1 Measuring Economic Globalization: Exploring methods to

This paper is the first in a series of papers centered on an empirical exploration of globalization processes. We seek to understand globalization processes through a structural exploration of changing global transactions of multiple types, beginning with international trade. We believe exploring the structure of multiple transactions over time can provide us with insights into the role and position of multiple entities (states and non-state actors), how these are impacted by globalization processes, and what mechanisms are involved in large scale structural changes. The current study compares three different methodological approaches to world trade analysis — a network based data mining program, social network analysis, and a model we describe as a geometric representation, combining aspects of log-linear analysis with multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis. We examine and compare changes in the structure of world trade at three time points: 1980, 1990, and 2001. We focus on evaluating methodological approaches that can be used to explore the structure of global trade. In future papers, we will be testing hypotheses derived from world systems theory and competing theories o