Geometric Data Analysis

On Thursday, 5 October, and on Friday, 6 October, we had two sessions on &dquo;Geometric Data Analysis&dquo;. The title of the sessions is the English translation of the French &dquo;L’Analyse des Donnees&dquo; which includes different techniques of visualization of data, from principal components analysis to multiple-correspondence analysis. The main idea formulated by the &dquo;father&dquo; of the &dquo;L’Analyse des Donnees&dquo;, Jean-Paul Benzecri, is that the model has to follow the data and not vice versa. Whereas the session from Michael Greenacre on &dquo;Multiple-Correspondence Analysis and its Interpretation&dquo; (Wednesday, 4 October) was mainly focussed on the technique itself, the idea of these two sessions was to give substantive examples using this method. Since correspondence analysis largely found its way into the social sciences via the publications by Pierre Bourdieu, and since many of the below listed contributors are closely connected with him and his work, many of the papers dealt with applications of his theory. In this way, the two sessions can be treated as a continuation of another conference which was hosted in October 1998 also at the Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung, organized by Henry Rouanet and Joerg Blasius (for