Preface

This project began on July 27, 2025. As part of my preparation for applying to a Ph.D. in Computational Social Science (CSS), I intend to make it a habit to study literature for one hour each day.

The idea is to take notes on noteworthy points as I read and see how long I can keep this up.

This idea was inspired by Hongtao Huang’s “A Paper A Day”.

Books Reading

1. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Andrew G. Walder)

July 27, 2025

  • Read Chapter: P1-P8
  • Key Points:
    1. A totalitarian society has two distinguishing characteristics:
      1. The nature of the tie between the totalitarian party and its active adherents
      2. Social atomization: “the obliteration of social ties that are not directly harnessed to the party’s aims. Totalitarian societies recognize no legitimate distinction between private and public spheres.”

  • Questions: The social atomization only exists in a totalistic society? What about the rise of media and internet platforms?

  • Key Insights:
    1. He insisted that the modern socialist society became less enforced. Where the totalitarian image places its emphasis on the disincentives and psychological states created by fear and inbred caution, the neo-traditional image emphasizes the meshing of economic and political power on the structured incentives offered by the party.
    2. How the social structure works: The result is a highly institutionalized network of patron-client relations that is maintained by the party and is integral to its rule: a clientelist system in which public loyalty to the party and its ideology is mingled with personal loyalties between party branch officials and their client.
    3. How it’s maintained: The neo-traditional image stresses the social network, not the group, as its main structural concept.

2. 传播政治经济学 (Vincent Mosco)

July 28, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 30-47
  • Key Points:
    1. 传播政治经济学的基本政治图谱：商品化、空间化、结构化
    2. 受众商品论：劳工为了回报他们所接受的媒介内容而出卖了他们的劳动力（注意力）；延伸了劳动的外延，扩展了传统的商品逻辑，也许可作为资本主义的劳动转型过程
    3. 劳动（Braverman，1974）：概念的统一体：想象与创意能力，设计与执行能力；在商品化过程中，资本的作用是把创意和制作相分离，把技术和执行任务的非娴熟相分离，形成一个管理阶层，同时生产上的新的技能与权力的配置相结合来重构劳动过程
    4. 商品化到空间化：信息系统的出现使得信息转变空间——重新分配产业资源
    5. 传播政治经济学的传统是把空间化视作企业权力在传播产业的制度延伸

August 02, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 48-56
  • Key Points:
    1. 社会关系，特别是权力关系，它们交互组成了资源的生产、分配和消费；而这就要求传播政治经济学检视顺着生产分配和消费线路不断变换的控制方式；或行动主义者如何通过新媒介来抵制权力的集中。但在传播产业中，生产者、分配者和消费者无法进行准确定义：受众不可被直接认定为消费者，在消费媒介产品时，也在制作出象征价值。
    2. 另一个对政治经济学的定义是，研究社会生活中的控制和存在。

August 10, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 57-85
  • Key Points:
    1. 马克思如何理解商品：全部商品不过是一定数量的凝结劳动时间（congealed labour-time）
    2. 在传播上的批判：传统马克思主义过度强调劳动的工具性与生产性，将人简化为生产对象或者简单的生产要素——故劳动的其他物质实践被最小化
    3. 故传政经提出要展示传播与文化如何构成物质实践、劳动与语言如何互为本质、传播与信息如何构成同一社会活动——意义的社会建构的辩证关系
    4. 保守主义者对政治经济学的批判：
      1. 他们认为财富的增长起源于一种有机秩序，这种秩序令人们尊重传统，传统令人们清楚地了解自身的社会角色与驱使他们行使该角色的道德基础
      2. 根本：反对赋予大众权力从而进行社会改造，认为经济学的本质是最大化快乐——最小程度牺牲不想要的并获取最想要的东西（杰文斯1965）
      3. 古典经济学在对均衡状态大感兴趣的前提下关注共识性变化，而忽略对历史的传统兴趣——无法分析转型时期
      4. 市场为古典经济学和新古典经济学赋予道德依据
    5. 几个政治经济学的变体：
      1. 新保守主义
        • 政府是规制的主要受益者——削减规制
        • 本质上是为了保证科学性而释放政治，任其为自由主义和社会主义思想俘获
      2. 制度经济学
      3. 马克思主义政治经济学：批判公司集中化，探讨国家干预解决的可能性，回应生产技术、工业组织、世界市场的变革
      4. 女性主义政治经济学：
        • 将家务劳动纳入市场交换体制与分析中
        • 缺少具体的计算体系
      5. 环境政治经济学：道德视界的变化
    6. 为何需要政治经济学：
      1. 经济学偏爱描述静态，一切在均衡中解决，兴趣仅仅局限于在一套特定制度中描述增量变化
      2. 无法将重大社会经济决定因素纳入考虑
      3. 倾向于将市场视为个人互动的自然产物，加剧了社会的阶级、种族和性别分别
      4. 急切的需要把经济学正统从修辞体系中脱离出来，研究其作为一种权力体系的部分

August 11, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 86-95
  • Key Points:
    1. 如何定义传播:
      • 会话的修辞如同调查的逻辑一样应该提供科学的标准，尤其是，这种观点坚持认为理解不是一个人使用解释实在的语言去解释显示并对现实做观察和报告的过程，相反，理解发生于两个或者更多的人交换观察结果、观念以及用并不只是揭示显示、而是有益于建构显示的语言来表达观察结果与观念时。
      • 两种定义方式: 信息传输与意义的建构
      • 数学基础的传播科学: 香农韦佛，传播者与编码者的信息传送于解码者
      • 社会学家: 建立意义的过程
      • 市场专家: 两个或多方的交互过程，意义通过符号有意图的使用交换
      • 政治经济学启示: 传播学应把传播体系看作社会基本经济、政治、文化过程的一部分：资本主义基本要素框架，资本积累与劳动工资

August 14, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 96-110
  • Key Points:
    1. 影响传播政治经济学的社会和知识因素:
      • 社会驱动力:
        1. 媒介沿着工业路线被组织并且大多数媒介劳动为薪水工作；但媒介聚集现在如此有力以至于无须保留完全所有权的风险就可以控制积累循环，弹性积累巩固了全球的媒介权力
        2. 但政治经济学对于探讨围绕家庭组织起来的行为是穷于应付的，同样谈论受众所使用的一种新语言也挑战了政治经济学，受众通过收听、阅读、观赏外加购买媒介内容来参与积累过程
        3. 跨国化的过程: 也是世界信息传播新秩序的诉求，而全球化则频繁而含糊的指向跨国化：
          • eg：不结盟运动——国家自决——传播媒介的普遍获得、对传播的生产和分配过程予以控制以及传播时基本人权——讨论全球资本主义在美国为首的战后重组中传播的角色——传播与文化在对先前对立的国家的重新支配中如何牵连
          • 新技术扩大受众的控制，国家主权的破坏——嵌入式的假想美国式形象——图汇跨国传播公司的增长和权力以及他们和美国亲近的联动装置
          • 信息与传播技术具有重新整合全球劳工分工的力量
        4. 信息社会的出现:
          • 时间，空间和社会关系的彻底断流
          • 丹席勒，数字资本主义
          • 开放源和黑客网络挑战了所有权：矛盾出现：信息免费使用的渴望和资本主义希望信息达到创造剩余价值的单一目的
      • 知识潮流:
        1. 传播产业与传统古典经济模型格格不入

3. Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Joel Andreas)

August 11, 2025

  • Read Chapter: P213 Chapter Nine - Rebuilding the Foundation of Political and Cultural Power

  • Main Content: Mainly talks about the rise of the red engineers and the revocation of the educational systems after the Cultural Revolution

  • Key Insights:

    1. Worker-Peasant-Soldier Students’ Attitude: They considered the loss of collective consciousness in the new college student as an indicator of the reduction of political rights and participation in the New Era. This phenomenon illustrates that there exists a huge generation gap; the traditional habitus didn’t exist, like the alternation of the ideology with the huge impact of their individual self-consciousness.

    2. Middle School Changes: The rebirth of the keypoints classes. This showed that the brand-new hierarchy of the educational systems comes out, which produces the education elite.

    3. Party Membership Transformation: Shorn of its ideological meaning, party membership retained its instrumental value as a political credential and networking tool, attracting ambitious university students who aspired to public service and leadership positions.

    4. Loss of Inspirational Core: The loss of the inspirational core of the communist party member put it more like a political credential and networking tool.

    5. Core of New Tsinghua University: The transfer of class power, the flow and change of the knowledge hierarchy

4. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Stuart Hall, Ed.)

August 14, 2025

  • Read Chapter: P225-235 Chapter Four - The Spectacle of The Other

  • Key Insights:

    1. Two Guiding Questions: a. Have the repertoires of representation around “difference” and “otherness” changed, or do earlier traces from colonial and racialized narratives remain embedded in contemporary culture? b. Is there a possibility for an effective politics of presentation that can challenge and transform dominant stereotypical portrayals?

    2. Persistence of Difference and Power:
      • Hall notes that even with new modes of visual and cultural production, many symbolic codes, visual motifs, and narrative frames of the “racialized Other” still echo colonial-era patterns
      • Old and new forms often overlap: modern advertising, film, and journalism may adopt new aesthetics, yet still rely on deep-seated binaries (civilized/primitive, modern/backward, white/non-white)
    3. Representation as a Site of Power Struggle:
      • The “spectacle of the Other” emphasizes that seeing and being seen are part of a broader power relation
      • Mainstream media and cultural industries do not merely “depict” the Other; they define the Other—this power to represent is central to cultural hegemony
      • Representation is not a one-way process; it is constantly negotiated among producers, texts, and audiences, though dominant discourses generally prevail
    4. Counter-Representation Strategies:
      • Reversing the stereotype: Flipping a negative stereotype into its opposite, re-signifying it in a positive or empowering way
      • Positive imagery: Presenting affirmative, authentic, and diverse representations to offset prevailing negative portrayals
      • Contesting from within: Working within mainstream forms and platforms to insert new narratives that disrupt established codes
      • Hall warns that each approach has limits—reversal can still lock thinking into binary oppositions, while positive imagery may gloss over structural inequalities

        Paper Reading

2025-7

2025-7-27

  • Paper: Nahrgang, M., Weidmann, N. B., Quint, F., Nagel, S., Theocharis, Y., & Roberts, M. E. (2025). Written for Lawyers or Users? Mapping the Complexity of Community Guidelines. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19, 1295–1314. Link

  • Previous Problems: As harmful content fostered many problems, and social platforms conducted content moderation, many users held low trust towards the restrictions. However, many actors tried to use community guidelines to restrict users, but created a vast difference. No research has put attention on users’ situation.

  • Research Questions: Focusing on the length, readability, and semantic complexity of community guidelines.

  • Interesting Points:

    1. Platform Typology: Chat platforms, creator platforms, forum platforms, social network platforms
    2. Alt Tech Platforms: Provide alternatives to Silicon Valley-controlled platforms like Gab
    3. Platform Governance Archive (PGA): GitHub Repository makes historical versions available
    4. Readability Measurement: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Score relies on average sentence length and average word length in a given text

2025-8

2025-8-10

  • Paper: Waight, H., Messing, S., Shirikov, A., Roberts, M. E., Nagler, J., Greenfield, J., Brown, M. A., Aslett, K., & Tucker, J. A. (2025). Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages. Sociological Methods & Research, 54(3), 933–983. Link

  • Research Purpose: To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narratives, rather than the same broad themes or exact features.

  • Methods: Using large language models to distill texts to their core ideas and then compare the similarity of claims rather than of words, phrases, or sentences. Sorting by SBERT and claimed by GPT-4o.

  • Research Questions: The spread of Russian claims about the development of a Ukrainian bioweapons program in U.S. mainstream and fringe news websites.

  • Key Insights:
    1. Narrative diffusion: A process that creates narrative similarity as an empirical relic
    2. When conducting or using one word, you should do a related literature review of this specific word
    3. Gold standard approach: Providing infinite resources to identify narrative similarity
    4. LLM-SBERT: Using the key claims and subjects to measure the similarity
    5. How to minimize the scale of large pairwise comparisons:
      1. Use LLMs to distill the core claims and subjects
      2. Using the pretrained BERT-based model to generate a semantic similarity
      3. Using human annotators to label pairs identified as positive cases
  • Questions: How to deal with LLMs bias?

2025-8-11

  • Paper: Waight, H., Messing, S., Shirikov, A., Roberts, M. E., Nagler, J., Greenfield, J., Brown, M. A., Aslett, K., & Tucker, J. A. (2025). Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages. Sociological Methods & Research, 54(3), 933–983. Link (Continued)

  • Language Standardization Process:
    1. Standardized Prompt: “Please summarize this news article in 7-10 English sentences. Article: [insert article text]”
    2. Claims Extraction: Prompt GPT-4o to extract the “descriptive, normative, causal, and classificatory claims” (the “claims”) and “people, places, things, and events” (the “subjects”) included in each summary
    3. Bias Mitigation: How to deal with the bias of the LLMs
  • Two-Step Candidate Generation Process:
    1. Bi-encoder to Cross-encoder: Using the cutoff to delete
    2. Efficient Pairwise Comparison: Reducing computational complexity through hierarchical filtering

[To be continued…]