The software itself, much like an online travel site, creates individualmodels for each person. Think of it: transparent, controlled by the user, andpersonal. You might call it the opposite of a WMD.
The chapter ends here but there is lots to be said about the issues of personalised and individualised recommender systems as well
WMD
"weapon of math destruction": mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis.
All this has a historical dimension
What aspects we consider to define "stupidity" is based on very historically contingent ideas.
Tellme what you've found out, but without using any of the identifyingcharacteristics of the actual case.”
This is a trick for how to generalize from your actual research findings to something broader, but not at the abstract level of concepts such as "identity".
Itoccurs, for instance, when we have tailored our concept to fit a partic-ular instance.
A form of "overfitting" a concept, if you will.
We ignorethose elements of the case whose presence or absence the category de-scription ignores.
I see this a lot in student papers. They have a conceptual framework, they check to which extent their case study fits into this concept. But the point here is that it's sometimes better to define your concepts based on all the specificities of some case studies, so you can better see how they vary.
This concern is en-shrined in the well-known distinction between idiographic andnomothetic sciences.
Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain types or categories of objective phenomena, in general. Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often cultural or subjective phenomena.
In anthropology, idiographic describes the study of a group, seen as an entity, with specific properties that set it apart from other groups. Nomothetic refers to the use of generalization rather than specific properties in the same context.
And that in turn meansthat quantitative researchers too can inspect the answers they have tosee what questions they imply
This works in digital humanities too. You try out methods to see what kind of results they yield, and then you try to explain those results in a satisfying way. If that's not possible, you can try a different method.
The data I havehere are the answer to a question. What question could I possibly beasking to which what I have written down in my notes is a reasonableanswer?”
A form of reverse engineering of your own mind, almost. You collect data and you have to figure out what your underlying motives were for getting the data you got.
If we systematicallylook for excluded cases, our work will improve
This is the theme of this book
Such problems arise in many areas of sociological work.
Please try to think of some concepts in your own field (e.g. intercultural studies) that could be critiqued in the way Becker is doing here.
n this sense: theychoose, as an “indicator” of the phenomenon they want to talk about,something that has an imperfect, sometimes a highly imperfect, rela-tion to the phenomenon itself, and then treat the indicator as though itwere that phenomenon.
Think about many tests in psychology here, such as personality tests. The test is not the phenomenon!
Psychologists, in their heyday when Blumer wrote, thought theycould do without concepts, at least concepts defined in abstract theor-etical terms.
Note that big data research these days makes similar claims: if N=all, you don't need concepts that generalize, as you can simply describe the "entire phenomenon".
The critique of Becker against operationalism here can be expanded to critique this N=all argumentation as well.
generalizedstatements about whole classes of phenomena rather than specificstatements of fact, statements that apply to people and organizationseverywhere rather than just to these people here and now, or thereand then.
Definition of concept
Common to both critical realism and complexity theory is the assumption of ontological depth, of levels that are linked within a social system, emerg-ing from each other, but which are not reducible to each other.
Authors do not explain critical realism or complexity theory very elaborately; you should do some further research into these terms if you don't know what they mean. This is their main reason for using them: the idea of mutual adaptation by intersecting social systems of inequality.
Conclusions
This mostly summarizes the above points.
It is useful to avoid terminology, such as ‘category’ or ‘strand’, that gives the impression of a unitary object, and instead to use terms, such as ‘set of unequal social relations’, ‘inequality’ and ‘social system’, that draw attention to the complex ontol-ogy of the object of analysis.
Lots of this kind of minute conceptual criticism - think about why this is important!
This article addresses the theoretical debates that underlie different approaches to the analysis of intersectionality.
goal of article
Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, andvoila!-a gesture.
This is the key insight: that context matters when interpreting the world around us.
"A society's culture," to quote Goodenough again, this time in a passage which has become the locus classicus of the whole movement, "consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members."
Geertz here is criticizing objectivism in anthropology. There is no "algorithm" to understanding a culture, that if we got it right would allow us to completely describe it.
Variously called ethnoscience, componential analysis, or cognitive anthropology
Old paradigms; not very popular now.
The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other-they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their i m port is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said.
KEY IDEA: We shouldn't ask of culture "is it real or just in people's heads?" That doesn't matter. It's about figuring out how it makes sense to people.
Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of') a manuscript-foreign, faded, fu ll of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
Ethnography as reading, as literary criticism almost, trying to reconstruct how different (groups of) people interpret the world. This view is not unproblematic, as we will discuss in weeks to come.
But it does lead to a view of anthropological research as rather more of an observational and rather less of an interpretive activity than it really is.
Interpretation as a key skill for ethnography and anthopology
a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort-how extraordinarily "thick" it is
In order to do good ethnography, you have to try and be exhaustive
iled-up structures of inference and implication through which an ethnographer is continually trying to pick his way
An ethnographer interprets culture. This is fraught with complexities, as we can see
You interpret the word basedon personal life experience and cultural understanding of property.
importance of context
thiskind of integration happens unconsciously, because we already move in afamiliar cultural environment within which we perceive words andobjects in a pre-established context of meaning
Understanding only becomes visible when it's not obvious, when its an issue
Acknowledging personal engagement in obtaining knowledge does notinvite relativism. After all, to claim that all knowledge is relative to apersonal standpoint, is not at all the same as claiming that only individualperspectives exist and are all of equal value. It is only to claim that weare not gods who look down on our world, but finite creatures deeplyaffected by the course of history.
Central point: Hermeneutics is not relativism
we intuitively graspthat we encounter not contemporary reality but a play that arises from thesocial and political milieu of old England.
Intuition is key to hermeneutics
he seat appears to you not as a meaninglessobject of neutral observation but as a place of comfort where you can restand warm your weary bones while enjoying the anticipated performance.
We inscribe meaning into things we encounter based on our situation; we're not "objectively looking", we're embedded in the world
The philosophical discipline of hermeneutics, however, is not amethod aiming at a specific practical goal or particular reading. Rather,hermeneutic philosophers are interested in understanding as such: howand under what conditions does understanding happen?
Hermeneutics is not like Marxism or feminism but about understanding itself
careful reader, such as Ian Watt, argues that elements leading to the rise of the novel could be detected and teased out of the writings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Watt’s study is magnificent; his many observations are reasonable, and there is soundness about them.† He appears correct on a number of points, but he has observed only a small space.
Example to show that close reading can work
Literary studies should strive for a similar goal, even if we persist in a belief that literary interpretation is a matter of opinion. Frankly, some opinions are better than others: better informed, better derived, or just simply better for being more reasonable, more believable.
Key: literary science as normative (even positivist) endeavour
While still graduate students in the early 1990s, my wife and I invited some friends to share Thanksgiving dinner. One of the friends was, like my wife and me, a graduate student in English. The other, however, was an outsider, a gradu-ate student from geology. The conversation that night ranged over a wine-fueled spectrum of topics, but as three of the four of us were English majors, things eventually came around to literature. There was controversy when we came to discuss the “critical enterprise” and what it means to engage in literary research. The very term research was discussed and debated, with the lone scientist in the group suggesting, asserting, that the “methodology” employed by literary schol-ars was a rather subjective and highly anecdotal one, one that produced little in terms of “verifiable results” if much in the way of unsupportable speculation. I recall rising to this challenge, asserting that the literary methodology was in essence no different from the scientific one: I argued that scholars of literature (at least scholars of the idealistic kind that I then saw myself becoming), like their counterparts in the sciences, should and do seek to uncover evidence and discover meaning, perhaps even truth. I dug deeper, arguing that literary scholars employ the same methods of investigation as scientists: we form a hypothesis about a literary work and then engage in a process of gathering evidence to test that hypothesis.
Anecdote to set the stage
Introduction
yellow for background and context; pink for the research questions; green for the methods; blue for descriptions of the data; purple for the results; orange for the interpretation of the results.
or moments of high user engagement on social media
e.g. calculate average response rates across time on your subreddit
The viewpoint over a conversation offered by this procedure is evidently biased. It only affords an understanding of what happens “at the top” of a conversation and its most influ-ential users and messages.
think also about TF-IDF, topic modeling, word embeddings methods etc.
Microsoft Exce
not needed for Reddit
HereItrytoshowhowhermeneutics,interpretiveactivity,occurswithinthesciences—butnotjustanyinterpretiveactivity,andnotwhatismorelikelytobetakenashermeneuticwithinliteraryandhumanisticcontexts.Rather,Iamdemonstratingintheanalysisofsciencepraxistheuniquewaysciencehasbeenabletocreateavisualisthermeneuticswhich,whileitfunctionsinawayanalogoustothemuchearlierinventionofwriting,functionsthroughthevariousdimensionsofthevisualizationofthings.
Science as inherently visual in its interpretative nature
In this, Dilthey’s concern is to defend the legitimacy of the human sciences against charges either that their legitimacy remains dependent on norms and methods of the natural sciences or, to his mind worse, that they lack the kind of legitimacy found in the natural sciences altogether.
The humanities engage in Verstehen (understanding) instead of Erklären (explaining). A statue by Rodin can be explained scientifically, but that misses the point of why it is valuable or interesting.
By the ‘psychological’ side, he has in view the contributions to the meaning of the discourse dependent on the individual author’s or creator’s min
knowing the author better than they did themselves
Rather, the art of interpretation is necessary for discourses, paradigmatically written texts, in regard to which our interpretive experience begins in misunderstanding
interpretation is born as a problem
with the announcement of Tom Reilly’s upcoming resignation from Cloudera and subsequent market capitalization drop.
Tom Reilly sure is a powerful man, being able to dictate the end of an era by resigning from some emerging tech infrastructure company
The Era of Big Data is coming to an end
Polemic