This chapter is about methods for managing and analyzing qualitative data. By qualitative data we mean text: newspapers, movies, sitcoms, e-mail traffic, folktales, life histories. We also mean narratives—narratives about getting divorced, about being sick, about surviving hand-to-hand combat, about selling sex, about trying to quit smoking. In fact, most of the archaeologically recoverable information about human thought and human behavior is text, the good stuff of social science. Scholars in content analysis began using computers in the 1950s to do statistical analysis of texts (Pool, 1959), but recent advances in technology are changing the economics of the social

conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Simon, until nearly the end of the 20 century, essentially embraced Piaget's position of extreme formalism and content independence of inferential rules. Cognitive scientists' endorsement of the formalist, universalistic position was undoubtedly encouraged by the analogy between the human mind and the computer: brain = hardware, cognitive procedures = operating principles and factory-installed software (Block, 1995). This analogy both encouraged the universality assumption and discouraged any assumption that cognitive procedures might be alterable. The heuristics and biases movement of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) and their colleagues in social

Cultural psychology, and other social sciences (e.g. cultural anthropology, sociology), seek to document cultural variation, yet have difficulty providing strong empirical tests of explanations for that variation. It is argued here that an effective means of testing hypotheses regarding the origin of, and persistence and change in, cultural variation is by simulating cultural transmission in the lab using certain methods from experimental social psychology. Three experimental methods are reviewed: the transmission chain method, the replacement method, and the constant-group method. Although very few studies have explicitly simulated specific cross-cultural patterns, much potential exists for future investigations. This integration of small-scale experimental simulations and largescale observational or historical data is facilitated by an evolutionary framework for the study of culture, and has a precedent in the biological sciences, where experiments are used to simulate and explain the processes of biological evolution.

There is growing interest across the social sciences in the systematic analysis of

Abstract. SEKT stands for Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies (EU-IST Project IST-2003-506826). Using previous and recently accomplished work on judicial and transnational lawyering prototypes (IURISERVICE and NETCASE Projects), we define an ontology of professional legal knowledge (OPLK) as a regular base for

Our research is aimed at a systematic investigation of phenomena in the nexus of culture, technology and learning. The basic premise of our research is that social affordances of technologies might vary along cultural dimensions. The challenge for technological learning environments is that interacting through technology is not unproblematic. First, it makes interaction more difficult (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Olson & Olson, 2002). Second, it may not mean, feel and

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

Academic dissertation to be presented, with the assent of

On behalf of:

This essay examines Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowing and seeks to clarify and elaborate upon its claims. Tacit knowing, which is conscious although inarticulate, must be distinguished from tacit processes, which are largely unconscious. Schematization is explored as a primary tacit process that humans share with all animals. This tacit process organizes and secures, in long-term memory, information of interest provided by receptors and those learned skills conducive to survival. Human empirical knowing integrates schematized subsidiaries into articulate explicitness through culturally-embedded symbols evoked in terms of felt fittingness. The thesis of this paper is quite easy to state: the tacit dimension of human knowing is implicated in all learning and accomplishing. Its processes and capabilities ought to be included in any adequate philosophical system. Yet for a process so central to education and achievement, there is a comparatively limited amount of attention paid to tacit knowing in scholarly writing, and there is surprisingly little consensus about how it functions. The literature in psychology contains disconnected discussion about various nonconscious contributors to knowledge, but nothing quite as comprehensive as a coherent theory of tacit knowing has emerged in psychology so far as I am aware. The most sustained version of a theory about tacit knowing has been produced by the scientist-philosopher who coined the term: Michael Polanyi. This paper is centered