Talk:Sociography
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I suggest the French page 'Sociographie' should be merged with this one, and expanded to match it. The topic seems to be identical, but the English page only mentions German, Hungarian and Dutch translations, and the French page mentions none. 84.84.212.57 (talk) 14:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
Sociography and sociograms[edit]
I have always been of the understanding that the term "sociography" referred to the making and using of sociograms. Jacob Moreno was using the term in 1934 and it seems to make much more sense for sociography to refer specifically to imaging of social structure than to the mere writing about social and cultural issues.
The definition given to the term in this article is not very coherent - describing sociography first as non-researched writing on societal patterns, etc. Then it describes it as a mix of sociology and geography. Then it describes something that sounds almost identical to ethnography. Next the article describes sociography as a meta-discipline combining literature, sociology, economics, etc. What the article has described is not a discipline, a field, or a genre. And I, for one, have never once heard the term used to describe what the article describes (and I've been through a few universities).
As the term was used by Jacob Moreno, sociography refers to any technique for the imaging of the structure of the social interactions under study. There have been many techniques developed over the decades. Hand drawings, devices such as wooden peg boards and elaborate 3D wire box grids that allowed for wooden balls to be spaced so as to fit the data of a given sociomatrix). The term sociography does not seem to be used much nowadays, but the various programs and algorithms that have been developed (like Panjek) are clearly examples of what in 1934 New York would have been called "sociography" or "sociographic technique". For my money the word belongs to this area of endeavor.
The word "sociography" (or "sociographie") seems to have had competing definitions. The article should be rewritten entirely so that it is about the word and its apparent history of competing meanings.
Qdiderot (talk) 08:32, 26 June 2016 (UTC)