The Multiple Meanings of Age

• In Event: 3260 - Emergent Perspectives on Age and Aging

Abstract

Similar to other dimensions of perceived difference, the construct of age orders society at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Yet, humans understand another person’s age in more ways than the number of years since they were born. Drawing on insights from theories of the production of gender and race, and existing work on “doing” age, this paper pushes forward theory on age by investigating: what are the multiple cultural meanings of age? I use a novel application of natural language processing to uncover patterns in the way that age-related words are used in real-world English text in order to understand the way actors interpret and give meaning to information about a person’s age. In this paper, I present preliminary results of analyses of word embeddings, and describe in detail my ongoing analyses that will be completed by March 2019.

Author

• Sasha Shen Johfre, Stanford University