Temporal Order: Sequence Analysis

In the chapter we introduce an application of Bison’s approach to sequence analysis to the quantitative narrative analysis. Sequence analysis is ideally suited to provide answers to questions such as the following: How does an event start, unfold, end? Where there typical patterns in the unfolding of violent events during the black years of 1921 and 1922? Do sequence of violence change in relation to the main social actors involved? Differently put, which roles do different actors play and in which order do they enter the fray? Did different patterns of violence occur at different times and places, or where they uniformly prevalent throughout the period? Do specific external events trigger specific type of sequences, reflecting specific strategies of violence? This new approach is based on the following three steps: (a) compute a particular index that defines the distance/coordinates among sequences; (b) apply cluster analysis on the resulting indices to extract a small set of homogeneous groups; and (c) apply Markovian chains on the groups to be able to represent graphically the content of the cluster groups. We apply these three steps to 9409 triplets extracted from the Avanti! database and belonging to 933 stories (disputes) of violence during the period from 1921 to 1922. Ten different cluster groups were identified, based on different combination of subjects, actions, and objects. Each of the ten groups represents a different sequential pattern of violence (in terms of the type and the role of different actors).