How to Do Things With Words

The measurement of meaning

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will …

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A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Selection d'extraits des Cahiers de Prison d'Antonio Gramsci, theoricien italien de la pensee marxiste, mort en prison en 1937 et qui proposa une reflexion sur l'education dans les regimes totalitaires, et plus generalement sur les systemes des gouvernements modernes, ou la priorite donnee a l'organisation economique et a l'efficacite de la production industrielle etouffe les valeurs humaines et historiques.

狱中札记 = The prison notebooks

We demonstrate the utility of a new methodological tool, neural-network word embedding models, for large-scale text analysis, revealing how these models produce richer insights into cultural associations and categories than possible with prior methods. Word embeddings represent semantic relations between words as geometric relationships between vectors in a high-dimensional space, operationalizing a relational model of meaning consistent with contemporary theories of identity and culture. We show that dimensions induced by word differences (e.g. man - woman, rich - poor, black - white, liberal - conservative) in these vector spaces closely correspond to dimensions of cultural meaning, and the projection of words onto these dimensions reflects widely shared cultural connotations when compared to surveyed responses and labeled historical data. We pilot a method for testing the stability of these associations, then demonstrate applications of word embeddings for macro-cultural investigation with a longitudinal analysis of the coevolution of gender and class associations in the United States over the 20th century and a comparative analysis of historic distinctions between markers of gender and class in the U.S. and Britain. We argue that the success of these high-dimensional models motivates a move towards "high-dimensional theorizing" of meanings, identities and cultural processes.

The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing Meaning through Word Embeddings.

We argue word embedding models are a useful tool for the study of culture using a historical analysis of shared understandings of social class as an empirical case. Word embeddings represent semant...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122419877135

The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing the Meanings of Class through Word Embeddings:

Issue alignment and partisanship in the American public: Revisiting the 'partisans without constraint' thesis.

Confidence in the scientific community became politically polarized in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century, with conservatives displaying lower confidence in scientists than liberals. Using data from the General Social Survey from 1984 to 2016, I show that moral and economic conservatives played distinct but complementary roles in producing this divide. I find that moral conservatives exhibited low confidence in scientists before any substantial division existed between self-identified political conservatives and liberals on this issue. However, as moral conservatism increasingly consolidated under the label of political conservatism, a negative association between political conservatism and confidence in the scientific community emerged. Economic conservatives, by contrast, previously held disproportionately high confidence in scientists, but this positive relationship wanes in the beginning of the twenty-first century. These findings suggest that interpreting political polarization requires attention to the multiple dimensions along which political attitudes are organized and ideological coalitions are formed.

http://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/sf/soab020/36620944/soab020.pdf

How Conservatives Lost Confidence in Science: The Role of Ideological Alignment in Political Polarization

compelling argument that temporary urbanism as a practice and object of knowledge and research is here to stay is carefully crafted throughout. When one reads about practices, moments, or discussions one has followed or been part of, one can appreciate how Ferreri clearly captures the complexities embedded in the ruminations of temporary urban practices. Temporary urbanism is not a binary process; it is filled with tensions and contradictions and invites a process of self-reflection for practitioners and also for those living through processes of intense regeneration and gentrification. I cannot do justice to the multiple levels of analysis or the complex power relations at play in the entangled and often contradictory voices captured in such a balanced way by Ferreri; to get a sense of this, you must read this book.

Austin C. Kozlowski

Papers

The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing Meaning through Word Embeddings.

The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing the Meanings of Class through Word Embeddings:

Issue alignment and partisanship in the American public: Revisiting the 'partisans without constraint' thesis.

How Conservatives Lost Confidence in Science: The Role of Ideological Alignment in Political Polarization

The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments