Table 3 Four techniques for edge ranking and their affinity to approaches in anthropology

Core values

...they connect two codes with high core values (Giatsidis et al. 2011)

“Central symbols in a culture”: Turner, Steward, symbolic anthropology

Simmelian backbone

...they are highly redundant (Nick et al. 2013)

“Culture as a field of competing forces”: Gramsci, Laitin, Comaroff

Association depth

...they encode a co-occurrence that occurs many times in the corpus

Structuralism and post-structuralism (Lévi–Strauss etc.)

Association breadth

...they encode a co-occurrence that occurs in the contributions of many informants