Two years ago, we initiated a multiyear project as part the Weatherhead Initiative to investigate ways of making the study of identity in the social sciences more rigorous. If one were to treat identity as a variable—as is increasingly the case in the social sciences—how would one do this? What definitions make sense? What methods could be used or developed to extract information about identity? What methods might be especially appropriate for large-scale comparative historical and/or textual analysis of identity? These have been some of the questions motivating our project. The purpose of the conference is to bring together scholars who work with identity as a variable and who bring special methodological skills to their analysis. We hope to produce a conference volume aimed at graduate students and faculty that will provide a series of applied chapters where the authors not only provide empirical tests that employ a methodological innovation, but are also very concrete about the nuts and bolts of this application and about its advantages and disadvantages. We intend to have chapters covering everything from discourse analysis to quantitative content analysis to surveys to cognitive mapping to experiments.