This two-day workshop illustrates a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the author, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). The speaker is Roberto Franzosi, Professor of Sociology and Linguistics, Emory University. It takes place 5-6 June, and is hosted by the Cardiff School of Social Sciences in the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff; there are 15 places available for attendees from outside Cardiff.

QNA relies on computer-assisted story grammars to analyse narrative, where a story grammar is the simple Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure.

In narrative, Subjects are typically social actors – individuals, groups, organizations – Verbs are actions, and Objects are both social actors and physical and abstract objects.

To each of the three SVO components one can add several attributes to capture the complexity of stories (e.g., name of an individual, number of actors in a group, time and space of action).

The workshop will:

• illustrate the power of the approach using data collected by the author from newspapers on the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922) (300,000 SVOs) and Georgia lynchings (1875–1930) (7,000 SVOs) using PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events).
• show how narrative data lend themselves to cutting-edge tools of data visualization and analysis as network graphs and maps in Google Earth and other GIS software.
• show how QNA data provide the basis for fascinating digital humanities projects.

The workshop will also illustrate what social scientists can do with words beyond narrative.

The cost is £30.

For further information about the workshop, and a profile of the speaker Roberto Franzosi, please see the event webpage, where you can also download a booking form.