The Promising Future of Mathematical Sociology

I'm now an occasional blogger at Permutations, the official blog of the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. You can read my blog post here, in which I outline why I think global trends in information technology and the meta-theroetical foundations of sociology provide conditions for a promising future for sociology in general and mathematical sociology in particular.

The Quantified Self

This site on the quantified self shows a small but growing revolution: using quantitative data for self-improvement. I can only expect this to grow in importance. Despite their popularity, means, modes, medians (in their conditional variants as well) simply capture central tendencies, and that there is nearly always substantial heterogeneity within and across populations. Accordingly, basic proscriptions and prescriptions, such as "Take an aspirin a day" may not apply to all individuals, and thus individual tracking is potentially extremely useful. For example, see Seth Robert's blog post on how eating butter might improve cognitive functioning (for him, at the very least).

Culturomics and the Google Ngram Viewer

In case you've missed it, I highly recommend exploring the Google Ngram Viewer, which allows for basic analysis of 5.2 million books catalogued by Google. The Ngram Viewer is an exemplar tool for what the authors call "cultromics" or the "the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture." For example, the Ngram Viewer is useful for examining over-time changes in concepts used by scholars and others. For anyone doubting the decline of the concept of "social class" in the realm of ideas (but of course not in reality), here is a compelling chart (the most reliability data are from 1800 to 2000):

You can also download the entire data set yourself, but beware: the data set is (ahem) large.

Quantitative Literary Studies

Fascinating article on the attempts by Franco Moretti, a Stanford English professor and member of the Stanford Literary Lab, to create a quantitative literary studies by digitizing and statistically analyzing literary texts.

Daniel Bell, Master Sociologist

The NYT posted an excellent profile of my late friend Dan Bell, the master sociologist (and big thinker). Even though he was a big-thinking social theorist, I remember that Dan told me, emphatically in fact, that he was a quantitative sociologist! This makes sense, since his big books often included quantitative data of trend lines (which is in many ways advantageous over modeling the data and then focusing on the model parameters, such as regression coefficients or standard errors).