Defining and Measuring Cultural Change: The Evolving Environment of Representations of U.S. Arts Policy, 1986-1997

• In Event: 094 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture 1: Evolving Meanings and Messages in Organizational Settings

Abstract

New and powerful methods for text analysis potentially facilitate advances in theorizing and studying a key aspect of cultural change: the themes that actors encounter in the representations with which they come into contact. We employ topic models, an increasingly popular means of extracting themes from large bodies of texts, to analyze change in press represent¬at-ions of U.S. government arts funding – a controversy that threatened the survival of the National Endowment for the Arts – between 1986 and 1997. Our theoretical contribution is to identify three key analytic tasks in the study of culture change: identifying analytic objects (themes of frames) to be studied; plotting the emergence of these themes; plotting their differentiation from other themes; identifying changing prevalence of themes over time; and identifying change in the val¬uation of these themes (and of key entities within them) over time as well. Our methodological contribution is to develop and employ measures of emergence, differentiation, prevalence and evaluative change, with which we analyze more than eight thousand articles from five U.S. newspapers related to our case. Our substantive contribution is to demonstrate that what initially was depicted as a controversy over decisions by a single government agency came to be portrayed as one of many fronts in a broader “culture war” between social conservatives and secular progressives and to identify changes in the political opportunity structure that facilitated this evolution.

Authors

• Paul J. DiMaggio, Princeton University

• Manish Nag, Princeton University

• David Blei, Columbia University