What is the mhc metrics lab?

The mhc metrics lab has been supporting mixed-expertise textual research in cultural sociology (metrics) at the intersection of social and data science since 2022.

This innovative lab, hosted by the MHC Sociology department, serves as a dynamic learning collaborative that brings together students from various disciplines, including social, data, and computer sciences through hands-on research.

The lab operates with a unique approach, emphasizing mixed-expertise teams that integrate diverse perspectives and skill sets. Through weekly collaborative work sessions and semester-long individual projects, students delve into computational and qualitative text analysis methods to gain insights into historically significant questions in the social sciences. This initiative not only provides students with valuable research experiences but also encourages interdisciplinary collaboration to address complex questions.

The lab’s main project involves the analysis of annual addresses by presidents of six social science associations, spanning from the late 1800s to the present, to understand the evolution of social science concepts. The creation of this corpus accommodates both computational grounded theory and traditional historical methods, fostering a balance between human and machine coding of text documents.

Questions of meaning, measurement, and method are at the heart of our work and implied by the multiple definitions of our name. This boundary spanning phrase, metrics, has meanings including those associated with technocratic discourse of measurement (e.g. business or social metrics) and the formal study of poetry. We build on these multiple discourses as we engage multiple disciplinary frameworks in our analysis of text data.