Marshall A. Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. He has been at NMSU since fall 2019, and is the founder and faculty lead of the Data Science and Application Center.
Taylor’s research focuses on questions of cognition and measurement in the sociology of culture.
“Specifically, I theorize and examine how cognitive processes interact with social contexts to influence individual and collective behavior in a variety of settings, especially in the domains of culture, politics and social movements,” Taylor said.
His research also focuses on developing new computational tools for measuring culture, which he has used as a guiding interest in culture and cognition to study, for example, how journalists respond to innovative protest strategies, the evolution of family metaphors in U.S. State of the Union addresses, the relationship between self-personalization and online negativity for female U.S. congressional candidates, the different moral schemas that consumers use to evaluate the fairness of price changes, and how gender biases manifest discursively in student evaluations of teaching.
He has co-authored a book under contract with Oxford University Press, “Mapping Texts: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences,” which is due out next year. The book serves as a practical introduction to computational text analysis for social scientists in the R statistical programming language.
“My day-to-day work involves going back and forth between research and teaching – with service to the sociology discipline, university, HEST and department sprinkled in. I am also dedicated to helping build up data science education and research as a core institutional identity for NMSU. To that end, I spend time creating new data science-related programming and activities as part of my work with the Data Science and Applications Center,” Taylor said. “It really is dream job, as I get to be a practicing sociologist and professor for a living.”