WHAT’S THE WORD?: TOPIC MODELING A DECADE (2004-2013) OF CITATIONS ON COLLECTIVE EFFICACY
Date of Award
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Natural Sciences
First Advisor
Doucette, John
Area of Concentration
Computer Science
Abstract
I collect and examine a decade (2004-2013) of academic work that cites a piece of literature in the urban sociological canon after its critical shifts since the 1980s. The publication I use from the "canon" is Sampson and Raudenbush's "Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods." Probabilistic topic modeling, a computational method that does not require manual annotation of texts beforehand, finds word co-occurrences representative of the possible themes or frameworks that the authors of these studies use. Discovering these themes is analogous to determining some underlying and unknown structure that can lead to a coherent organization of scientific content. Trends within this underlying structure may be useful for documenting and exploring how institutions such as race and gender influence scientific development in the context of agenda setting at the university level and social hierarchies.
Recommended Citation
Shlyakhov, Richard, "WHAT’S THE WORD?: TOPIC MODELING A DECADE (2004-2013) OF CITATIONS ON COLLECTIVE EFFICACY" (2019). Theses & ETDs. 5804.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5804