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1 Inside the Rituals of Social Science Notes 1 Inside the Rituals of Social Science 1. On recent expansion of qualitative coding into the humanities as well, see Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso: 2005), pp. 31–33, 76–77. 2 . H a r r y F r a n k f u r t , On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 51. 3. Historians have criticized Poovey’s anecdotes, but her scaffolding remains invaluable. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 8–9. 4 . I b i d . , p . 9 8 . 5 . M i c h è l e L a m o n t , How Professors Think (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 174, 184; David Herman, Story Logic; Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 243, 353; Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy. Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 490. To maintain the anal- ogy between the natural scientists’ retrieval of facts from “experience” and the coders’ retrieval of facts from texts, I will in the main exclude research that merely tracks the frequency of words. I focus on research that qualitatively sorts meanings. 6 . F r a n ç o i s R a s t i e r , Arts et sciences du texte (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 2001), p. 224. 7. For an example of the dissemination of coding into the humanities, see R. Alberich, J. Miro-Julia, and F. Rossello, “Marvel Universe Looks Almost Like a Real Social Network,” February 11, 2002, Cornell University Library. Abstract at http://arxiv.org. 8. “Wonder” is perception that exceeds classificatory cultures. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 4, 19. 9. Illustratively, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See chapter five in this volume. 1 0 . E r i c D o n a l d H i r s c h , J r . , Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 4, 42. 11. Lars Furuland, “The Rise of Literacy: From Rote Reading to Cultural Literacy,” The Nordic Roundtable Papers 3 (1989): 9; Lars Sandberg, “The Case of the Impoverished Sophisticate: Human Capital and Swedish Economic Growth Before World War I,” The Tasks of Economic History 39 (1979): 230. 12. Karen Dovring, “Quantitative Semantics in 18th Century Sweden,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 18 (1954–1955): 392–394. 13. Karin Dovring, “Communication, Dissenters and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Europe,” Journal of Popular Culture 7 (1973): 565. 158 Notes 14. On the adminstrative gaze, Francis Earle Barcus, “Communications Content: Analysis of the Research, 1900–1958. A Content Analysis of Content Analysis,” PhD disserta- tion, University of Illinois, 1959, p. 25. 15. For historical appreciation of how “single-point perspective” was a condition of modern governance, see John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (1993): 159. Cataloguing collective representations as “facts” emerged in modern projects to manage “society” from above. Zygmunt Bauman, “Durkheim’s Society Revisited,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim , ed. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 367. 1 6 . R i c h a r d B i e r n a c k i , The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640 –1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 179–185. 17. For example, in nineteenth-century Britain, a married woman could not enter into a labor contract in her own name. If a husband not employed at the factory complained about a male overlooker’s ambiguously consensual encounters with his wife, was this a complaint about workplace harassment or about male sex rights? On the inseparability of agents’ renderings of their action from what that action is , see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 123–128. 18. Diary examples in “Back to Sociology’s Origins: Contracts in the Protestant Ethic” at http://www.havenscenter.org/vsp/richard_biernacki. 19. Borges likewise had to rely on counterfactual reasoning about a body of literature to establish the meaning of a frequency: “If there were any doubt as to the authentic- ity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.” Only a faker would insert camels repetitively for local color. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 181. The Koran, like the Bible, contains only a handful of camels. 20. For example, potlatchs are not usefully classified by our sense of “economic” function, nor do genealogical relations establish kinship as a generic object. David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), p. 183. 2 1 . E r v i n g G o f f m a n , Frame Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), p. 8. 22. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 21. 23. Wendy Griswold, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture,” Sociological Methodology 17 (1987): 4. 24. Bernard Berleson, Content Analysis in Communication Research (New York: Hafner Press, 1952), p. 17. I followed Berleson in reasoning that approximate counting under- lies aggregate coding conclusions in Richard Biernacki, “After Quantitative Cultural Sociology: Interpretive Science as a Calling,” in Meaning and Method , ed. Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander (Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2009), p. 166. 25. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 18. For qualitative content analysis, see David Winter, “Content Analysis of Archival Materials,” in Motivation and Personality: Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis , ed. Charles Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 110–125; “Content Analysis: An important form of qualitative coding,” in Dictionary of Modern Sociology (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield Adams, 1969), p. 83. For “content analy- sis” without counts, see Steven Philip Barker, “Fame: A Content Analysis Study of the American Film Biography,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1983. 26. Biernacki, “After Quantitative Cultural Sociology,” p. 164. 27. Matthew Miles and A. Michael Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis. An Expanded Sourcebook (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1994). On “clear operational definitions,” see Notes 159 ibid., p. 63; on logs of “decision rules” for assembling data, see p. 242; on the term “content analysis” as the commonsense processing of qualitative coding, see p. 253. 28. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “A Matter of Definition,” in Culture, Code and Content Analysis , ed. Thelma McCormack (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1982), pp. 9–31, esp. pp. 29–30. 29. Roger Sanjek, “The Secret Life of Fieldnotes,” in Fieldnotes. The Makings of Anthropology , ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 187–270. 30. Deborah Winslow, NSF, “Field Notes . What Will Happen to Yours?” Anthropology News , September 2009, p. 36; Jean Jackson, “D éj à entendu . The Liminal Qualities of Anthropological Fieldnotes,” in Representation in Ethnography, ed. John Van Maanen (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1995), pp. 36–78, esp. p. 66; Nancy Luktkehaus, “Refractions of Reality: On the Use of Other Ethnographers’ Fieldnotes,” in Fieldnotes. The Makings of Anthropology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 303–323. 3 1 . M a r t i n O r a n s , Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, David Freeman, and the Samoans (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1996); American Educational Research Association, “Standards for Reporting on Humanities-Oriented Research in AERA Publications,” Educational Researcher 38 (2009): 481–486. 32. Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester, “Accidental News: The Great Oil Spill as Local Occurrence and National Event,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (1975): 240. 3 3 . M i c h a e l F r e d e , “ P l a t o ’ s Sophist on False Statements,” in Richard Kraut, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 397–424. 34. Allen Grimshaw, “Happy Auguries of the Decline of an Emergent Specialty,” Contemporary Sociology 10 (1981): 25. 3 5 . G e e r t z , Local Knowledge , p. 23. 36. Ibid., pp. 23–34, 35. 37. Ibid., p. 23. 3 8 . A l e n k a Z u p a n c i c , The Odd One In. On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 89–90, 114. Bernard Traimond saw pranks arising in anthropology from the dilem- mas of translating indigenous idioms into authoritative discourse of social science. Bernard Traimond, V érit és en qu ête d ’auteurs (Bourdeaux: William Blake, 2000), pp. 12–13. When Stuart Macdonald and Jacqueline Kam found that social researchers and economists displayed “dizzying circularity” in their conduct, publishing to get articles cited as the indicator for quality rather than publishing quality articles, they concluded that laughter “is the appropriate reaction to such farce.” See “Quality Journals and Gamesmanship in Management Studies,” Management Research News 31 (2008): 595, online abstract, DOI:10.1108/01409170810892154. 3 9 . A n a l o g o u s l y , G o f f m a n , Frame Analysis, p. 181. As Garfinkel intimated, agreement in coding results—“reliability”—can result from extraneous but shared social framings that run contrary to the actuarial definitions of necessary and sufficient conditions for categorizing text features. Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 20. 40. J. Zvi Namenwirth and Robert Philip Weber, Dynamics of Culture (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 196. 41. C. Picart, “Scientific Controversy as Farce: The Benveniste-Maddox Counter Trials,” Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 7–37; Brian Martin, “Suppressing Research Data,” Accountability in Research 6.4 (1999): 340–341.
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