| Summary: | The very idea of a "canonical data set" implies a whole organization of knowledge: first, the data are durably available—a quarter-century on—thanks among other things to the institutional continuity of the GSS as an important large-scale data-collection enterprise of American social science; second, the data remain meaningful, their validity underwritten by the methods of survey research; third, the disciplinary norms of sociology allow for the possibility of following on someone else's work by reusing the evidence they have already selected; fourth, that evidence can still bear on a significant research question within sociology, a testament to the fruitfulness of the research program in cultural taste and social structure which was set in motion, notably, by the Anglophone reception of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction. Lizardo and Skiles's starting point, in other words, includes not simply the dataset itself but all the institutional conditions for a productive ongoing research program involving quantitative analysis of cultural data.
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