Last week, at a conference of scholars interested in the civic mission of colleges and universities, I offered some general remarks about how academia can help strengthen democracy. I said something like this: Although it’s a complex story, we do not live in a good era for democratic government in the US. Whether measured by […]
A moral worldview is a set of beliefs or values connected by various kinds of relationships. For instance, one belief may imply another, or may subsume another, or may be in tension with another even though both are truths. If analyzed that way, a whole worldview can be mapped as a network, with the beliefs […]
We can think of a person’s moral mentality as a network. The nodes are ideas or values; the links are various kinds of connections among the ideas: implications, explanations, influences, and meaningful tensions. For instance, I believe that all human beings have exactly equal value, yet I also believe that my primary obligations are to […]
As described in this slide show, we have been working with college students at Tufts and UMass Boston to build one elaborate “network map” of civil society in the Boston area. The map already has many hundreds of nodes and links; we need to improve the visualization tools so that users can make more sense […]
This little presentation describes our software for mapping a community, and our progress in using it so far in the Boston area.