Speaker
Description
A fundamental challenge in the sociology of taste is reconciling our intuitive yet often “fuzzy” understanding of musical genres and social categories with traditional methods that depend on clear categories and central tendencies. This research addresses this issue by applying relational (dual projection methods for two modern networks) and geometric (stacked Correspondence Analysis) techniques to explore the perceived connections between musical genres and social characteristics, specifically focusing on subjective interpretations of these linkages rather than strictly objective connections. The study utilizes data from a representative sample of Americans (N = 2250), each of whom reported their perceived associations between 20 musical genres and 15 social characteristics, treating this information as cognitive two-mode data. The methodological approach involves several key steps: First, Dual Projection (Breiger, 1974; Everett & Borgatti, 2013) and Backbone Extraction (Neal, 2014) are used to identify and isolate the most significant perceived associations in the data. This "Mondo Breiger" approach generates a personal two-mode network for each individual, from which personal genre projections (the perceived similarity between genres based on shared labels) and personal label projections (the perceived similarity between labels based on shared genres) are derived. Next, these individual projections are transformed by extracting binarized backbones. The backbone of these person-specific projected networks is modeled jointly using Stacked Correspondence Analysis (CA). This yields three sets of scores: person-specific judgments of relative similarity, aggregate judgments, and supplementary scores that represent the centroid of personal judgments for genres and labels. Geometric Data Analysis is then used to examine the distribution of various groups of individuals, analyzing how they are arranged along principal axes in genre and social label spaces. This comprehensive approach shifts the focus from rigid definitions to more flexible categories, allowing for a direct examination of diversity and the distribution of opinions across the social spectrum.
Keywords/Topics
Culture, Genres, Categories, Dual Projection, Backbone Extraction, Correspondence Analysis
