Visualising Class Structures in Australia and Britain

Canberra.
The next panel at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 is starting with Tony Bennett, whose interest is in visualising socio-cultural relations. Franco Moretti has set out the differences between ‘seeing like a state’ (top-down, from above) and ‘seeing like a novellist’ (from within the space itself, in a contextually situated fashion). There’s also a way of ‘seeing like a sociologist’, Tony suggests – a map which makes visible the underlying social universe.

Tony’s aim here is to compare major studies on cultural tastes in Britain and Australia, using multiple correspondence analysis: a form of geometric data analysis which generates two clouds of points – of the individuals surveyed, and of the lifestyle modalities investigated. In both cases, items are located closer to one another in the cloud if they are more closely related.

In Australia, for example, there are striking separate clusters around ‘high’- and ‘low’-culture activities, and these are also associated with other tastes (wine vs. beer, for example). This can also be mapped onto social classes (such as manual workers, white-collar workers, employers and managers, and professionals).

In the UK, similar distinctions emerge, but here, the amount of TV watched is a much more important factor of distinction; the same goes for participation in rock concerts (but then, the UK study was a decade earlier, too). Social classes in the UK are more widely spread across this spectrum as well; but here, professionals and employers and managers are less distinct from one another than in Australia: only three classes (working, intermediate, and professional-executive) emerge, but in Australia, these classes cluster more strongly.

Class culture divisions are weaker in the Australian than in the British case; the division between the working class and professionals is more polarised in the former, however; and managers/employers are more separated from professionals in Australia.