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Douglas R. White (born 1942) is an internationally known American complexity researcher on the Santa Fe Institute external faculty and a social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine. He is known today as a key link between social network analysis, thnography (worldwide), ethnosociologie| {Germany), and theorie de la pratique, and the TIPP Kinship and computing project (France).
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[edit] Comparative ethnographics and interactive computing
White (1965, 1967, University of Minnesota) developed the Societal Research Archives System (SRAS), an ethnographic data system with computerized coded variables from 72 published cross-cultural studies, most of the extant literature of published codes. It featured a codebook, index of societies used in different studies, analysis of the overlap of samples, a linguistic atlas together with a method for solving Galton's problem for effects of common language family affiliations, and the coded data themselves from each study.
The first public-access on-line ethnographic data system using the SRAS database was White's (1970) Maximum Extensibility for Cross-Cultural Analysis comparative ethnographic project MECCA. From 1972-1987 it operated to provide the SRAS data interactively for statistical analysis (e.g., cross-tabulation and correlation of variables) on teletype computers in New England colleges and high schools. It was a central part of Dartmouth college president John G. Kemeny's project IMPRESS (Interdisciplinary Machine Processessing for Research and Education in the Social Sciences), run by sociologist James Davis and Project Director Ed Meyers, with student programmer Paul F. Velleman. Quoting James Davis, Kemeny said of this project:
- sociology used to be taught as follows: "You went into a sociology class and the lecturer told you what the truth was, then the students took it all down and then they went to another sociology class, where the lecturer again told them what the truth was, which just happened to be the opposite of what the first lecturer said, and then the student was told to do research to find out which of the two lecturers was right. The way the student did research was to go to the library and look up a book written by a third sociologist, who also told you what the truth was. In no case did the student ever have an opportunity to check on the facts himself. And the reason that he couldn't do it was not because it's so terribly hard, but in order to get any feeling about sociology you need data bases with millions of pieces of information. This was so expensive and so inaccessible that only a few leaders in the field ever got their hands on the original data and everybody else had to take their word for it. But today, in freshman sociology, every single student goes through that exercise of going to original data bases and second-guessing the faculty members." This was another area where there has been an enormous impact.
The MECCA interactive codebooks and datafiles, together with Velleman's statistical package, was the core of sociological computing system. Here are further quotes from John Kemeny (p.86 JOHN KEMENY SPEAKING - at a building dedication):
- this building has just had a vast effect in making this an even more outstanding institution. The other was the impact of computing, and somehow as one sitting in the audience instead of speaking about this and being able to listen to a review of all the ways that the computer has affected Dartmouth College, I found it a terribly exciting event, as I found it terribly exciting to meet these young men I used to know as undergraduate students and finding them in key positions in major companies and major educational institutions all over the country. But I thought I would make an attempt at giving you some feeling of how widely the computer has affected an educational institution. Incidentally, this was the tenth anniversary of our Time-Sharing System. I always get the credit for it, but that's only because Tom Kurtz never takes credit for anything at all. The dream was Tom Kurtz's. Tom had the dream that every student at Dartmouth College should have an opportunity to learn how to use a computer, not because it was a technological tool, but because Tom was convinced, as was I, that for better or worse, computers will have an enormous impact on the lives of all of us, and that the very nature of a liberal arts education is to understand those major forces that will influence our lives so that we can try to control them, so that they will have a beneficial effect on our lives and not a harmful one. The dream was clearly impossible at the time Tom dreamed it, and when he persuaded me to go along with it and eventually persuaded the Board of Trustees, it was very lucky that neither Tom nor I nor the students who worked on the system knew that the dream was impossible, because a year later it became a reality. It sometimes helps to be terribly ignorant in that we did not know just how difficult the task was.
- It was terribly exciting to see these students many years later. It was also terribly exciting just to hear recounted how that dream came true. The obvious things we were after were first, that students would understand what computers are about. Secondly, quite clearly in mathematics and science courses, the computer gave an opportunity, as one of our faculty members described in Chicago, to get away from the absolutely ridiculously stupid problems we used to give in mathematics and freshman physics courses. I like to use mechanics as an example, where I had a terribly exciting mechanics course as an undergraduate--that's the theoretical part of it. Newton's Laws are some of the most exciting things you can study. On the other hand, if you then have to go and do homework problems on what happens when you toss a rock up in the air or what happens when a ball rolls down an inclined plane, or one billiard ball hits another billiard ball, you totally destroy the nature of the mechanics course. That's not what Newton was after. Newton was after understanding how the heavenly bodies behave, and he solved the problem. The difference is not knowing more physics, the difference is that the computation to apply Newton's Laws to celestial motion or a rocket trip to the moon is a mess. It happens to be a total and awful mess--but that's what computers are for. So now as a standard exercise, students will in a freshman physics course work out the orbiting around the earth or a rocket trip to the moon.As a matter of fact, I learned a great deal at the Chicago presentation; students now go beyond that, they invent gravitational laws different from the ones in our universe, and they have to plot, i.e., have the computer draw pictures, as to what orbits would look like in a different gravitational field--and this is in a freshman physics course!
[edit] Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
The SRAS analysis of sample overlap (part of White 1967) showed that the overlap between samples -- cases surveyed -- used in cross-cultural research was so small as to be statistically viable only when they sampled from Murdock's (1965) World Ethnographic Sample of 565 societies.
White's work on SRAS and his comparative historical studies of 90 Northern Amerindian societies led Murdock to hire him at the University of Pittsburgh and to jointly submit a grant proposal to the NSF which when funded established the Cumulative Cross-Cultural Coding Center. This was intended to provide a Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969) which was large enough (eventual7y 186 societies) to represent known diversity in well-studied world cultures, at their earliest dates, to provide a basis for coding ethnographic data so that coded variables would be comparable through pinpointing of focal social units in time and space, with a common selected bibliographic rating of the best ethnographic sources. The SCCS established a framework for cumulative research by hundreds of subsequent coding projects by as many cross-cultural researchers from a wide variety of disciplines.
[edit] National policy research (1972-1974)
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[edit] Network research (1974-2009)
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[edit] Organizational networks and dynamics (2000-2004)
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[edit] Historical dynamics (2005-2009)
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[edit] Methodology
... Wikipedia:Jerome Rothenberg
Categories: SCCS | SRAS
