Measuring Culture Conference

The conference brings together top social science scholars to discuss timely matters of methods and measurement in culture, including qualitative, quantitative, and computational approaches. The third meeting of these scholars, it will reconvene the group to discuss a coauthored book manuscript, with the goal of workshoping the manuscript with each other and with culture scholars selected from different departments on campus. The book manuscript will make an important interdisciplinary contribution by 1) offering a programmatic statement on the measurement of meaning and culture that moves debates beyond the well worn boundary between qualitative and quantitative strategies; 2) proposing concrete strategies for measuring culture across levels of analysis, in its different manifestations (e.g. textual versus material culture) and across the implicit/explicit divide, and 3) demonstrating the value of this approach by applying these insights to the persistent problem of the reproduction of social inequality in the current context.