilism

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
Francois Dépelteau
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Social Cause ◽  
Social Causes ◽  
The Universe

This chapter addresses determinism, which has been the predominant mode of perceiving the universe in modern sciences. The basic assumption is that any event is the effect of an external cause. Generally speaking, biological determinism focuses on the biological causes of events, whereas social sciences focus on the social causes. This mode of perceiving the social universe is typically associated with positivism and, more specifically, social naturalism — or the idea that there is no significant difference between social phenomena and natural phenomena. In this logic, it is assumed that social scientists can and should discover ‘social laws’ — or universal relations of causality between a social cause and a social effect. However, determinism in the social sciences has been criticized since its very beginning. In response to these critiques, many social scientists have adopted various forms of ‘soft’ determinism. The chapter then considers social predictions and probabilism.

Capitalist Social Reproduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 320-340
Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Abstract Feature

This entry will look at Marx’s theoretical contributions to social reproduction in relationship to critical assessments of his alleged “neglect” of reproduction and to the development of the social sciences, particularly the “radical” social sciences that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continued to develop ever since. Marx, as well as Engels, offered important insights for understanding social reproduction as an abstract feature of human societies that, however, can only be fully understood in its historically specific context (i.e., in the context of the interface between modes of production and social formations). Social reproduction in the twenty-first century is capitalist social reproduction, inherently contradictory, as successful struggles for the reproduction of the working classes, for example, do not necessarily challenge capitalism. Finally, this article argues that radical social scientists, because they identify the capitalist foundations of the social phenomena they study, have made important contributions to the study of capitalist reproduction.

Secularism in Its Place

1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 747-759 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. N. Madan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Writing ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
Publishing Program ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethnic Pluralism ◽  
Distinguished Research ◽  
Culture And Development

This is the text, with a few verbal modifications, of a lecture delivered by T. N. Madan at the President's Panel in Honor of the Fulbright Fortieth Anniversary Program, on the occasion of the 1987 meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Boston. T. N. Madan has invigorated the social sciences in India for many years by his research, writing, and teaching. As an author he has written on such themes as Hindu culture, culture and development, ethnic pluralism, family and kinship, and the professions. As editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology, he has attracted to its pages distinguished research and writing from an international pool of contributors. This achievement is related to his capacity to combine discriminating intellectual taste with a friendly capacity to insinuate the journal into the publishing program of outstanding social scientists. It is also related to the fact that his anthropological understanding is combined with a wide-ranging methodological sympathy for other social sciences as well as the humanities.

scholarly journals Power and Agency: The Discipline-Shifting Work of James C. Scott

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Meredith L. Weiss ◽  
Pamela McElwee
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power And Agency

The purportedly irreconcilable aims of “area studies” versus formal disciplines are a long-standing concern. In reality, their objectives are often inseparable, and approaches that start from and center a region have strongly contributed to theory building within disciplines. Few social scientists have been so productive in building bridges between these competing frames as James C. Scott, as evidenced by his celebrated body of work, his election to the presidency of the Association for Asian Studies, and his receipt of meritorious citations such as the Social Science Research Council's 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, awarded to “scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication.”

scholarly journals Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences

Synthese ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Strohmaier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Internal Representation ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
The Social

AbstractThe ontology of social objects and facts remains a field of continued controversy. This situation complicates the life of social scientists who seek to make predictive models of social phenomena. For the purposes of modelling a social phenomenon, we would like to avoid having to make any controversial ontological commitments. The overwhelming majority of models in the social sciences, including statistical models, are built upon ontological assumptions that can be questioned. Recently, however, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have made their way into the social sciences, raising the question whether they can avoid controversial ontological assumptions. ANNs are largely distinguished from other statistical and machine learning techniques by being a representation-learning technique. That is, researchers can let the neural networks select which features of the data to use for internal representation instead of imposing their preconceptions. On this basis, I argue that neural networks can avoid ontological assumptions to a greater degree than common statistical models in the social sciences. I then go on, however, to establish that ANNs are not ontologically innocent either. The use of ANNs in the social sciences introduces ontological assumptions typically in at least two ways, via the input and via the architecture.

scholarly journals Challenging the theoretical framework of the totalitarian syndrome

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
Roman Bäcker ◽  
Joanna Rak
Keyword(s):  
Content Validity ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
Individual Concepts ◽  
The Individual

The article is of methodological nature and aims to evaluate the content validity of Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome, that is, the extent to which this theoretical framework accurately represents the social phenomena to which it refers. It introduces the critical analysis of the individual concepts extracted from the totalitarian syndrome as the indicators of totalitarianism and the model as a whole as a research tool for measuring political regimes. The paper begins with the discussion on an alternative concept of totalitarianism formulated by Nicholas Timasheff to illustrate the context in which the authors of the theoretical categories of totalitarianism created them. Then, the article goes on to analyze the nature and major characteristics of Friedrich and Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome as well as these reviews of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, which addressed the validity of the model. Social scientists have widely criticized Friedrich and Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome. The most serious objection concerns the non-specific essential features collected and combined to define totalitarianism. The taxonomic nature of the model has allowed researchers, who blindly adopted the framework, to classify discretionarily political regimes of numerous states as totalitarian. Friedrich and Brzezinski failed to advance any clear criteria for coding. They did not establish a line between meeting and not meeting the listed essential features. Furthermore, it is unknown what character the features enumerated under this syndrome have. This generates a question if the six “indicators” are essential, distinctive, significant, co-decisive, contours, features, factors, frames, pillars, or mechanisms. Although Friedrich and Brzezinski’s totalitarian syndrome fulfilled a prominent educational role mostly for US citizens by showing that there could be social worlds completely different from those in which one lives, the proposed understanding of totalitarianism is insignificant in defining such regimes. This theoretical framework inaccurately represents the social phenomena to which it refers. The paper finishes with the argument against applying the syndrome to scrutinize political regimes because of its considerably limited content validity.

scholarly journals Old Questions, New Techniques: A Research Note on the Computational Identification of Political Elites

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Hicks ◽  
Vincent Traag ◽  
Ridho Reinanda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Research Note ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Method ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Computational Identification

This paper presents a new method of identifying a nation’s political elite using computational techniques on digitised newspaper articles. It begins by describing the three most widely used methods of identifying political elites: positional, decisional and reputational. It then introduces the “reported elite method”, exploring the kinds of elites it detects and how well it reflects the composition of political elites in our case study of Indonesia. Compared to the other existing methods, we find that our method casts a much wider net when searching for political elites, resulting in many more people from civil society, far fewer formal politicians, and challenging conventional notions of who is a political elite. The method has two major underlying assumptions: (1) the newspapers from which the texts are drawn are free and fairly representative and (2) political power can be inferred from frequent appearance in newspapers alongside other frequently appearing individuals in computational “communities” of political elite.

Modeling Sociality: The View from Europe

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Computer Simulation ◽  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Multiagent Simulation ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Energy

Social science research based on computer simulation, much of it using multiagent, multilevel models, has grown dramatically in Europe since the early 1990s. This growth has been inspired by the recent upsurge of work within computer science on distributed artificial intelthe metaphor between agents and people/social actors. This chapter reviews some recent and influential European examples of the multiagent simulation of social phenomena. One common thread running through what is otherwise a very heterogeneous collection of studies is the description and exploration of a small number of generalized "logics" or "abstract social processes." It has been possible to investigate these through the construction of "artificial societies," and it is this methodological discovery that partly accounts for the current energy and excitement in the field of computational social simulation. However, the assumption of a simple correspondence between agents and social actors needs to be applied with some care if it is to be useful in understanding human societies. The same epistemological puzzles and problems that sociologists have struggled over during the last hundred years can recur in trying to understand soci eties through computer simulations. Some of these problems will be described, again with reference to current European studies. While the use of simulation as a methodological tool is a commonplace in the natural sciences and engineering (e.g., Shannon 1975; Zeigler 1976), it still strikes many people as remarkable that one could use simulation in the social sciences. The very idea of modeling the obvious complexity, unpredictability, and autonomy of humans and their societies using computer simulation is considered by some social scientists as absurd. They suggest that if simulation of social phenomena could ever be possible, it would have to involve such simplification that nothing of value could be learned. Clearly, the whole enterprise is just an excuse for playing around with computers. While I do not agree with this view, there is a real question at the heart of many social scientists' skepticism.

scholarly journals The Debate of Minimizing Subjectivity in Gender Studies: A Critical Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Madiha Nadeem
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Systematic Knowledge

The social sciences have always been contested on the philosophical and ethical grounds of producing scientific knowledge. Similarly, the standpoints of Gender studies are analytically linked to certain domains of reasoning for human behavior. It discusses social phenomena from a societal and cultural perspective, which raises questions for the scholars of this subject about the application of particular procedures for understanding realities guided by some ideologies (Söderlund & Madison, 2017). This article critically evaluates the theoretical debate on ways of upholding the objectivity in this discipline by minimizing the role of subjectivity in the construction of new knowledge. It is concluded that by adopting techniques such as bracketing, triangulation, reflexivity and various other theoretical stands mentioned by scholars, feminists, and social scientists, the struggle of producing objective systematic knowledge can be promoted in gender studies and other social sciences.

scholarly journals Czy socjologowie są w stanie budować maszyny społeczne? Rekonceptualizacja różnicy między przyrodoznawstwem a naukami społecznymi

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Łukasz Afeltowicz ◽  
Krzysztof Pietrowicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference

The last three decades have witnessed a dynamic development of science and technology studies, which have shown science in a way completely different from that presented by the traditional philosophy of science and methodology of social sciences. The authors accept that the findings of those studies concerning the mechanisms of functioning of science are correct and attempt to address again the problem of the difference between those disciplines and the social sciences. Their analysis concerns: the role and importance of laboratories in the social sciences; the “transition” of social phenomena to those laboratories; the possibility of popularization by the social sciences of technological solutions prepared by those laboratories; an incorrect approach to experiment and the acceptance of false ideas of the function of natural sciences by social scientists.

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