Hi everyone!
Welcome back to Applied Statistics! This week at the Applied Statistics
Workshop we will be welcoming *Laura Nelsom*, Assistant Professor of
Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. She will be
presenting work entitled* Computational Means, Qualitative Ends*. Please
find the abstract below and on the Applied Stats website here
<https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009>.
As usual, we will meet at noon in CGIS Knafel Room 354 and lunch will be
provided. See you all there!
-- Dana Higgins
*Title:* *Computational Means, Qualitative Ends*
*Abstract:* The majority of scholarship in the growing field of
computational social science is focused on quantitative projects aimed at
identifying generalizablefeatures of broad social systems. A smaller group
of scholars are instead weaving computational methods into qualitative
approaches to provide comprehensive, reproducible, but deeply contextual
descriptions of more narrow empirical phenomena. To explore this
intersection of computational and qualitative methods, we gathered over
430,000 newspaper articles describing the actions and beliefs of 530
environmental movement organizations between 1990 and 2015. Combining
qualitative and interpretive methods with computational techniques,
primarily natural language processing techniques and machine learning, we
provide a rich, meaningful, but computational description of this movement
sector andhow it has changed over time. We focus on three questions: 1)
what is the full range of tactical and strategic repertoires within the
environmental movement sector? 2) how have these repertoires changed over
time? and 3) can we inductively but computationally identify social
movement form via shared tactical and strategic repertoires? In exploring
these three questions we identified a fourth question: 4) what internal
movement processes led to the emergence of a new environmental form, a form
that focuses almost exclusively on business sustainability? Using various
clustering techniques, we explore this last question, the emergence of a
new environmental movement form, to think through the implications of using
computational methods for qualitative ends.