Our downstairs neighbor hates us. She looks away from us when we see them on the street, if we’re coming into the building at the same time she doesn’t hold open the door, and if we’re in the elevator when it stops on her floor, she refuses to get on.

On the other hand, if you’re a sociology professor in Chicago, one of your colleagues might try to run you over in a parking lot. So I guess I’m getting off easy.

Aleks pointed me to this recent article by Pablo Mateos, Paul Longley, and David O’Sullivan on one of my favorite topics.

The authors produced a potentially cool naming network of the city of Auckland New Zealand. I say “potentially cool” because I have such difficulty reading the article–I speak English, statistics, and a bit of political science and economics, but this one is written in heavy sociologese–that I can’t quite be sure what they’re doing. However, despite my (perhaps unfair) disdain for the particulars of their method, it’s probably good that they’re jumping in with this analysis. Others can take their data (and similar datasets from elsewhere) and do better. Ya gotta start somewhere, and the basic idea (to cluster first names that are associated with the same last names, and to cluster last names that are associated with the same first names) seems good.

I have to admit, though, that I was amused by the following line, which, amazingly, led off the paper:

Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random.

Far from random, huh? Who’d a thunk it?

And also this:

Researchers have automatically classified the 2.5 million users of a mobile phone operator in Belgium into French and Flemish speaking communities based exclusively on the topological network structure of their 800 million phone calls and texts interactions [9]. In doing so they have demonstrated the enduring importance of linguistic and geographical barriers in the age of global mobile communications, and more importantly, that they can automatically be detected using network analysis.

OK, sure, any analysis of 2.5 million users is impressive on computational grounds alone, but . . . it’s hard to be impressed that you can automatically partition phone calls and texts from two different languages, right? It’s fine to do, but it’s hardly news that people like to talk in their own language.

This is partly what goes into the “sociologese” style of writing: a sort of flattening of affect, in which seemingly strange behaviors or findings are presented deadpan, while unremarkable observations can be touted as important.

P.S. [just added] This was just a coincidence—the above post about a month ago and was waiting its turn in the queue, whereas the item from yesterday was more recent—but it’s funny that I slammed economists one day and sociologist the next. I’m just full of stereotypes this week, I guess!