:Douglas R. White

Douglas White was born in Minneapolis in 1942. He attended the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received a B.A. in 1964, an M.A. in 1967, and a Ph.D. degree in 1969, all under advisor E. Adamson Hoebel and the Travelling Scholars Program.[http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/TravelingScholars/ CIC: Travelling Scholars Program] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070405145357/http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/TravelingScholars/ |date=April 5, 2007 }}

White taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1967 to 1976. Since then he has been a Social Science Professor at the University of California, Irvine, teaching in Social Relations, in Comparative Culture, in Social Networks and in Anthropology. He co-founded and chaired the Social Networks PhD program and within the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences chaired the Social Dynamics and Complexity{{cite web|url=http://www.socsci.uci.edu/socdyn/|title=Home|access-date=2 February 2016}} research group and the UC four-campus videoconference group.{{cite web|url=http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/center/cac.html|title=Human Sciences and Complexity (HSC-UC)|access-date=2 February 2016|archive-date=9 October 2006|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061009004757/http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/center/cac.html|url-status=dead}}

He was on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute,{{cite web|url=http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Douglas_R._White|title=Douglas R. White|access-date=2 February 2016}} was on the governing Council of the European Complex Systems Society,[http://complexsystems.lri.fr/ECSS/tiki-index.php European Complex Systems Society] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060901090924/http://complexsystems.lri.fr/ECSS/tiki-index.php |date=September 1, 2006 }} and served as President of the [http://computationalsocialscience.org/ Social Science Computing Association] and of the Linkages Development Research Council.

He founded the World Cultures electronic journal in 1985 as part of the movement for open access scientific data and publication and founded the open access and peer reviewed Structure and Dynamics electronic journal in 2005, where he continued as editor-in-chief.

He was a recipient of the U.S. Distinguished Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the "Best Paper in Mathematical Sociology of 2004" Award of the American Sociological Association (2004), and the 2007 "Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award" for the outstanding article published in the field of economic sociology in the previous two years.

Major contributions of Douglas R. White:

• White was known for Cross-cultural studies, studies of the division of labor, sexual division of labor,{{cite web|url=http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pw/SexualDivision_ofLabor.htm|title=Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: The Sexual Division of Labor Page, Causes and Entailments|access-date=2 February 2016}} polygyny,{{cite web|url=http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pw/Polygyny.htm|title=Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: The Polygyny Page|access-date=2 February 2016}} marriage and kinship, his collaborative creation of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), and [http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Standard_Cross-Cultural_Sample#Download_for_Spss:_Standard_Cross-Cultural_Sample_Spss_data_file public domain distribution of SCCS data, courseware and software], which has given way to the [http://www.xsede.org/gateways-listing UCI Complex Social Science Gateway] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140306062219/https://www.xsede.org/gateways-listing |date=2014-03-06 }} that hosts Anthropology's [http://intersci.ss.uci.edu Ethnographics of the Lives of World Peoples] along with software used in solving Galton's problem of autocorrelation [http://SocSciCompute.ss.uci.edu for analysis of observational data],{{cite web|url=http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/DEf|title=DEf|access-date=2 February 2016}} and for research on:
• Longitudinal historical evolution and field studies of human groups, larger societies, and city systems[http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Realistic_modeling_of_complex_interactive_systems Realistic modeling of complex interactive systems]
• Mathematical modeling of social, economic, and historical dynamics, as well as statistical entailment analysis, Galton's problem, the Natchez Paradox,{{Cite web |url=http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pub/NatchezPeople.pdf |title=the Natchez Paradox |access-date=2007-06-05 |archive-date=2008-06-26 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080626001318/http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pub/NatchezPeople.pdf |url-status=dead }} Structural endogamy and network simulation, regular equivalence, flow centrality, and structural cohesion,
• Social networks, including, more specifically, the network realism{{Cite web |url=http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/NetworkRealism.htm |title=network realism |access-date=2006-07-27 |archive-date=2007-05-03 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070503074509/http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/NetworkRealism.htm |url-status=dead }} paradigm,
• Social complexity and complex-network system dynamics.
• Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
• System dynamics Studies of world system dynamics and urban studies, including his current studies of urban dynamics over the last millennium,

A reaction to his latest book, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems, by one reviewer, was that this "could be the most important book in anthropology in fifty years." His work on implications of feedback and feedforward processes, published in Physical Review in collaboration with the founder of nonextensive physics, a founder of chaos theory, and two young computer scientists, provides one of the foundational network simulations for understanding complex networks.

White's [http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Main page] hosts a public server, that if used externally at http://SocSciCompute.ss.uci.edu, offers ethnographic data, variables and tools for inference with R scripts by Dow (2007) and Eff and Dow (2009) in an NSF supported Galaxy (http://getgalaxy.org) framework (https://www.xsede.org) for instructors, students and researchers to do cross-cultural research modeling with controls for Galton's problem using Standard Cross-Cultural Sample variables at https://web.archive.org/web/20160402201432/https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9256203/SCCScodebook.txt.

White authored or coauthored 5 books and over 100 articles, and edited 3 books and 2 special journal issues dealing with his research interests.

• 1972, The Anthropology of Urban Environments. with Thomas Weaver. Society for Applied Anthropology, Monograph Series.
• 1975, Tuaraiscail: Report of the Committee on Language Attitudes Research Regarding Irish. 5 volumes. with Lilyan A. Brudner. Dublin: Government Printing Office.
• 1991, Research Methods in Social Network Analysis. with Linton C. Freeman and A. Kimball Romney. Transaction Publishers.
• 1998, Kinship, Networks, and Exchange : Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences, with Thomas Schweizer. Cambridge University Press.
• 2004, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan (with Ulla Johansen and [http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/turks/Fwd.pdf Foreword][http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/turks/Networks_and_Ethnography.htm Foreword, by Andrey Korotayev, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan] by Andrey Korotayev). Lexington Press.

{{reflist}}

• [http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/drwhite/ Homepage]
• [http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pw/Polygyny.htm Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: Polygyny page]
• [http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pw/SexualDivision_ofLabor.htm Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: Sexual Division of Labor page]
• [http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/ Structure and Dynamics eJournal (General editor)]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20060211003825/http://worldcultures.org/ World Cultures eJournal (Founder and past Editor)]
• [http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Douglas_R._White Complexity Sciences wiki (Founder and sysop)]

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:White, Douglas R}}

Category:1942 births

Category:2021 deaths

Category:American anthropologists

Category:American sociologists

Category:Complex systems scientists

Category:Cross-cultural studies

Category:University of Michigan alumni

Category:University of Minnesota alumni

Category:Columbia University alumni

Category:University of Pittsburgh faculty

Category:Social anthropologists

Category:World system scholars

Category:Neoevolutionists

Category:University of California, Irvine faculty

Category:American network scientists

Category:People from Minneapolis