I just wrote a my first post on Scatterplot, about the debate over the recent Facebook emotions study. For at least a little bit, I’ll likely be blogging over there. Since I imagine my readership overlaps a fair bit, I will likely not cross-post most of the content, unless I want to keep a record over here for my own purposes. Either way, if you’re interested in the Facebook debate, please check out my post and let me know what you think!

This Thursday, I’m headed to the research triangle area for my last dissertation archival trip. I’m also giving a talk this Friday at Duke’s Center for the History of Political Economy (details here). The talk is based on a paper co-authored with Elizabeth Popp Berman on how economists, economic ideas, and economic devices influence policymaking (forthcoming in Socioeconomic Review). The paper is very much aimed at sociologists and political scientists, so it will be interesting to see what the historians of economics make of it.

In addition to being excited about the talk, and about finishing off archival work, I’m delighted to be able to time travel several months into the future and arrive at Summer. If you have any recommendations for good food spots in the Raleigh/Durham area, or fun things to do that might not pop up on a casual Google search, leave your suggestions in the comments. And if you want to say hi or grab a coffee, I’ll be in the area through Friday the 18th. Thanks!

This week I’m headed to the archives at Columbia University. I was really excited to leave snowy Michigan, only to learn that it’s going to snow here tomorrow. Alas.

Also, if you have any recommendations for good food spots – especially breakfast and lunch places or coffee shops – near Columbia, leave your suggestion in the comments. Thanks!

Warning: This post is about professional etiquette and/or venting about a pet peeve.

Suppose you are submitting a paper to a conference, paper award, or the like – a judged competition which usually receives a relatively large number of submissions – by means of an email attachment.* What should you name the attached document? There are some real issues here. There is no standard format, and there has been some historical variation in which characters were acceptable (spaces used to be annoying, now are not, etc.). But I think we can all agree that a reasonable answer should include, at a minimum, the author’s last name, some version of the paper title, and perhaps some indication of the competition to which it is being submitted, e.g. “Hirschman_Totally Awesome Paper Title_Section Award.” My preferred variant is actually “Hirschman (2014) Totally Awesome Paper Title (Section Award Version)” as it’s most useful for me, but I don’t have a strong claim to it being the perfect solution.

What doesn’t, and can’t, make sense is a submission simply titled “Section Award.pdf.” This can’t make sense because it doesn’t scale. If everyone uses the same filename, the organizers or award committee members will have a directory entirely consisting of “Section Award (n).pdf” for n from 1 to N, and no way of telling which was which without using some kind of internal search feature. So what possible logic leads people to consistently title attachments this way? Arguably, the purpose of the submission is the least important piece of information in the filename as it’s the one thing the recipient already knows, and which is shared across all submissions!

Tl;dr: When sending out a paper as an attachment, please use an informative file name.

* The same holds for submissions to, say, department workshops where only one paper is being presented at a time, but in that context proper naming is somewhat less urgent, as receiving only one submission at a time makes it more likely I will rename the file anyway. That said, the more informative your file name, the easier it is for everyone receiving it rename to their liking, and usually such submissions have larger audiences and thus burden more people if you use an uninformative file name as everyone has to rename it.

Dear Loyal Readers,

As part of my dissertation research, I’m headed to England tomorrow. I’ll be in the archives at the LSE and King’s College, Cambridge for the next month and a half or so. In the middle, I’ll be presenting some early stage dissertation work at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) in Milan. The paper, on the history of income inequality data and the recent discovery of the “top 1%”, is part of a mini-conference on Economic Culture in the Public Sphere, organized by Nina Bandelj, Lyn Spillman, and Fred Wherry. If you’re going to be at SASE, come by the mini-conference, and drop me a note if you want to meet up for lunch, coffee, or a drink. And if you have ideas for things to do / places to go / food to consume in London, Cambridge, or Milan, leave a comment with your suggestions!

Otherwise, posts rate to be on the thin side for a while longer. If I find anything interesting, I may post a bit from the archives, as I did with this Kuznets post.

Until then, have a wonderful summer!
Dan
P.S. Here we see a rare glimpse of the life of an historical sociologist, hard at work prepping for an important research trip.

Dear Readers,

I’m going to be in the Boston/Cambridge area from March 18 to March 28. I’ll be visiting Harvard University’s archives and presenting a brand new paper at the Eastern Sociological Society Meetings. Leave a comment or send me an email if you’re going to be in the area and want to meet up!

Here’s the abstract and title for the ESS talk, based on a paper co-authored with Isaac Reed:

On the Formation of Social Kinds:
Expanding the Causal Repertoire of Sociological Research

Current understandings of causality in the social sciences suffer from an unnecessarily monolithic definition of “cause.” Building on Reed (2011)*, we offer a new typology of causation. This typology distinguishes forcing causes from forming causes. Forcing causes describe the relations between existing social objects that produce, determine or explain why a process has a certain well-defined outcome rather than others. Forcing causes coincide with existing definitions of causes in the extensive literature on causal inference, and some of the literature on social mechanisms. Forming causes describe how objects and outcomes in the social world are shaped or reshaped, or in extreme cases, brought into being. We argue that some of the literature in historical and cultural sociology has been misidentified as ‘merely’ interpretive or descriptive rather than causal because it deals with forming causes. Additionally, we argue that confusion results when scholars conflate questions about forcing and forming causes. We illustrate these claims with two short examples from very distinct literatures: the historiography of the French revolution and the debates over the performativity of the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing model. We close with a brief discussion of how adopting this distinction can help initiate a conversation about making rigorous claims about formal causes.

The talk is part of what rates to be an excellent collection of six panels on Comparative Cultural Sociology. Stop by and check it out!

*If you haven’t read Isaac’s book, and you want to learn more about the role of meaning and interpretation in the production of social knowledge, you really should.