Dr. Marshall A. Taylor

Sociology of Culture, Cognitive Sociology, Computational Social Science, Quantitative Methods

Dr. Marshall A. Taylor

Contact Information

Office: Science Hall 292B
Emailmtaylor2@nmsu.edu


Curriculum Vitae  


Education

Ph.D. – University of Notre Dame, 2019
M.A. – The University of Memphis, 2014
B.S. – Middle Tennessee State University, 2012

Background

I am an assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. I am also the faculty lead for the Data Science and Application Center (DaSA) and the co-associate dean of research for the College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation at NMSU.

Research

My research focuses on questions of cognition and measurement in the sociology of culture. Specifically, I study how social contexts and cognitive structures interface to influence the stability and change of cultural knowledge and how to best measure cultural knowledge in natural language and survey data using computational methods. I have used this guiding interest in culture and cognition to study how journalists respond to innovative protest strategies, the evolution of family metaphors in U.S. State of the Union addresses, how neural binding operates as a meaning-making and meaning-maintenance practice, the different moral schemas that consumers use to evaluate the fairness of price changes, how gender biases manifest discursively in student evaluations of teaching, and why and when white nationalist organizations divert attention to the grievances that they do, among other topics in the sociology of culture, politics, and social movements. My research makes use of a wide range of computational and quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in developing tools for computational cultural analysis—especially (semi)automated text analysis.

My book, Mapping Texts: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences (co-authored with regular collaboraor Dustin S. Stoltz at Lehigh University), is scheduled for online release in January 2024 and in print February 2024 with Oxford University Press.

My current and forthcoming work can be found in Sociological Theory, Poetics, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological ForumJournal for the Theory of Social BehaviourSociological Science, Socius, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Journal of Computational Social Science, Deviant Behavior, and the Stata Journal, among other peer-reviewed outlets. My research and institution-building work have been funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Study of Social Movements, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

Learn more about my work at my website: marshalltaylor.net