The cultural and social dynamics of awarding the Nobel Prize
My most recent project takes up the awarding of Nobel Prizes in science and literature in order to disentangle the social mechanisms that allocate recognition in global cultural fields. This project is based on a newly available database of Nobel Prize nomination materials that covers almost all science and literature prizes from 1901 to 1968 and contains around fourteen thousand nomination letters. I am currently adding new materials in collaboration with the Swedish Academy.
I treat each prize as an organizational process in which the awarding organization, its committees, and its external nominators must work together to agree on a hierarchy of merit. Judgements of merit can be based on many criteria, including prior accolades and recognized contributions to a scientific specialty or aesthetic movement, but also discrimination, “old boys” networks, and self-dealing. To construct measures for each of these mechanisms, it is necessary to sift through a vast trove of textual output written by and nominees and nominators, map out their social networks, and identify their preferences according to specialty or genre. Doing so will require not only identifying the far-flung social networks of nominees and nominators, but also creating models of their textual output to identify their common scientific or aesthetic interests. This work is currently being pursued with the generous support of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
I treat each prize as an organizational process in which the awarding organization, its committees, and its external nominators must work together to agree on a hierarchy of merit. Judgements of merit can be based on many criteria, including prior accolades and recognized contributions to a scientific specialty or aesthetic movement, but also discrimination, “old boys” networks, and self-dealing. To construct measures for each of these mechanisms, it is necessary to sift through a vast trove of textual output written by and nominees and nominators, map out their social networks, and identify their preferences according to specialty or genre. Doing so will require not only identifying the far-flung social networks of nominees and nominators, but also creating models of their textual output to identify their common scientific or aesthetic interests. This work is currently being pursued with the generous support of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.