The Measuring Culture conference at Notre Dame continues a three-year conversation on methods and measurement in the sociology of culture. Measuring Culture brings together a team of leading junior and mid-career cultural sociologists as they collaborate on new co-authored book project of the same title. This book offers a programmatic statement on the measurement of culture, moving debates beyond qualitative and quantitative boundaries and between theoretical traditions. This conference is the first opportunity the group has to publicly present material from the book.

Measuring Culture at Notre Dame will present and discuss methodological insights that have emerged out of the conversations and debates from the first two Measuring Culture meetings at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Those meetings produced a well-received special issue of Theory and Society. Now the group puts forward a collective vision that celebrates the creative methodological work produced by the field thus far and seeks to build on these innovations by suggesting ways to produce fuller representations of social phenomena. Measuring Culture proposes concrete strategies for measuring culture across levels of analysis, in its different manifestations (e.g. textual versus material culture), and for cultural processes that are both implicit and explicit. Finally, it demonstrates the value of this approach by applying these insights to a longstanding question within the discipline such as, how does culture reproduce social inequality in the U.S. and internationally?