Modeling Culture

What is culture, and how can we model it? This course will survey theoretical frameworks for studying culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, ranging from evolutionary biology through sociology to economics. We will explore various methods for measuring culture and modeling cultural processes, including ethnography and survey data. Our focus, however, will be on measurement and modeling strategies that are made possible by the internet revolution and big data, including agent-based modeling, natural language processing and machine learning. Our class discussions will transition between theoretical abstraction and hands-on data analysis.