For W 11/15
I'll show you a case of MDS using data that are inherently distances using some analysis I did a few years ago. I was developing a strategy for investigating mass media (usually newspaper coverage) using conceptual network analysis and quantitative tools. The analysis including MDS and social network modeling. I developed the initial idea in my dissertation research, having done all of the content coding by hand. I then wrote a program to do the coding and then developed R scripts to compute the results. I'll show you those scripts.
One of the papers that came from this line of research was a report of a study of anti-slavery newspapers in New York State.
http://www.shortell.nyc/online/files/Shortell_SSH2004.pdf
I'll collect all of the scripts into a single page and post it here and I'll show you the code that you can use to compute MDS on one of the other data files from the study.