How New Fields Emerge from Barriers in Semantic Flow

Ethan Greist, University of Notre Dame

The existence of social fields – distinct sites of social competition and interaction around some common understanding of norms and goals – has long been recognized by sociologists. The mechanics underlying the emergence and development of these fields are, however, far less well understood. This is partly due to the way that these mechanics are shrouded by popular spatial models of fields which are ill-suited to processual questions about field evolution. Using data on 50 years of bill cosponsorship between United States senators, I construct a structural topic model which relates the social network interactions of these individuals through bills to the topical fields that these interactions emergently create. I show that the “speciation” of new topics can come from both intra-field and inter-field mechanisms which are amenable to discovery through the pairing of semantic and social network analysis. I describe how shifts in the mediating technologies of social network interaction – in this case the decline of the congressional committee system – influence the rate and kind of field evolution.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 77. System and Action