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Those interested in fashions and their changes, over the long run, should
read Stan Lieberson's excellent "A Matter of Taste." He looks at the first
names that parents choose for their children; he looks at changes over
time spans up to centuries long; and he very astutely assesses several
kinds of theories including diffusion and trickle-down theories.

Bonnie Erickson

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Michael Foulds wrote:

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>
> This may be of some historical interest. I've been reading some of Gabriel
> Tarde's work on diffusion (and the important roles of conversation and
> imitation). He would have appreciated recent work by Valdis and Eric on
> using Amazon data to interpret social trends...
>
> "it would be of the greatest interest to have good statistics on bookstores,
> which, from the number of copies sold, would tell us the rise and fall of
> curiosity about and public favour for a given type of publication -- novels,
> travelogues, philosophical stories, poetry, newspapers of a particular bent.
> We should then clearly observe the variations of public opinion and the
> direction of its transformations." (pp229-230)
>         Tarde, G. (1897) Quantification and Social Indicators
>         in "Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence" (1969), (Ed,
> Clark, T.)
>         University of Chicago Press, Chicago pp245-251
>
> regards
> Michael
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Eric Promislow
> Sent: Tuesday, 30 September 2003 3:44 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Snowball sampling
>
> That site connects the dots on over 400,000 items that Amazon
> sells.  I haven't done any of the clustering analysis Valdis has
> connected; fascinating work.
>
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