Coding, counting and cultural cartography

Richard Biernacki has, through painstaking attempts to replicate the codings of formal analyses of culture, concluded that such efforts to bring rigor into cultural analysis are futile. Coding does intrinsic violence to the nature of the material, and imposes interpretations as opposed to drawing them out in such a way that they can be made subject to critique. Here we argue that Biernacki’s claims as to the intrinsic problems with coding are valid, but they do not necessarily imply that the only form of defensible analysis of cultural materials is a conventional humanistic one. Instead, they may just as well be taken to imply that we need to move further in the direction of formalism. Formal techniques that do not involve imposition of interpretation before the analysis, but rather condense information to facilitate an intersubjectively valid interpretation, do not suffer from the problems identified by Biernacki, and offer a path for a distinctly sociological contribution to cultural analysis. Further, although such techniques simplify their source works, they do so in the way a map simplifies – they make patterns accessible for joint exploration.