State of the art and preliminary work
which context you situate your own research and in what areas you intend to make a unique, innovative, promising contribution.
1. the effect of science is measured by instutional practices. frascati,
Science society interaction, complexity,
Unlike the social authority which denotes the capacity for legitimately commanding people (Weber, 2015), cultural authority refers to a softer form of power deployed for establishing certain definitions of reality to prevail as legitimate and true knowledge (Starr, 1982). This makes its mapping a challenging task because it does not manifest itself through directly observable institutional practices. Nonetheless, people in modern societies increasingly feel the cultural authority of science in their everyday life which now has started to claim nearly a monopoly over the production of all forms of legitimate knowledge. It is now largely believed that science possesses the capacity to give definitive answers to major existential issues such as interpreting social and cultural events; diagnosing and managing risks; and guiding the society through policies (Habermas, 1989). Referring to or invoking symbols of science has become a license for corroborating any truth claim about a quotidian citizenship or consumption decision. The role of media during the dissemination of such symbols makes it a huge repository from which the cultivation of collective consciousness can be inferred. Mass media encodes the cultural context in a way to maintain the communication of truth claims, worldviews and values to be meaningfully perceived by the public. As an agenda setter, media has a public making function by enabling collective thought and action through the construction of shared ways of framing, selecting and viewing events and aspects of life (Gerbner, 1969:140). Gerbner (141) showed that analysing how certain concepts exist, prioritized, evaluated, and related in the mass media can provide important background knowledge for inferring the cultural environment of a society. Using these theoretically informed inference forms we can operationalize this background knowledge into observable cultural indicators. However, general terms relevant to these forms as instructed by Gerbner have been methodologically limited to manual content analysis which can be costly, burdensome and time consuming. Large scale digitalization of mass media and big data techniques for extracting, analysing and visualizing information from textual data now offer novel potentials for surpassing these limitations. Unfortunately, inadequacy of technological resources and skills kept social scientists away from fully exploiting these potentials. The area has been largely left to the computer scientists who in turn lack the theoretical direction to ground the texts into their social contexts and interpret the results of the analysis. MACAS project opened the Pandora’s Box for extracting science culture indicators by means of automatized text analysis from a social scientists’ perspective, albeit leaving us with more questions than answers. Quest for investigating such a complex area is indeed an expedition to an unchartered territory that would advance through trial and error and conjectures. Since controlling the conjectures by criticism is essential for developing more mature solutions to the problems, this study will not seek another case for confirming the knowledge already produced during the MACAS project which is perfectly achieved by the other studies in this book. Building upon a constructive criticism of its conjectures, this study aims to contribute to the quest of MACAS by bridging big data techniques to social studies of culture and experimentally applying this idea to the mapping the cultural authority of science. The text unfolds as follows. The next section critically discusses the difficulties of defining the discursive boundaries of science as a general concept and substantiates the necessity of starting from sub-fields for a boundary work exercise. Then, the methodological problems for collecting the texts with keyword searches during the corpus construction are discussed and guidelines for a balanced and representative corpus are presented. Final section focuses on the methods of inference for developing science culture indicators by means of media analysis and application of these methods to the mapping the cultural authority of biotechnology in Turkey.