Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 7-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Using Radical Environmentalist Texts to Uncover Network Structure and Network Features

Using Radical Environmentalist Texts to Uncover Network Structure and Network Features Radical social movements are broadly engaged in, and dedicated to, promoting change in their social environment. In their corresponding efforts to call attention to various causes, communicate with like-minded groups, and mobilize support for their activities, radical social movements also produce an enormous amount of text. These texts, like radical social movements themselves, are often (i) densely connected and (ii) highly variable in advocated protest activities. Given a corpus of radical social movement texts, can one uncover the underlying network structure of the radical activist groups involved in this movement? If so, can one then also identify which groups (and which subnetworks) are more prone to radical versus mainstream protest activities? Using a large corpus of British radical environmentalist texts (1992–2003), we seek to answer these questions through a novel integration of network discovery and unsupervised topic modeling. In doing so, we apply classic network descriptives (e.g., centrality measures) and more modern statistical models (e.g., exponential random graph models) to carefully parse apart these questions. Our findings provide a number of revealing insights into the networks and nature of radical environmentalists and their texts. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Sociological Methods & Research SAGE

Using Radical Environmentalist Texts to Uncover Network Structure and Network Features

Download PDF
56 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/using-radical-environmentalist-texts-to-uncover-network-structure-and-elCd72XFT4

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2017
ISSN
0049-1241
eISSN
1552-8294
DOI
10.1177/0049124117729696
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Radical social movements are broadly engaged in, and dedicated to, promoting change in their social environment. In their corresponding efforts to call attention to various causes, communicate with like-minded groups, and mobilize support for their activities, radical social movements also produce an enormous amount of text. These texts, like radical social movements themselves, are often (i) densely connected and (ii) highly variable in advocated protest activities. Given a corpus of radical social movement texts, can one uncover the underlying network structure of the radical activist groups involved in this movement? If so, can one then also identify which groups (and which subnetworks) are more prone to radical versus mainstream protest activities? Using a large corpus of British radical environmentalist texts (1992–2003), we seek to answer these questions through a novel integration of network discovery and unsupervised topic modeling. In doing so, we apply classic network descriptives (e.g., centrality measures) and more modern statistical models (e.g., exponential random graph models) to carefully parse apart these questions. Our findings provide a number of revealing insights into the networks and nature of radical environmentalists and their texts.

Journal

Sociological Methods & Research – SAGE

Published: Nov 1, 2019

There are no references for this article.