Reducing Networks of Ethnographic Codes Co-occurrence in Anthropology

The use of data and algorithms in the social sciences allows for exciting progress, but also poses epistemological challenges. Operations that appear innocent and purely technical may profoundly influence final results. Researchers working with data can make their process less arbitrary and more accountable by making theoretically grounded methodological choices. We apply this approach to the problem of reducing networks representing ethnographic corpora. Their nodes represent ethnographic codes, and their edges the co-occurrence of codes in a corpus. We introduce and discuss four techniques to reduce such networks and facilitate visual analysis. We show how the mathematical characteristics of each one are aligned with a specific approach in sociology or anthropology: structuralism and post-structuralism; identifying the central concepts in a discourse; and discovering hegemonic and counter-hegemonic clusters of meaning.