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ROBERTO FRANZOSI
Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology
Ph. D. in Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, 1981
OFFICE: Tarbutton Hall, Room 212
PHONE: 404 727-7533
EMAIL: rfranzo@emory.edu
Professor Roberto Franzosi joined Emory in the Fall of 2006 and became a core faculty of the Program in Linguistics in 2007.
While not a linguist by training, Professor Franzosi has had a long-standing interest in issues of narrative, semantics,
semiotics, rhetoric, and quantitative approaches to language. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in
Textual Analysis, Narrative, and Language and Mass Media.
Professor Franzosi's research work in the field of linguistics (himself being a sociologist) has focused on narrative
(e.g., see his "Narrative Analysis - Why (And How) Sociologists Should Be Interested in Narrative." 1998, Annual
Review of Sociology). He has developed a technique, based on the concept of "story grammar" and relational database
systems, for quantifying narrative information for socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of conflict as reported
in newspaper articles on strikes, riots, or violent events), publishing several articles and books (From Words to Numbers:
Narrative, Data, and Social Science, 2004, Cambridge University Press; Quantitative Narrative Analysis, Sage, 2007; Content
Analysis. Benchmarks in Social Research Methods series (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences). 4 vols. Sage, 2008).
Franzosi (still me, talking in the third person) has developed a software, PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of
Events), for quantifying narrative information (available for free download at www.pc-ace.com). Using PC-ACE, Franzosi
has carried out a huge data-collection project on the rise of Italian fascism (1919-22), collecting some two-hundred
thousand skeleton narrative sentences from three different Italian newspapers.
Franzosi has also been fascinated by the rhetorical aspects of scientific work. Whether there is or there isn't a
"reality out there", whether science can or cannot attain an objective knowledge of that reality, scientific writing
underscores science's "noble dream" of objectivity via an array of specifically linguistic devices. Franzosi is
approaching these issues in a book titled A Trilogy of Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Foundations of Social Science
Quantitative Work (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) (see also his "On Ambiguity and Rhetoric in (Social)
Science," Sociological Methodology, 1997). In Trilogy of Rhetoric Franzosi takes three once-popular
strands of social science quantitative literature-strike, union growth, and wage inflation-and analyzes both the
statistical and linguistic conventions behind the argumentations adopted.
Prof. Franzosi's Sociology Faculty Page
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