Hi everyone,

This Friday, November 1 at noon Eastern time, the International Methods
Colloquium will host a presentation by Sarah Shugars (Northeastern
University). Sarah's presentation is entitled "The Structure of Reasoning:
Measuring Justification and Preferences in Text."

The abstract of the talk is as follows:

Public opinion is often considered as an aggregation of preferences, but
> the field has the potential to be much richer. For decades, scholars have
> argued for the value of going beyond measuring political preferences and
> examining how individuals reason about and justify those preferences.
> However, this task has only recently become tractable with the emergence of
> modern computational methods. In this paper, I present a text-based
> approach for inferring characteristics of individuals' political reasoning.
> This method identifies the key concepts a person raises and examines the
> implicit connections between those concepts -- what ideas are connected to
> which other ideas? This structural approach is theoretically justified in
> both the cognitive and linguistic literatures, which repeatedly suggest
> that humans store, retrieve, and interpret information through network
> structures. I show that this approach provides insight into the quality of
> a person's reasoning and reveals meaningful individual variation which is
> correlated with known behavioral traits. The ability to measure and
> interrogate individuals' expressions of political reasoning holds the
> potential to shed new light on the dynamics of public opinion and political
> behavior. Questions of persuasion, ideological fracturing, and conversation
> quality all rely upon understanding individual styles of political
> expression. These dynamics are driven not just by what someone says but by
> how they say it.
>

A link to the paper is available here:

http://sarahshugars.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Shugars_Structure_of_Reasoning.pdf

To tune in to the presentation and participate in the discussion after the
talk, visit http://www.methods-colloquium.com/ and click "Watch Now!" on
the day of the talk. To register for the talk in advance, click here:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OVTBCdBATxW14bmIYoZyyQ

The IMC uses Zoom, which is free to use for listeners and works on PCs,
Macs, and iOS and Android tablets and phones. You can be a part of the talk
from anywhere around the world with access to the Internet. The
presentation and Q&A will last for a total of one hour.

I hope to see you there!

-JE

--

Dr. Justin Esarey
Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Wake Forest University
Voice: (678) 383-9629
Fax: (336) 758-6104
E-mail:  <[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]
Web: www.justinesarey.com

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