Crafting Cultural Networks From Text with R and igraph

James Cook from the University of Maine at Augusta introduces the concept of crafting cultural networks, also known as semantic networks, which are a blend of social structure and cultural insights. He credits the development of this concept to classical sociological thinking, highlighting the work of Ronald Breiger, Scott Feld, and Georg Simmel. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding affiliation, connection, and culture in a new way and the potential of using these networks for analyzing social media and other social science courses.

The video delves into the methodology of using affiliation matrices to represent relationships between individuals and groups. It explains how these matrices, initially termed adjacency matrices, can reveal connections between people based on their group memberships. The concept is illustrated with an example, showing how shared group memberships lead to ties between individuals and how these ties can be predicted mathematically. The discussion also touches on the non-mathematical implications of these connections, such as shared activities and joint projects within groups.

This section discusses how group memberships not only create ties between individuals but also connect groups at a higher level. It uses the example of two individuals belonging to both the Urban League and the Rotary Club to illustrate how cultural practices and ideas can flow between groups. The video highlights the multi-level thinking required to understand social structure and the interconnectedness of groups and individuals, introducing the concept of cultural networks as a form of social structure.

The focus shifts to cultural expressions such as texts, images, and videos, and how shared cultural content between these expressions creates ties. The video introduces the work of Sarah Sugars and Sandra Gonzalez Bayonne, who argue that cultural content can form networks through shared meaning in cultural forms. The discussion emphasizes the importance of cultural data in social media research and introduces an R package called Reddit extractor for collecting and analyzing social media data.

James Cook presents a case study on ethical non-monogamy practices, specifically swinging and polyamory, as discussed in Reddit subreddits. He explains how he has been collecting data on these communities for four years to understand cultural beliefs about different sexualities within these groups. The video outlines the process of using Reddit extractor to gather information and how this data can be used to examine cultural values and beliefs, particularly focusing on the perception of bisexuality in these communities.

The video demonstrates how to visualize cultural values and expectations associated with categories such as bisexuality using an Excel spreadsheet and R programming. It shows the process of creating a list of cultural ascriptions and their frequencies, and then using R to convert this data into a network that can be visualized and analyzed. The discussion highlights the importance of understanding the cultural positions and descriptions within communities and how they can be represented and studied through cultural networks.

The video concludes with an exploration of bipartite projections, which create two one-mode networks from a two-mode affiliation matrix. The first network describes the overlap between positions, while the second describes the overlap between cultural attributes. The video visually represents these networks, showing how certain cultural attributes cluster together and how positions are connected based on shared attributes. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of cultural structures and the relationships between different cultural positions and attributes.