May 5th, 2008 | Other Stuff | 4 Comments
Edit: Be sure to read Krishna Kumar’s take on blogging, work and creativity.
Oh my, I didn’t manage to write a single post in the whole of April.
While blogging fatigue seems to be a widespread phenomenon, it’s a particularly soft spot when your research is largely about blogging and you are in the process of organizing a panel at an international conference concerned chiefly with personal Web publishing technologies and how they are changing how we talk about science - among other things.
But, as always, time is the essence. I’m starting to wonder what on Earth I was doing a year ago that allowed me to blog so much (or rather: what I was not doing). Perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it though. Yes, blogging takes a lot of time, but it very much depends on how you approach it. Maybe I’ve been a little too concerned with saying it all, i.e. with restricting myself to the planned, substantial and structured writing that we are accustomed to in other contexts . Blogging isn’t always like that and I believe that that’s a good thing. The minimal audience for a blog, as I love to repeat incessantly, is its author. In other words, a blog can be useful as a tool to systematically structure your thoughts - nothing more, nothing less. Forgetting about readership and self-reflexivity (i.e. thinking What is this good for? What goal am I trying to achieve?) can be exactly the right kind of self-motivating strategy. Don’t get me wrong - blogging with a purpose is great. But the luxury of having no specific purpose in mind can be a good thing sometimes, especially when you’re starting to feel that blog writing is actually a burden, a chore that you have to take care of. Obviously, when you’re writing for an institution or in a professional context you are well-advised to think of your readers. But if you’re not enjoying what you do it’s bound to show sooner or later and it seems that with blogging, much of the pleasure that people draw from the activity is a direct result of its unfocusedness - a sort of ‘my blog is my castle’-attitude in communicative terms.
A friend once told me she preferred the original way of blogging: “rambling incoherently to yourself on the street”. Blogging doesn’t have to be quite that bad, but sometimes it helps to ramble just a bit.
Oct 9th, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Other Stuff | 3 Comments
Being a researcher naturally involves dealing with complicated topics that are often hard to explain to the uninitiated. Understanding how the human brain functions, what the difference between synthetic and analytic languages is or what role landscape plays in the novels of Don DeLillo all requires some prior knowledge about those subjects. Without that knowledge, you may not have the least idea what a teacher or instructor is talking about.
But sometimes it all sounds like babble, even to those familiar with the terminology and the right theoretical background. Maybe you’re tired or distracted, maybe the writer is being vague, or perhaps the presenter is just not very skilled at presenting.
What you then get is best described by this paper and this presentation by computer scientist Doug Zonker.
The interesting part is: to non-academics it is silly to the point of idiocy, whereas I had to make a conscious effort to not fall from my office chair because I was laughing so hard. Subverting conventions is funny, but only if you know them well enough to recognize the parody.
If you find Zonker amusing, be sure to read this as well.
Jul 21st, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff, Visualization, Web 2.0 | No Comments
It’s amazing what kind of great data visualizations you can create with IBM’s web statistics tool Many Eyes (I’ve used it before). The Many Eyes team has recently added a simple concordancing function so that you can see in what context a given word is used. People doing literary studies can do some interesting things with such a tool, as this word cloud from the ME site demonstrates.
While I was already at it, I decided to create a word cloud for HuffingtonPost.com using 2175 entries made in the last six months. You get a fairly clear idea of the topics that were central in that time by looking at the cloud. In case you were wondering - the terms appear so large because I used the top 50 words with their individual frequencies instead of a raw text.
Jul 4th, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff, Robert Scoble, Technology, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments
Robert Scoble likes Google better than Microsoft (but not much) - and I have proof for that. He also holds his wife Maryam dearer than his company PodTech, but sadly she is outranked by Twitter and Apple. Ah, cruel World 2.0 capitalism.
How do I know? Simple, I have a list of 1,587 posts with 273,994 running words of text that Mr. Scoble has produced between 2 Aug 2006 and 4 Jul 2007. That translates into 18,362 sentences. An average Scoble blog entry has a length of 172.6 words, with 14.9 words per sentence and an average word length of 3.8; all of which is fairly - deep breath - average for a blog.
All, except for the word count. It’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider that he’s been at it for almost 6 years (I believe he started in October 2001 - correct me if I’m wrong). That’s 69 months of blogging, which translates into an estimated staggering 1,65 million words. That would make him twice as productive as William Shakespeare, who (only) managed 884,647 words in his entire lifetime, though in all fairness it has to be noted that Mr. Scoble didn’t have to write all that with a quill pen.
And here are his favorite nouns, by frequency (the number after the word indicates how often in occurs).
1 Google 1015
2 blog 779
3 Microsoft 776
4 people 688
5 video 503
6 stuff 393
7 things 365
8 something 357
9 way 354
10 Web 343
11 lot 322
12 today 320
13 time 301
14 thing 290
15 link 280
16 Apple 267
17 week 259
18 Search 258
19 world 256
20 post 245
21 videos 229
22 bloggers 220
23 interview 217
24 Twitter 215
25 blogs 213
26 company 206
27 one 199
28 Maryam 199
29 update 197
30 day 195
31 fun 193
32 someone 192
33 news 190
34 team 185
35 companies 178
36 lots 177
37 iPhone 175
38 service 172
39 Steve 171
40 show 171
41 site 170
42 TechMeme 169
43 business 165
44 phone 160
45 Windows 159
46 conference 158
47 year 158
48 PodTech 153
49 minutes 153
50 developers 151
Jul 1st, 2007 | Academic Publishing, Blogosphere, Opinion, Other Stuff, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments
After reading a number of interesting comments in the course of the last few days, I thought it would make sense to follow up on danah boyd’s blog essay concerning socioeconomic status and social networking sites with a second post (read the first one here). As with my previous piece, I’m especially interested in the reception and in how boyd herself is reacting to the (shoddy) journalism of the BBC and others.
Last week, boyd posted this on the heels of her essay:
Dear esteemed members of the press,
I am in the field collecting data and then will be attending a conference. I am not able to respond right now. Do not call my house phone. Do not pester my department. And do *NOT* hound my subletter. All press inquiries should be sent to press [at] danah.org. When I can, I respond. When I can’t, I don’t. Do not use other email addresses - I check the press one from my phone and answer them in order when I have spare cycles. Other requests are typically ignored.
The BBC coverage of my blog essay is hugely problematic. If you want to discuss what I’ve written, please read the essay itself. This is not a formal report. This is a blog essay based on observations from the field. And this is not a 6-month study; it is a 4-year study with a tide shift that I’ve noticed in the last 6 months. Again, read the essay. At some point, I will turn this into a formal article, but this is not that. Cover it as you see fit, but do not call it a report.
Thank you,
THE MANAGEMENT
(emphasis mine)
From the viewpoint of anyone who has ever done genre studies, this is a pretty interesting text. Obviously the genre categories boyd uses - blog essay, formal report, study, formal article and report - are important. boyd essentially claims that the semantics of these terms place them in distinct distance from one another. In other words, the fact that a) her blog essay is in fact a blog essay (and not a report, study, article etc) and b) the knowledge of what a blog essay is should both have been available to the BBC’s reporters and their failure to use the correct terminology to describe her piece suggests incompetence or even a willful misrepresentation. They are calling it a study although it isn’t, because they don’t understand how ethnographic research works.
And of course this is perfectly true. All the labels used by the mass media to describe Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace are their invention -nowhere does boyd use the terms report or study.
Some of the comments I’ve read capture the problem quite well. Says Marianne Richmond:
I think perhaps that the fallout of Danah’s blog essay is a case study in new media participation and consumption in and of it self: Her observations were interpreted, misinterpreted and remixed within the context of academic research that is more typical of the author…even though the standards of academic research were specifically stated by the author as not applicable.
The last statement is actually incorrect. boyd made the explicit statement that the piece was not an academic article after the initial posting. This short paragraph originally preceded the text, followed by the essay proper.
I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.
The paragraph following it - what could be called the ‘disclaimer for academic readers’ - was added retroactively:
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
boyd also later edited the blog post announcing the piece. Sadly, I have no way of retrieving the original text to check what changes were made, but it seems she highlighted the word essay multiple times to emphasize the status of the publication as something other than an article/study/report etc. Of course, she also made no claim going into the other direction. When using a descriptive label for her piece, she consistently calls it a blog essay or essay. As I’ve noted before, the semantics of the compound term blog essay are bound to be unclear to her readers, as she is one of very few people who use this phrase at all.
That being said, I fully agree to Marianne’s observation. In the media ecosystem we live in today, an author constantly risks losing control of her text and it being recontextualized by others in meaning-changing ways that cannot be predicted. Such recontextualizations can be deliberately misleading or the result of a misunderstanding. It’s often a thin line.
In this vein, Elaine Young sides with boyd and notes the inaccurate reporting:
You go girl! Fancy that. Asking the media to READ something before they report on it. But … there is no guarantee that they will full comprehend what they are reading and there in lies the challenge in posting “information” that is somewhat controversial on the web in an open forum.
The way “information” is put in quotes here is interesting to me, as it seems also to point once more to the unclear status of the piece and a lack of clarity regarding boyd’s investigative methodology. Note that I’m not saying that her methodology is in any way unsound. It’s a perfectly well-established practice in a range of disciplines that produces highly valuable results. I am saying that Young’s way of phrasing it suggests that she is not clear about the kind of evidence that ethnographic methods produce (is it information or just “information”?).
This blog gives a very good summary of the sequence of events:
Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd, has the web astir after she posted an informal essay on her blog about the class divisions associated with the popular social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd, who is already among the most prominent of academics of the Internet’s social sphere, posted the essay on Sunday. On Monday morning, the BBC reported on Boyd’s “conclusions”, and by midday Monday, nearly 100,000 readers had flocked to Boyd’s original entry. Though many have written in support of the essay, others have taken major offense, calling the work “racist” and academically unsound. Boyd sees the negativity towards her essay as a product of its misrepresentation in the press–specifically in the BBC’s “hugely problematic” coverage of her essay–which she says referred to the essay as a final product of academic research, rather than the exploratory mid-process musing it was meant to be.
Kevin P comments over at Tuttle SVC:
I’m not sure. I can’t decide if we should blame danah for not being *more* clear it was not research or the media for not being *more* clear that it was not research.
Certainly she’s getting flamed, and boy is she getting known.
The topic is being discussed like crazy.
Blogs are confusing with standards and danah is firmly on the crack, but I think it’s put her out as a leader.
Would her problem have been solved if she had moderated comments like you do and just taken out the really nasty ones?
It’s interesting to conclude that the essay is “not research” (which is again not phrased that way by boyd). If it were not research, or based on research, the idea that there is a socioeconomic split between Facebook and MySpace users would merely be an opinion. Instead, it is supported by research data - just not by data of the right kind, in my view. Whereas a large volume of quantitative data could answer the question of the Facebook and MySpace user communities’ makeup with relative precision, the qualitative data that has been used cannot. That does not mean that the assumption isn’t true, it just means it can’t be validated.
This post also caught my attention:
Ms. boyd is a quite accomplished scholar of social systems and her thoughts tend to carry a fair amount of weight. She’s an acknowledged expert in a given field, yet as an academic, she has two different “modes” of presenting her thoughts. One is very formal, involving calculated and well researched statements reflecting research and study and highlighting correlation and conclusion. In other words, your typical research paper.
The other is the equivalent of sitting at a coffee shop for an hour.
The funny thing is that it’s often those latter statements that seem to have the highest likelihood of spreading like an Atlanta lawyer on a transcontinental flight.
Kent and i got into a quick discussion about this and i think he touched on something kinda key. He noted that it won’t be long before academics realize that they don’t necessarily need the structure and peer review that they previously always had. They can be more open and have greater impact without it. i disagreed, since i know that often that peer review system exists for a good reason and a lot of folks actually like it since it helps them refine and defend their assertions instead of just shouting them into the void.
Peer review is regarded by many as a guarantee of scientific integrity, yet to others it means elitism and expert-worship. I agree with the author though - without peer review, the scientific process can turn into a popularity contest. What can be proven often isn’t what’s generally believed, what is plausible or popular.
Ken Cousins of Augmentation is impressed by the potential of blogs as a publishing platform for academics:
Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.
Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.
The awareness that you can communicate with an enormous number of readers almost effortlessly via your blog has still not reached the majority of academics, who are used to thinking in very tightly knit groups and don’t really consider the importance of addressing a wider audience. I’d be very surprised if the majority of researchers in the humanities and social sciences isn’t blogging 10 years from now. Why? Because I think these areas have suffered from a lack of knowledge about what they do and how, on the part of the majority of the population.
Finally, I want to quote a full post by Michael Clarke on the topic that I found very insightful.
The reaction to Danah’s essay in the newspapers suggests that mainstream media are still very fond of privileging expert, authoritative discourse - when it suits them (i.e. when it gives an opportunity to discuss/reinforce class divisions, say “Oooh, it’s bad this Noo Medjaa stuff, isn’t it?” and so on…). Three days previously, Weinberger and Keen were debating the “…value of authority in a connected world…” and it’s fascinating how much of the attention given to Danah’s post accrued from her status as an academic (and how much hatred that this seems to have generated on the comments on her most recent post).
This is in line with studies such as the Edelman Trust Barometer (see slide #22). Academics are still generally trusted as credible, though a democratization of trust is taking place (”someone like myself” is now considered the most trustworthy source of information in many areas).
One might argue that perceived “expertise” has always been related to demagoguery both benign and sinister (Gina Ford of Contented Little Baby, Scoble, Hitler, Alain de Botton, Ghandi…) - social media just democratises people’s access to becoming a demagogue (lowers the entry requirements).
I find that observation both keen and very amusing, though I don’t think Robert Scoble deserves being mentioned along with mass-murderous dictators.
Perhaps “experts” then, in a constructed sense, are still very much with us but social media renders them more open to challenge than ever before. The Danah cited in a slightly sloppy piece by the BBC is thoroughly mediated by their take on her work but it’s one click away from her blog. On her blog, she’s speaking for herself - and people can answer back.
No doubt the openness of the social media is a good thing, but the diversity of opinions and the lack of accountability also make it hard to figure out whom to believe. That isn’t a catastrophe, but the market for things which are simply untrue (but nicely serve to compound our stereotypes) is definitely there.
Any conclusions? Expertise is accountable on Web 2.0. And perhaps more useful as a result of this, as any socially mediated means of distribution makes the consumer of expertise equally accountable for the uses they put it to. Well, that’s my optimistic take on it, anyway…
Expertise is only truly accountable if you have it yourself. In other words, I have to be physicist to understand an advanced physics problem, social web or no social web. If I don’t, my only alternative is to trust someone who knows more about this stuff than I do. Believing what the majority finds plausible can be a dead end. That doesn’t mean that the social web is not a boon for academics, but since earning and keeping trust is vital to what we do, we should make sure we do our job well.
The initial lack of clarity regarding the genre-status of the piece is what caused all this fuss. While it would be nice if journalists and the general public knew more about different forms of academic writing, I believe that danah boyd intended the piece to be both more than just a blog entry and less than a real research paper - and therein lies the problem. I don’t think you can have it both ways and make it authoritative for those who believe and “just an essay” for those who don’t, which is what this looks like.
May 8th, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff | 2 Comments
While it’s rather random and exceedingly tricky, the question of the following text snippet’s origin popped into my head this morning. It was attached to an email sent to me by a friend who works in the public sector.
RAAUE: S’preevaadjagh yn çhaghteraght post-l shoh chammah’s coadanyn erbee currit marish as ta shoh coadit ec y leigh. Cha nhegin diu coipal ny cur eh da peiagh erbee elley ny ymmydey yn chooid t’ayn er aght erbee dyn kied leayr veih’n choyrtagh. Mannagh nee shiu yn enmyssagh kiarit jeh’n phost-l shoh, doll-shiu magh eh, my sailliu, as cur-shiu fys da’n choyrtagh cha leah as oddys shiu.
Cha nel kied currit da failleydagh ny jantagh erbee conaant y yannoo rish peiagh ny possan erbee lesh post-l ass-lieh Rheynn ny Boayrd Slattyssagh erbee jeh Reiltys Ellan Vannin dyn co-niartaghey scruit leayr veih Reireyder y Rheynn ny Boayrd Slattyssagh t’eh bentyn rish.
Can you guess where she is from?
Apr 18th, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff | 1 Comment
Wow, my timing has really been off recently. Only a month late, I realize Heather Hamilton had a linguistically interesting post up in March. I feel a little bad for always picking up Heather’s stuff, but the simple reason for that is that her blog is one of relatively few business blogs I really enjoy reading. The post that caught my eye isn’t exactly a “serious” one, but there’s still more to it than you might think at first glance.
Dear Bloggers and friends,
I’m so sorry I haven’t blogged since week before last (time frame). I have been incredibly (adverb) busy (adjective). And my inbox (noun) has been overflowing (adjective). I have some blog posts in mind and hope to get them up soon (lie).
What Heather did with her little text is called part-of-speech tagging and it a common technique in computational linguistics - automated part-of-speech tagging, to be precise. I ran Heather’s text through TreeTagger, which I also use for my corpus project, together with this very nifty Flash-based interface developed by my colleague Thomas Koller. Here’s the result:
I PP I
‘m VBP be
so RB so
sorry JJ sorry
I PP I
have VHP have
n’t RB n’t
blogged VVN <unknown>
since IN since
week NN week
before IN before
last JJ last
. SENT .
I PP I
have VHP have
been VBN be
incredibly RB incredibly
busy JJ busy
. SENT .
And CC and
my PP$ my
inbox NN <unknown>
has VHZ have
been VBN be
overflowing VVG overflow
. SENT .
I PP I
have VHP have
some DT some
blog NN <unknown>
posts NNS post
in IN in
mind NN mind
and CC and
hope VVP hope
to TO to
get VV get
them PP them
up RP up
soon RB soon
. SENT .
It might look a little cryptic at first, but if you have an idea what the abbreviations stand for the meaning becomes pretty clear.
I (word) / personal pronoun (word class) / I (base form)
‘m (word) / the verb BE, present tense (word class) / be (base form)
so (word) / adverb (word class) / so (base form)
…
What’s neat about modern taggers such as TreeTagger is that they are able to deal with words they haven’t encountered before. The words blog, blogged and inbox are all unknown to TreeTagger, but the program still “gets” that they are two forms of a verb and a noun, respectively. This may not get us any closer to making machines understand human language, but it is pretty useful nonetheless. TreeTagger has chewed through well over 20.000 blog entries in my corpus database and it has encountered more than just a few odd words on the way, most of which it identified correctly.
Here are a few of my personal obscure favorites:
blog-fueled
jumpstarted
road-raged
Delusionville
nonsteroidals
Vegetopians
ululations
…and my personal favorite: unavialable. While that is exceedingly likely to just be a misspelling of unavailable, it could also mean “something that can’t be brought to fly”.
Hmm, or maybe not.
Feb 21st, 2007 | Other Stuff | 3 Comments
Just wanted to note that I haven’t blogged lately because I’ve caught an annoying (and fairly persistant) cold over the weekend. No coincidence that it happened now either. As a few of you might know, I live in Duesseldorf, Germany, in the heart of the Rhineland and it was carnival last weekend, which means much time was spent outdoors wading through huge crowds of people. That, and the imbibed alcoholic beverages made me misjudge the temperature. And perhaps the lovely tradition of bützen (try guessing what that is if you’re not a native of Cologne) played its part too.
Anyway, I’ll report back when I’m virus-free again.
Jan 25th, 2007 | Opinion, Other Stuff | No Comments
I apologize for interrupting the regular scheduled program for a brief rant.
Since being a researcher mostly means burning taxpayer dollars, it is widely understood and accepted in the scientific community that we need to explain to the public what on earth we’re actually doing and why any of it matters once in a while. Personally, I enjoy this very much - so much, in fact, that I tell people without having been asked. Blogging is obviously one of the best ways of talking to virtually any interested individual on the planet about your work, and I think that is partly because it attracts people who otherwise wouldn’t go through the arduous process of finding a paper publication, buying it, and then contending with an unwieldy format and inaccessible jargon that only the anointed are able to understand.
In other words, talking about your research on the web is a great idea, because all sorts of people who are not members of a tightly knit in-group might listen and contribute with their perspectives. Or, if you’re some kind of grant agency that supports scholars, having a blog to talk to your clients might be a really good idea.
Which is why the website of KoWi, the office for the coordination of scientific institutions in the EU (my rough and dirty translation) frustrates me so much. They state their mission as follows:
Via email, phone, in the KoWi offices in Bonn and Brussels or at your institution KoWi gives advice regarding proposal-writing and project management. Particularly, this is valid for the European Research Council (ERC) as well as the funding of young scientists and European and international consortia in collaborative research (quote)
Being both a young scientist and a citizen of the EU, I strongly support this goal. The trouble is: the advice and information KoWi provides appears on the front page in the form of anonymously posted news bits. Not only do I have absolutely no idea who writes this stuff (and therefor little reason to find any of it relevant), but it also seems to exist independently of their AiD newsletter (which they’ve been publishing for an impressive 13 years). The disconnect between the news on the web site and the newsletter is just a minor issue though - the newsletter itself is where it really gets weird.
Instead of simply containing news items in the message body, each email issue instead consists of a table of contents. For each item in this table a PDF attachment is included, even if the news piece is a mere three or four sentences long. But that’s not all. In a recent issue, only two of four newsletter items were actually attached to the email as PDF docs. Why? Because, as the disclaimer tells me, “you only receive those items which match your profile” - that is, a list of interest areas that you have to specify when signing up for AiD. Of course I was interested in one of the items that wasn’t attached and wondered how I’d be able to get it. They don’t provide a link or anything else that would be, you know, useful. In the end I had to google their web site to find what I was looking for. To summarize: they’re using email for something that could be realized much more effectively through a blog, they apparently don’t know what RSS is and they’re making it unnecessarily difficult for me to find what I’m looking for. Oh yeah – and I have no clue who they actually are and what precisely they do, which is something a blog could tell me.
The closing irony of it all is that the news item I wanted to read was about communicating the results of your research to the general public (for example via the Internet!). They apparently had a conference on the subject. Now, a bit more than a year later they’ve published the proceedings.
As a book.
