Formal models of culture

By our accounting, a formal model of culture is, first of all, an output from a quantitative study of collected data that seeks to describe, explain, interpret, or otherwise represent some feature, aspect, or content of culture. As a model, the output has been transformed into a summary or a representation (in reduced form) of the data that purports to be analogous (in some fashion) to the phenomena under consideration. Thus, it is precisely the use of quantitative methods or the formal analysis of data that distinguishes work included in the present classification. In this essay, we trace some of the broad contours of change in the history of how culture has been modeled. We simplify this task in two ways. First, we focus on just one arena, American sociology in its first century or so of professional formation. Second, we highlight just one difference, distinguishing interpretative from non-interpretative intents. Thus, in the history presented here we look separately at models of culture that have explicitly hermeneutic goals in contrast to those that don’t. Practitioners of the former sort want to use formal tools to make interpretations that they hope unlock useful readings of texts. Those of the latter persuasion usually seek robust measures of cultural forms that can be fitted onto other explanatory frames. Our main goal is to describe important changes in how culture has been modeled by

social scientists over the last century or so. We will also say something about the enduring frictions between qualitative and quantitative styles of social scientific research. In the final section of the essay (pp. 125-26) we take up the question of how these two different modalities of knowledge production have been linked in the history of American sociology, and we offer a preliminary interpretation of what this structure of articulation says about the recurrent “Methods Wars.” We conclude with a few thoughts about the relevance of our analysis of culture modeling to other national intellectual milieux, and about the future prospects for the formal modeling of culture.