Welcome to the NKSS Project!

The New Kind of Social Science (NKSS) Project began in 2002 as a collaboration between Philip A. Schrodt of Penn State University and Valerie M. Hudson of Brigham Young University. Inspired by the work of Stephen Wolfram, and given their own background in computational modeling and other alternative methodologies, Schrodt and Hudson developed a vision of a new kind of social science. This new kind of social science would transcend the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methodologies in traditional social scientific research, and offer powerful new techniques for the explanation of agent-based interactive time streams of behavior. Given their involvement in the creation and development of events data, discrete sequence rule models for use with events data is their first NKSS endeavor.

Navigation of this Site

This site is organized to help you use our software, called Event Patterns (EP) Tool, which was developed by Ray Whitmer of Jhax, Inc. Several links from this homepage will help orient you to the project and to EP Tool. If you wish to learn more about how the project began, click the "About" link at the top of the page; if you wish to contact us, choose the "Contact" link.

Our foundational paper, in which the entire rationale for the development of Discrete Sequence Rule (DSR) models is explicated, can be accessed from our "Papers" links above. That page will also allow you to examine other research that we have produced that applies DSR models to real-world events, in particular the interaction between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership since the 1970s. Our first published paper, "“Discrete Sequence Rule Models as a Social Science Methodology: An Exploratory Analysis of Foreign Policy Rule Enactment within Palestinian-Israeli Event Data," was published in 2008 by the journal Foreign Policy Analysis.

An in-depth Guide to Using the EP Tool software is very useful for those wishing to utilize EP Tool online by accessing it through our server. The link entitled "Tool Guide," located at the top of the page, will bring you to those instructions. Last, for those wishing to use EP Tool on our pre-uploaded KEDS datasets, or on their own data formatted to meet the specifications of EP Tool, the Tool can be directly accessed at the "EP Tool" link at the top right of this webpage.

 

 

 

Background figure for this website courtesy of Stephen Wolfram's NKS website.