Codification/Reduction of Data

I wrote my Peer Review on the McMillan “Soap Box” article. My primary criticism of the research centered around McMillan's coding or “reduction” of data. All I ended up seeing was the seeming arbitrariness of interviewee categories into a neat (but incredibly vague and questionable) table. McMillan didn't seem to consider that the interviewees might use a variety of media outlets on a day-to-day basis. Personally, I find it difficult to define “media,” and tend to use a variety of different sources. McMillan also didn't seem to consider researcher bias (Luker's “fish problem”) or alternate viewpoints. Some of the categories consisted of only one interviewee, which led me to think that a much larger interviewee base (or quantitative methods) might have helped. I really didn't think that this kind of “redundancy” can be claimed after 18 interviews.

Because of the Soap Box article, I was re-considering incorporating a mixed method approach in my research design. However, I was brought back to Earth after reading Knight, who points out that drawbacks of cost and faulty judgments are involved with quantitative research. I would tend to agree with his advice, “The temptation to exploit the potential of numbers needs to be resisted unless the data really are of the right sorts” (p.177).

-Martin

Census and Research

Recently, I had to do a debate which concerned the Long Form Census – and whether it should be cancelled or not. That exposed me to this singular method and authority of collecting data from a large number of the population. It also brought forth the fact that an equally immense number of organizations are dependent on that data for their research work as well as the fact that the information collected through the census is subjected to considerable and continuous analysis.

The Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN) in its website states that since 2000, it has been in partnership with Statistics Canada to “transform quantitative social science research in Canada”. Researchers analyze the census data to enhance their understanding of the Canadian society. The census functions as the primary source of information about the population of Canada. It is in fact a benchmark against which all other data are measured and evaluated. It provides knowledge about language, education, income, housing, geographic mobility, ethnicity and so on. It is widely used by policy makers, city planners to businesses and marketing researchers and NGOs. Even though it does have issues regarding privacy, it is also true that it provides us researchers with an unimaginable treasure trove to dig into.

Immersed in literature

Hine's (2004) examination of Internet ethnography, just like Wheeler (2010) and Miller and Slater (2000), among many others, conceptualizes the Internet as a 'place', a 'network' or a 'community'. One thus studies a part of the Internet just as one would study a village, a grassroots association or a practice - by examining the people linked to them and the relationships between them.

However, discussing my thesis proposal with Professor Grimes today, it hit me that not all parts of the Internet are conducive to this type of study. In fact, some parts of the Internet would better be qualified as 'technologies' or even 'artifacts' than 'places'. This applies to my chosen area of study, the US Government's geographic information system. While an ethnographic lens, particularly the one described by Star (1999), may be useful in examining the politics and of the GIS, Pinch and Bijker's (1984) social construction of technology framework/method might provide the right bridge between relationships and technology.

In this line of thought, at the DIY Citizenship conference at the University of Toronto this weekend, Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab talked about the methods that his team used to study cyber attacks on the Office of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. Deibert discussed what he termed 'fusion methodology' which consists of field methods (participant observation + focused interviews) and technical interrogation (in-depth analysis of the technologies in play). This gives equal value to the social interactions and the technology itself, differing from Star's method which examines technology only as a small part of the ethnographic study.

The final report, entitled Shadows in the Cloud and produced by the Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation, provides an interesting description of the mixed method - definitely worth considering for those approaching their research through science and technology studies.

Oh my Facebook

I'm using an article entitled “The Librarian as Video Game Player” (Kirriemuir, 2006) for an INF1300 Annotated Bibliography project, and I thought it brought up an interesting argument. Kirriemuir states that gamers are typically capable of multi-tasking, of using sophisticated information-locating resources (online and offline), of installing hardware, and of using social networking tools effectively (all of which happen to be fairly relevant skills in a library). I narcissistically like to think that I possess many of these strengths, save one.

Yes, in a futile effort to recover my humanity, I have deleted my Facebook account. I hope I don't come across here as someone who thinks he is “above” social networking sites, but part of it had to do with the way people whip out their smartphones in the middle of social gatherings. Another part of it had to do with the fact that I don't actually care how well my friends are doing in Farmville. The list goes on but I'm pretty certain I'll have to reactivate at some point, for some reason or another. It's simply too ingrained in our culture.

I thought this topic was quite relevant to the Orgad article, since the blurring of lines between online and offline lately seem fairly substantial. I would agree that the Internet is an extension of people's lives, and that studying online/offline in conjunction could yield valuable insights, depending on the research question.

-Martin

Detecting spam in Twitter Network

Now a days Twitter has become one of the biggest social networking sites around. Twitter has some useful features which make it especially helpful for research on almost any topic under the sun. This is because Twitter pages are viewable to anyone, even those without accounts, and the site has a search function which pulls in all recent posts dealing with a given topic or phrase. Twitter is a micro blogging service where users can post 140 character messages called tweets. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Twitter is directed, meaning that a user can follow another user, but the second user is not required to follow back. Most accounts are public and can be followed without requiring the owner’s approval. With this structure, spammers can easily follow legitimate users as well as other spammers.

As online social networking sites become more and more popular, they have also attracted the attentions of the spammers. In the article of First Monday, “detecting spam in twitter network” by Yardi and others, they mentioned that Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, is studied as an example of spam bots detection in online social networking sites. A machine learning approach is proposed to distinguish the spam bots from normal ones. To facilitate the spam bots detection, three graph-based features, such as the number of friends and the number of followers, are extracted to explore the unique follower and friend relationships among users on Twitter.

Unfortunately, spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter as other online social network sites. Spammers use Twitter as a tool to post multiple duplicate updates containing malicious links, abuse the reply function to post unsolicited messages to users, and hijack trending topics.

Network( -ed / -ing)

Though there is no novelty in thinking of cultural complexity, this week’s readings has underscored its awe through discussions around the formation of research methods on the Internet. The same metaphor kept popping up for me, and even explicitly stated a number of times: that of the network. 

Through Hine’s ethnographic analysis (as studying phenomena requires a point of origin and a definition of perimeter) to Orgad’s online/offline discussion (to which these difference data should “mutually contextualize themselves” [pg 48]), the readings presented phenomenons as a blurred interconnected array of factors that any research method must be conscious of. 

I am a little intrigued about the network metaphor doubling in both the Internet’s architecture and this theoretical understanding of the world (I doubt if its done tounge-in-cheek, though I don’t think it’s completely haphazard). Regardless, the metaphor serves as a valuable insight to both the Internet and ethnography broadly. I was reminded of a recent lecture (image below) about the increasing intention of web design to tap into this network idea, where offline/online behaviours are so connected it becomes blurred (think Foursquare, NikeRun, and continuing experiments of networked objects and cities). While canonical methods approach the Internet as an artifact, web designers are attempting to evolve the Internet as culture; in the meantime, researchers, like us, are attemping to adapt to both.

Dark Days

Last night my partner and I watched the Marc Singer documentary "Dark Days". The name of this film had been stuck in my head since Prof. Grimes had mentioned it in a class long, long ago, in October sometime. I know that this weeks readings focus on online research, which has absolutely nothing to do with this film, but they also discuss ethnography, boundaries and the fact that field sites do not exist in a vacuum.

This film is not a pure ethnographic study and Singer is not an ethnographer, neither claim to be so. But Singer fully immerses himself into a marginalized culture and is able to record his experience. He filmed bits of the lives and thoughts of a group of people that lived in a section of the New York city underground railway system. They built their own homes out of what they could find and had free electricity, but lived mostly in the dark.

These underground dwellings were Singer's main field site, he didn't stray from there much except to occasionally follow his subjects while they looked for food or tried to make money above ground. This culture was so small and unique, and Singer's access so complete and rare that I don't think he had any issues with defining where this project started and stopped. I suppose he could have expanded it to tackle issues like New York's crack problem, or effects of living underground, but he didn't.

Singer was specific in recording only these people (and later on some authorities). He chose to focus on their relationships, their back stories and sometimes their aspirations. He also took a personal interest in their well-being. Singer played a large role in finding a lot of the people actual housing. I suppose this could potentially be seen as similar to action research. Singer wanted to make a change for these people and by researching them and making outsiders aware of their plight, he was able to make a real difference.

Again, I repeat that Marc Singer is not an ethnographer nor claims to be one. But, this documentary really did show his immersion into a completely alien culture, a very bounded and precise culture. He was so immersed that he was able to entirely change the culture forever.

A Strategic Use of Methodology

My weekly post has been delayed because I really wanted to talk about the peer-review process and feared the dangers of posting too early. Alas, its been a few days so I’m considering safe to discuss it.

My peer-review was the examination of Facebook as a platform for political debate. One of the first things I did was follow the references the paper gave (majority linked to the field of CMC, computer-mediated communication) and sat down with a couple of books on the subject. It was, in sum, a gravely outdated theory from the 90s — the central claim was that all Internet communication are a series of rude childish insults. They begin to theorize about the importance of social cues in civility, and creating models about ranking the communication mediums by how much of the physical person they present: the Internet, lacking visual or audio persona, somehow psychologically triggers our inner animal, as it unleashes us from the perceived social pressure of civility.

The bulk of this academic field has grown with this (biased) perception. The particular research study that was up for review, however, approached this was a purely strategic method: take a unit of the Internet, and count how many posts are civil and uncivil. Lo and behold, the majority of them were completely civil! Its a rather simple procedure, but its power rests in quantitatively debunking the theoretical work of CMC. To put it in a different way, the study played by the academic rules and still able to beat the academy at their own game.

That last sentence wasn’t meant to turn out as negative as it did, but it brings me into an overarching point: researching with the academic discourse and researching against it. That is, I think to a point, what peer-review taps into: how well does it fit with the academic body of work happening? While you can adopt it or challenge it, there is an expectation that you are working with it.

How important is it to have this relationship with the academic body (again, I’m considering dissent as a type of response)? Class discussions suggested ‘breaking free’ and just research whatever you find interesting is much more liberating, but I’m just worried that this privatized research is just a disguise of your working methods: your own perceptions, biases and are not explicitly formalized. To extend, challenge or adapt the scholarly work (with references and citations) at least allows the the reader the luxury of accessing this history.

Although, this fault works the other way, as working with the the academy is to adopt all of its biases (the Facebook study, though it challenged the civility argument adopted many other biases without hesitation; it is as if you can only challenge one idea at a time). 

I feel myself loosing track of this post, but it’s been just an area of tension that I’ve been trying to grapple with; the academy with all its embedded faults and limitations, provides the strength of context.

Peer Review

I guess I am too full of assignments right now. I was doing a peer review of the paper using ethnography and since ethnography makes use of pictures as well, I was inspired to use some images myself in this posting to depict what peer review is, instead of writing yet again. Hoping the pictures would serve more than a million words...

Bias in Research Methodology Design

This week's peer review made me realize just how complex research methodology can be, especially in terms of the design. Those in charge of the study have to make sure that their methodology tests everything they intend it to and that these tests are reliable. The problem is, every researcher approaches the study with a bias, and this can affect the results. It's one of those things that can't really be avoided, but it can sometimes be argued that a bias can be good for the study, as it might bring a new and unique perspective. However, sometimes the bias can completely distort a study because the researcher had something particular in mind and, subconsciously or not, designed the study towards that bias.
Biases are something that every researcher has to deal with, but it just becomes a question of how aware you are of your bias and whether the bias affects the research design in a negative way.

Public relations, funding and case studies

As I started reading Beaulieu et al's (2007) article, I was struck by their mention of the cultural and institutional context of case study use in science and technology studies and how this might link the research to multiple audiences. This made me think about the fact that case studies can provide an extremely powerful illustration of a more complex issue for a public outside of the research field.

While research popularization can contribute to general understanding of an issue, if the research is publicized adequately, it can also lead to increased funding, as grant-making institutions want to fund relevant research. I haven't examined this enough to be in the position to make a link between case studies and the funding that they receive, but my experience with the mock SSHRC proposal tells me that the clearer the link between research and a current social issue, the better the chances are that it will be funded. My work in public relations also has taught me that the more concrete and emotionally engaging a story, the more likely it is that it will be picked up by the media, and thus reach the public through traditional channels. Therefore, an engaging case study that can be covered by the media and insert the researcher into a societal debate will also receive financial support to do so. What's more, the funding agency might benefit from a little publicity as well.

Since I have diagrams on the brain (and I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation), I thought that I would illustrate my point with a little drawing. I think that this applies whether the research is in the social sciences, humanities or hard sciences. The 'generalization' ring is what links the case study to societal debate.

I then thought about how the diagram above might translate into a press release, and because I have a lot of time on my hands, I made a model of a press release that might get media attention by making the case study relevant to the public.

I'm not sure to what extent this reflects reality for researchers who have been funded, but I think that examining the politics of research methods and funding is a very interesting way to position the researcher within a broader societal context. Taking this into consideration is, in my opinion, a good way to make sure that our research can both happen and have an impact.

Science and technology

I found aspects of the article by Pinch and Bijker quite interesting this week. Written in 1987, its ideal for doing your own mental comparison study using contemporary thoughts. The part of the article that I became particularily engrossed with was their brief and admittedly partial discussion of the science-technology relationship. I feel like it could have been a contemporary piece. Nowadays, Science and Technology are still grouped together and people are still trying to define the distinction between the two, even though they are inextricably intermixed. Perhaps this is because technology has evolved at such an exponential rate. Pinch and Bijker dismiss some prominent philosopher thoughts that "science is about the discovery of truth whereas technology is about the application of truth" as overidealized and simplified. When I googled "what is the difference between science and technology" an answer that popped up alot was, "Science is knowing and technology is doing". One of the same prevailing thoughts as 23 years ago!
Pinch and Bijker take a social constructivist view of science and technology. "Scientists and technologists can be regarded as constructing their respective bodies of knowledge and techniques with each drawing on the resources of the other". All this time, well the last two months, I've been under the impression that the meshing of disciplines and blurring of classification lines was a new phenomenon. Obviously, it started long ago. The category of science and the category of technology are socially constructed, only now we have started to take down the barriers that we ourselves erected, or have we actually? Two decades later we are still wrestling with the same issues.

Peer Review Assignment

I have chosen the article for peer review is “Getting political on social network sites: exploring online political discourse on face book”. This article is about the social network site like Facebook for online political discussion. This article shows the impact of facebook in political discourse and this site give people a tool to interact online and extend their social lives beyond working hours. Of the many narratives exploring use and outcomes of social network websites, perhaps the most common explores the public sharing of personal identity information. Over the past four years, social network websites (SNS) have achieved strong market penetration with a wide range of participants. Sites such as Facebook.com are indicative of the phenomenal growth social network sites have seen in the past few years. The site was launched in 2004 and as of April, 2008 surpassed 70 million active. With the rapid popularization of social network sites, the potential for individuals to engage in online discussion about social and political issues has grown exponentially in a few short years. Due to the explosive growth of social network sites, scholars have little understanding of the nature of online political discourse as it is occurring in these new social spaces. This study explores how Facebook is serving as an arena for political debate among members. This research has shown that online political discussion does serve to expose participants to non likeminded partners. Yet, despite the potential of the Internet to bring opposing camps together in a common space and provide exposure to different ideas, some evidence suggests that this may not necessarily be occurring. I found this is very interesting subject in research.

-Meenaxi

Article hardships

I have to admit, I found this week's readings a little confusing and verbose. My brief summaries/interpretations of the first two readings are as follows:

Beauliu et al.: A research approach allows for debate and discussion, whereas work in a laboratory tends to constrict workers to their own tasks. A research approach can also be useful in examining elements of space, time and relationships. In studying the relationship between local and universal, it is helpful to draw comparisons across cases and disciplines.

Yin: Case studies do not necessarily entail a certain kind of evidence (such as “qualitative”) or a particular data collection method (such as ethnography or participant observation). The fundamental thing about case studies is that they attempt to examine a contemporary phenomenon in a real-life context. A number of techniques are effective in a case studies approach, such as focusing on a topic, noting meaningful events, and creating explanations for outcomes. Case studies yield more than single data points or single observations, so cross-case analysis should facilitate reflexivity.

Did I completely miss the point of the articles? It would be great if anyone could shed light on what the authors were trying to say!

-Martin

INF1300 Interview

I don't really plan to include the study of artifacts or literature review in my research design (although that could change), so I'm going to instead talk about my experience conducting an interview for the INF1300 that many of us are taking:

It didn't go quite as expected. Although I told my subject (who happens to be the most extroverted person in the world) that it was a one-on-one interview, she was visiting with two friends when I arrived. Since it was obvious that asking them to leave would have made the situation uncomfortable, I ended up letting them stay. Thankfully, the friends did not (for the large part) answer for the interviewee, give her suggestions, or pose questions of their own to her. The interview also ended up going much longer than anticipated and I ended up with more material than I could possibly have used. I omitted tangential responses in my report and I was sure to address all of these issues in the report.

Comparing Meenaxi's experience to mine, it seems that the flow of an interview largely depends on the nature and background of the interviewee. The INF1300 interview was about impressions of the library, and I think I had a relatively easy time getting responses because my interviewee was a student. Did anyone else have any interesting experiences/difficulties with the interview?

-Martin

An Introduction of Critical Discourse Analysis

While going through this week readings, I found Critical Discourse Analysis very different topic in research, I personally don’t know what exactly it is? So I went through the definition of CDA and found that it is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced by text and talk.

In my opinion the term ‘critical’ has become ‘little more than a rallying cry demanding that researchers consider ‘whose side they are on?’’. From personal experience I have found that it also seems

to cause the hackles of other discourse analysts to rise because of the implication that they are ‘non-critical’ or even ‘sub-critical’ and therefore somehow in favour of things like oppression, exploitation and inequality: by commandeering the moral high ground of being critical, CDA thus ‘others’ mainstream discourse analysis and performs the very kind of domination through language that it seeks to oppose.

Discourse analysis challenges us to move from seeing language as abstract to seeing our words as having meaning in a particular historical, social, and political condition. Even more significant, our words (written or oral) are used to convey a broad sense of meanings and the meaning we convey with those words is identified by our immediate social, political, and historical conditions. This is a powerful insight for home economists and family and consumer scientists. We should never again speak, or read/hear others’ words, without being conscious of the underlying meaning of the words. Our words are politicized, even if we are not aware of it, because they carry the power that reflects the interests of those who speak. The words of those in power are taken as "self-evident truths" and the words of those not in power are dismissed as irrelevant, inappropriate, or without substance as van Dijk mentioned in his article.

-Meenaxi

The Contextual Scope of an Artifact's Meaning

I have to admit, I feel way more at home with this week's readings; although I found the quantitative and ethnographic research methods interesting, I was struggling to apply them to my own current research area. Thomas' Artifactual Study in the Analysis of Culture, in particular, struck an interest in me. 

One of the first problems Thomas' discusses is that of the substitution problem; can the study of artifacts be equivalent with the study of human behaviour? She points out two shaky assumptions this problem is built on: that of 'a direct method' (as if all of human behaviour is can be captured in one ultimate method) and that of attempted equivalency (as if artifacts are trying to be a pale reproduction of human behaviour). 

The substitution paradox, I think, rests on the hierarchical dichotomy of effable and ineffable. Rudolf Arnheim, a psychologists most noted for his work on visual arts, argues that this word-over-image bias rests in a linguistic-deterministic framework: the visual world is so chaotic and meaningless that the only way to liberate is to impose the structure of the language, a mold in which order and meaning is created. The implication of this, thus, is that the visual is innately chaotic and represents no meaning or order in and of itself. 

This seems to be where Thomas' problem with artifactural study rests: can artifacts, a physical realm, be innately meaningful or does it require linguistic, a rationale realm, to give meaning? While she argues no, and to which I agree, I wonder the scope of innate meaning lies (i.e. is this meaning culture bound?). 

The dehumanizing effect of critical discourse analysis

In the closing paragraph of his article, van Dijk writes: "this paper has sketched a rather simplified picture of power, dominance and their relations to discourse" (1993). Unfortunately, that is exactly why critical discourse analysis should not be used, in my view, for social research.

Dualistic frameworks about power and oppression, dominance and hegemony can be applied in the formulation of a research question, for example during an ethnographic study. They might also be useful in examining social phenomena, such Paulo Freire's popular education movement. However, they ideally should only represent a portion of the researcher's work.

Van Dijk's statement that: "critical scholars should not worry about the interests of perspectives of those in power, who are best placed to take care of their own interests anyway" is frightening, because it implies that there are two classes of human beings: the powerful and the powerless. It also indicates that the former class is less worthy of study, and even of human compassion, than the latter one.

I would venture that, in reality, power dynamics are much more complicated than this, and that human beings, whether they hold more or less power, remain multi-dimensional and unclassifiable. Any researcher that splits a population into two groups, discards one group and promotes perceived interests of the other, is not only misguided, but can also create serious damage in any community.

Dilemma concerning ethnography

I plan to make use of ethnography and am presently in the process of understanding how to “cover my bases” and be as transparent as possible and today’s class seemed to help a lot in this respect. Previously, I had come across some articles which addressed issues concerning ethnography that stated that it is a method which is not regarded to have as high a standing as certain other methods. And it is not just ‘quant’ researchers who have such views but ‘qual’ people share similar ideas. It has to be always substantiated by statistical calculations or concrete qualitative analysis. One of the basic reasons for this is the bias that a researcher or group of researchers can develop while conducting the field work. That is because, the research is analysed from one person or group’s point of view and their perception does come into play often. One of the ways of protecting ourselves from such criticism would be by being “extra super vigilante” while situating oneself into a culture or system. Thus the “importance of distance” plays an exceptionally major role in making the research credible.

Yet another attack against this method of research is that it studies one culture, organization, or system and tries to ‘see the world in a grain of sand’. This is true in some sense when the local provides an image of the global, the micro that of the macro. But it is also true that in a world as varied as ours, such study and its relevance can be highly limited. If I study one department in an organization, it is unlikely that the same gleanings from that study could be applied to another very different department. So studying one aspect of a company might not reveal much about the entire organization. It is difficult to defend ethnography in such a case. However, keeping in mind that all methods do have their drawback/s I guess conversely, ethnography too has its own (confident) position... enough to gain ground amongst the other research methodologies.

A face-to-face interview

Many of us have experienced with interview method which we had used in the assignment of INF1300. This assignment involves conducting an interview on the public's view of the library. Last week I have conducted the interview and have found that this class has really assisted me in determining the method I would employ as a researcher. The goal in this particular research is to discover what a person knows about libraries, library services and facilities etc. but while taking the interview , I had discovered that there is a lack of knowledge about the library gives a researcher valid information which can lead to questions of why there is such a lack of knowledge on the resources offered by the library. I have used an open-ended questions, it became apparent that there needed to be more structure than I had originally thought. The questions that I thought would have long answers were very short and I had to compensate by asking questions in different ways or being more specific without telling them what they know about the library and its services.
In other words, a face-to-face interview is the method most widely used in the research of any topic and based on a direct meeting between interviewer and interviewee. By personal communication it is possible not only to obtain much more information, but also to use visual materials (cards, pictures, logos, etc.) to encourage response.

Meenaxi