Abstract
To extract messages from modern “facts”—expressed in sociology as coding labels or data points—the facts typically are arrayed to help us perceive nonrandom patterns. Why should one suppose that when such “facts” are extracted from texts they speak to the meaningful dynamics that led to the texts’ composition in the first place? If you bear in mind that coding does not preserve the semiotic operators that generate a text—its verbal “system” of implicit parallels and contrasts—it becomes a nonstarter to imagine abstracted data offer clues to meaningful devices. I chose the research prototype governing this chapter because it discloses there is slight reason to suppose that an absence of statistically significant differences in codes between sample populations marks lack of differences in significant cultural mechanisms. Nor ought we imagine the reverse, that presence of such sample differences is a tracer of differences in the signifying devices of a culture. Neither pattern nor its absence in coding frequencies from a corpus of texts plumbs social meaning. Texts signify by implicit contrast to what is not mentioned as well as by superseding or negating what they first affirm.1
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Notes
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© 2012 Richard Biernacki
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Biernacki, R. (2012). “A Quantifiable Indicator of a Fabricated Meaning Element”. In: Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007285_4
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