Rob Ford’s mayoralty in Toronto is a telling case, in that it occurred outside of national politics and hot-button issues, and within a multi-cultural metropolis (often represented as more or less inherently on one side of the populist divide).
This type of case helps build more general theory.

The case study method helps to give some empirical flesh to a conversation that threatens to become highly abstract.

The populist cocktail becomes politically potent with horizontal and vertical are conjoined.
To the extent that populism represents a revolt against rationalism, rationalized forms of mediating social organization are a key target. Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is a good place to start.

The script includes two dimensions: the more familiar vertical one between elites and the people, and a horizontal one between insider and outsider. The vertical often includes a third term, a “sub-popular” element beneath the people (often represented as parasites, sponges, deviants, disorderly).

key points:
Building on Brubaker, Populism is a social script, which leaves room for improvisation to specific contexts, topics, and ideologies as it is reproduced locally

I don't know what to make of that, but worth thinking about more!

But a diagram resembles its object without looking like it, in terms of a shared relational structure. If I understand Weatherby right, his claim is that embeddings are diagrammatic, but LLMs move into the poetic, i.e. metaphor, since they are generative.

good points! Though the notion of iconic, at least in a Peirician sense, is a bit wider than "look like," no? Peirce had three types of icons: image, diagram, metaphor. The image is based on "looking like."

Sociology has not escaped similar uncertainties. This post reflects on how the sociology of culture has grappled with these problems, via a brief history of its methodological debates from humanism to coding to computation.

I have enjoyed this in a number of areas, but since I like reading and talking about books, it is especially the case with literary criticism and literary studies. Computational approaches raise the question of what exactly literary scholars do, or should be doing, with particular force.

There is something to that, where the implied “we” seems very time bound, to 1990s mainstream sociology. I had a bit on that, which I didn’t include. Still, I think big ideas are important, often and especially in guiding assumptions behind our backs . Stay tuned a few weeks for a long post on that!

While I have some serious criticisms of this and other claims, the book deserves major praise for raising such foundational claims in a forceful way that hopefully will inspire more discussion about them within and outside the field.