Sociology

Illuminating the Shadow of the Future edited by Frank Wayman, Paul Williamson, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Research Methods from the Trenches edited by Eszter Hargittai

Illuminating the Shadow of the Future: Scientific Prediction and the Human Condition

Frank Wayman, Paul Williamson and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Editors

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Illuminating the Shadow of the Future is the exciting end-product of a very high-level interdisciplinary conference held in Ann Arbor, September 23-25, 2005, on forecasting human behavior. The conference brought together some of the world's leading experts on modeling and forecasting from an unusually wide range of disciplines, including political science, evolutionary biology, computer science, environmental sciences, linguistics, economics, physics, mathematics, demography, public health, and psychology. The goal was to emphasize what keynote speaker Edward O. Wilson has labeled consilience, the tendency of categories of human inquiry and knowledge to converge on certain key questions: in this case, how to explain and predict long-term global patterns of human behavior. Individual papers looked at everything from high-speed computational modeling to how global shifts in material well-being are related to the spread of political ideas and changes in patterns of international conflicts. Ultimately, the participants explored the possibility of harmonizing their approaches to create a unified and truly scientific system of modeling and forecasting.

August 2008
400 pages

Research Methods from the Trenches

Eszter Hargittai, Editor

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Research Methods from the Trenches is a guide for empirical social sciences research based on first-hand accounts of work with data of all types, including large-scale data sets, social networks, interviews, observations, experiments, and historical documents. The unique contribution of this collection is that it provides readers with a realistic idea of what to expect when embarking on empirical investigations by offering richly detailed descriptions of the logistics of individual research projects. The volume draws on the experiences of recent successful dissertation writers and young scholars doing cutting-edge research in their respective social scientific fields.

Eszter Hargittai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2003, and her articles have appeared in numerous publications including Poetics, Social Science Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, and Annual Review of Sociology.

June 2008
300 pages