Marshall Taylor

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

Regular Faculty

I am an associate professor of sociology at New Mexico State University, where I am the principal investigator of the C3 Lab. I am a computational and cultural sociologist whose research revolves around questions of measurement and cognition in the sociology of culture.

I study how social contexts and cognitive structures interface to influence the stability of and change in cultural knowledge and how to best measure cultural knowledge in natural language and survey data using machine learning, social network analysis, and advanced statistical modeling. I have used this guiding interest in culture and cognition to study why and when white nationalist organizations divert attention to the grievances that they do, the emergence of immigrant stereotypes in U.S. news media since the late 19th century, how journalists respond to innovative protest strategies, the evolution of family metaphors in U.S. State of the Union addresses, the relationship between self-personalization and online negativity for female U.S. congressional candidates, the different moral schemas that consumers use to evaluate the fairness of price changes, how gender biases manifest discursively in student evaluations of teaching, among other topics in the sociology of culture, politics, and social movements.

Much of my scholarly work has been methodological, particularly in the area of computational text analysis for social science applications. I extend on work in computer science, information science, computer engineering, corpus linguistics, and statistical physics to develop new computational methods for measuring culture and modeling what it does (i.e., how it relates to social behavior or outcomes). My recent methodological work has been on leveraging static and contextualized word embedding spaces to derive (1) document-level measures of concept engagement, (2) trace representations of cultural schemas in texts, and (3) statistical models of dictionary term reliability that are conducive to formal hypothesis testing.

My work has been funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Social Science, Center for the Study of Social Movements, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.