Apart from the apocalypse bingo card being full ten times over in 2020, this has (and still is, to some extent) been slow going. The dataset I’m using contains over 700 000 speeches; and this poses certain computational challenges, shall we say1. But, I have prevailed somewhat nonetheless. So far I have:
data.table
and parallel processing black magic? Yup.But one of the biggest takeaways is: All (social, at least) research is subjective, and thus susceptible to researcher bias. Even ones that involve a lot of numbers and maths. Those off-seeming parameters above? There is no Goldilocks answer — all I can do is fiddle with the settings until it seems fine.
For more on how I overcame these challenges somewhat, feel free to check the other blog. Spoiler: it gets nerdy. ↩
Langager posits that, in keeping with changing societal discourse concerning welfare, citizenship and integration, the attitudes toward working with the disabled has shifted. Instead of a duty to ensure development and progress, the pedagogical[^spec] approach is characterized by avoidance of discomfort and timidity. Which should strike the pedagogically educated oddly. Surely, pedagogy is in it’s nature transformative and progressive. Or, at least it should be.
Langager pounces on neuropedagogy as an example of a language of development that is transmogrified into a practice in timidity1. By using terms such as ‘meeting them on their own terms’, practitioners turn to avoiding situations that seem to cause strews or discomfort in their charges. But surely, change can be uncomfortable, stressful and discomfiting - even positive change?
Of course, this is not a clear cut dichotomy. I have examples from practice of an understanding of a citizens particular challenges resulting in careful guidance through a stressful transition2 - as well as ‘professional’ timidity in the name of conflict avoidance.
And I would also posit that, while pedagogy is by nature transformative, the range and scope of the change sought effected is not necessarily great. Being able to sleep soundly through the night. Successfully transitioning from leisure to enjoyable activity. For the neurotypical mind, this discomfiture is managed through a process called ‘growing up’, facilitated by ‘parents’ or other primary caregivers.
For the developmentally atypical, a small change — even a change of environment — can seem insurmountable; the threshold of the unknown a vast and terrible thing. Sometimes, a calm and guiding force can ease this great uncertainty, lending strength and surety. But here, I think, we arrive at the crux of the matter: the caregiver must accept the uneven power balance, and, in the immortal words of Uncle Ben, recognize the great responsibility it is to act on behalf of and for the benefit of another3.
Without being cognizant of our power and responsibility, and using them to enact change in the world, social workers risk becoming timorous and cowering.
This should not be the actions of my profession, such as it is.
For a diatribe (in Danish) regarding my thoughts on “neuropedagogy” as a panacea, see essay 2 of this assignment for AU. Spoiler: I am unconvinced. ↩
A transition from a common pasttime to a truly enjoyable one. A transition that often was fraught, volatile and even violent. But worth it to see the expression of pride and contentment after a successful quest. ↩
This line of work is tough shit, dude.
Now, this is hardly an original thought. I’ve got 5 anecdotes off the top of my head of people transitioning out of caregiving jobs. My wife is a store assistent. I am in school; at least one more of my fellow students has the same motivation as I. I have a colleague who transitioned laterally, from a social advisory role to a more direct caregiving role1.
Asterisk, my faculty magazine, even had the whole last issue related to the concept of “professional care”.
It became particularity clear a couple of days ago, as I was talking to an old acquaintance who shares my line of work. Or, at least he did. He (like I did over the winter of ‘15/’16) had had a stress related breakdown; and had changed fields completely. When the conversation turned to me working nights, he commented that he had done similar things in his career. A night shift, physical toll notwithstanding, is a way to let down your guard as it were.
Lower those shoulders.
Have a little break from the grind.
The kind of emotion work we are discussing can be quite grueling at times.
We work with and assist the most vulnerable and fragile of citizens. We act as a filter and a bastion against the outside world - a world that can be quite overwhelming for even the most staunch stoic. We help them navigate their wishes and sometimes conflicting desires. We try to ensure their days have stability, structure, and purpose2.
But this can also entail conflict. For example; when an immediate desire (such as visiting family) is not immediately able to be fulfilled, reactions to disappointment and frustrations can be… counterproductive. Self-harm and/or externally oriented outbursts, as we euphemistically describe actions that might for all the world seem like physical assault of our bodies.
And thus we must act. Do we flee? Do we embrace? Do we play possum? Do we rebuke? These, and many more possibilities for action, may be equally appropriate. Yet we expect of ourselves, both personally and collectively, to be able to let this, too, to pass. And when all is said and done, to turn the other cheek; maybe even offer a hug and comforting words.
In short; as Hochschild3 described in 1979: Our emotional labor — the suppression of unwanted feeling; or the evocation of desired feeling — has been commoditized, as we trade it on the labor market.
Whichever action we chose (in this context, even inaction is an action), it is incumbent on us to reflect on and consider them. Could this be optimized? Could a similar conflict be avoided in the future by choosing different interventions? This sometimes extends to trying to gauge actions five, ten or fifteen minutes in advance, based on careful reading of the room.
Turns out; this is somewhat exhausting. Add to this personnel shortages; reports to write; food to prepare; meetings to attend; and coffee to drink4.
So why keep it up? The answer, for some, is… not to. I, for instance, moved to the night shift, and then grad school simultaneously. Granted, I wish to put my continuing education to use in furthering the efforts of those still on the front lines of the welfare state. Others burn out. Some change careers; some change workplaces; some scars of the soul never heal5.
But some stick it out. The reasons range, I presume, from the practical (this is the job I’ve got, and money is nice, i guess) to the ideological (the premise and promise of the welfare state demands that we step into the breach!), which seems like a plausible continuum6. Motivations may well be more mundane, like a welcoming smile, or a heartfelt welcome. Or a feeling that the sword’s edge was successfully balanced, with no one slipping and falling today.
There are some who posit that work such as this should be rewarding in it’s own right7. To plant a seed and let it grow, as it were. I call bullshit — I do not believe the world can ever send as much back as is required of us to give. Although there is value in completing a difficult task, and doing so competently. A job well done, with a support network to back it up, both professionally and privately. In particular, giving room for self care, which is explicitly brought up in the aforementioned issue of Asterisk. I routinely politely ignored my colleagues at break time — not because I didn’t like them; I was simply peopled out, and needed to stare at my phone for 30 minutes.
In Denmark, there is a distinction between a socialrådgiver; who typically is affiliated with social offices, and (social)pædagoger, who chracteristically work in street programs or assisted living/work programs. The connotations of the English term scial worker maps somewhat imprecisely to both professions, depending on context. ↩
Yes, this implies an uneven power dynamic in the relationship. See my previous post for my thoughts on this issue. ↩
Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049 ↩
Some days, there is not enough coffee. ↩
PTSD is a recurring theme in the union magazine. ↩
Now there’s a research idea. ↩
Even to the point of arguing that the wages be lower. ↩
No, really.
Data is messy.
Take, for a practical example, scraped Twitter data.
Do you strip all punctuation?
This means you lose #hashtags
and @mentions
too.
Do you normalize common misspellings?
Then social signifiers such as group affiliations and slang might also be lost.
In the end, as with most research, the approach will depend on your research question.
But it will almost always be useful to retain the raw text as part of your data frame, with appropriately treated text as new fields.
Thus, when trained on corpora such as newswire feeds or Wikipedia articles, any bias in the corpus will be reflected in the model.
The typical example: If king
minus man
yields queen
; then doctor
minus man
yields… nurse
.
Yeah.
Not great.
No, more data. Go on, don’t hold back… This will be an issue when working with small languages such as Danish. A lack of available training data means less robust models.
Two presentations in particular underscored this point: Felix Günther, who argued that semantic analysis could give an insight into how humans understand and generate meaning; And Kristian Tylén, who modeled increased problem solving efficiency in groups when the individual agents were dissimilar.
A couple of the presentations were from bachelor’s students presenting novel approaches and new research. For example, SENTIDA, an R package providing sentiment analysis of danish prose. I am already contemplating the implications for educational sociology. An analysis of assessments, guidelines and policy documents regarding education and/or social issues? Or analyzing the debates in the Danish Parliament over such issues? Something made possible, incidentally, by another student project presented at the seminar, which aims to catalog all parliamentary debates in Europe (the data is not publicly available yet; but at least the Danish and Czech data had been scraped).
In contrast, my school projects, both from my bachelor’s in social education and my current master course in educational sociology seem rather rote and inconsequential. Which reminds me of a somewhat disparaging note by a lecturer last semester, comparing the Department of Educational Studies at Århus University rather disparagingly to the kind of school I got my BA at. Make of that what you will.
(There is, incidentally, a fair bit of literature on the attempted academization of the welfare professions in Denmark, and the relevance and success of this project.)
Lest we dwell on that last observation; how do I wish to proceed? Firstly, I’d like to wedge an NLP approach into my coursework and assignments. I’m reaching out to the thesis supervisor administrator with my ideas, and I am hoping to utilize a computational approach to a qualitative analysis of text. The computer is capable of sifting through orders of magnitude more data in a given span of time than myself - such as, for instance, meeting notes or parliamentary debates.
I’d also like to spend some of my limited free time on learner projects, to build familiarity and a little bit of a portfolio.
My first idea is to revisit an assignment from last year; where I attempted a positional analysis of masculinity following the #thebestamancanbe
Gillette ad from January 2019.
A machine learning/NLP approach to this data might be interesting.
Oh, and also brush a lot of dust off my knowledge of applied statistics.
Wish me luck! And also, 48 hour days.
I just might need both.
]]>This cornucopia of interests would seem to be a Good Thing, right? But for someone who is graduating within 8 months, this can also look like vagueness. Being able to present some sort of clarity of purpose will help both me and a prospective employer decide if we are a match.
Something resembling a professional identity1.
Luckily, Aarhus University have come to the same conclusions. Thus, students have the opportunity to get career coaching before graduation. I chose the course offered by Martabolette Stecher, after perusing the introductory material.
It has been quite interesting so far, about halfway in. (Re)articulating defining character traits and strengths is all well and good - this is, after all, what I will bring to the table when it comes to employment.
But the real “whoa, dude!” moment came when I was asked to visualize my thoughts for the future on a dreamboard.
Articulating — not to mention dwelling on — my hopes and dreams was quite enlightening. In my personal life I want some leisure time back. Going back for a Master’s has meant that I’ve not had time to start an RPG campaign or visit my siblings as often as I’d like, for example. But I also want more of what I have — family, pets, maybe own a house and drive an electric car.
But the job thing… that was hard to pin down. I imagined a scenario where I’d get out of the salt mines and into an office. I do something a lot of people find inscrutable, and it involves a fair bit of computer work. Thus, the combination of qualitative research, coding in R and Python, but also presentations and meetings and publications.
For this example — I have no knowledge if such a position even exists; much less if I could qualify. I’d need to do a butt-ton of learning NLP and R, at least…
And that’s just one example. I’d probably be happy many places where I can play on my strengths:
Which probably is also why this aspect has been hard to pin down.
This week’s assignment is to actively assess possible career choices on three axes:
And follow this up by actively seeking feedback from people in one’s network on how to proceed.
Current ruminations (after stalking job listings) include
But the weighting is hard, much less figuring out who to ask for comments.
The future is my canvas. I shall gather my colors.
As expressed by one of my classmates, this is somewhat of a daunting task to undertake on ones own. With my background as a social worker, the job description was also (mostly) the professional identity. Not so any more. ↩
I’m still working on Ship of Destiny. Not very much progress has been made, but we’re getting very close to a resolution now.
In TV land, I finished season 3 of The Magicians. So angsty! And magicians truly can be shitty people too… even if they pulled a Supernatural with the finale and leading into nesxt season.
Queer Eye has a new season out, and it is still very good. Confident men who wish to empower everyone to be their best selves? Awesome!
Actually got some things from the library read. The initial Batman from DCs Earth One setting (apparently, some sort of althistory take). Interesting, if maybe a little bit eehh…
But the other pick-up was explicitly up my alley: Don Rosas collected works, volume 4 (vol 1-3 were, sadly, not available). Leafing through those stories is reading excerpts from my childhood, cliché and all.
I’ve been spending rather more time than probably wise on (neo)vim threads, procrastinating writing my exam papers by making my editor of choice more better-er. I’ve still got work to do, though:
But I have found some interesting stories this week. My brother pointed me to a scathing disassembly of a Danish anti-cheat system. Le sigh. Pointless venality, placing everyone under suspicion to catch, seemingly, 0.5 cheaters per thousand student? Grossly incompetently done? Yup. Seems like the Danish governing mentality the past decade or so.
Fabio Rojas points to an article (from 2014, no less), about hermeneutic institutionalism . The basic gist seems to be, that sociology should, or only could, seek to uncover processes of meaning and understanding.
Archim Zeileis writes about ditching the default rainbow color palette for data vizualisations. The examples illustrate quite well how ill-suited the ever-ubiqutous RGB full saturation approach is. Neither readability nor accessibility are served many favors.
]]>I’m still enjoying the ride as I near the half-way point of Ship of Destiny. The somewhat large cast, and a spilt narrative perspective, makes for loooong stretches without my favorite characters, though. And I do see the need to bring new, previously underserved characters into the spotlight, which necessitates putting previous POV characters on a bus (or chained up on a remote island, as it were. I do wonder what has befallen Kyle Haven…).
The Magicians is really quite an enjoyable show. I’m trying to get back to where I left the third season, and the sardonic realism of this ‘Narnia for Millennials’ is quite entertaining.
I just saw Captain Marvel tonight. Damn me, but that was a good one. Cinematically sound, with good pacing, believable characters and an interesting mystery. And sooo many mythology gags and call-forwards. Wanna know how Fury lost his eye? Watch this movie. Oh, and super badass action woman who takes no shit from the men around her? Sign me up! Putting this one on my daughter’s Must See list, in a few years’ time.
My RSS feeds have been on fire this week — so many stories that have caught my eye.
Andrew Gelman is continuing his quest to dissuade against defending mistakes in scientific research, so as not to lose the ‘scoop’. Instead, figure out the source of the mistake - poor theory, noisy data, poor coupling between theory and data — so you know how to overcome this mistake in the future.
Ashes Ashes, a podcast I haven’t (yet) listened to, but been linked the transcript of one episode, has a discussion on the loneliness epidemic in the western world today. With terms such as ‘emotonal refugees’, this is quite interesting. I must admit, becoming more active in my Tae Kwon Do club has made a world of difference in my life.
What caught my eye, was the discussion of the artificiality of the selves we construct on social media, and how alienating to our inner selves this can become.
This ties in with my university-assigned reading. In *In Defense of the Enlightenment’, Todorov tells of Rosseau warning against this very alienation of self if we allow the idea of others’ perception of ourselves dominate our actions. Thus, increasingly, rendering them increasingly conformist and inconsequential, in our hunger for external affirmation.
From Inside Higher Ed, Barbara Fister writes about the shady nature of academic publishing, in the context of the University of California not paying Elsevier for access anymore. As Barbara notes: Somehow, these companies earn massive profits while academics provide content for free, and, more troubling, soon the data flow of scholarly production may be a source of income.
If you’re not paying, you’re the product being sold.
In another podcast transcript, I paid close attention to ways into a data science career. I do not know if I want to go full-on data analysis post-university; but as a methodology this approach fascinates me.
On the topic of AIs and machine learning, [Awful AI(https://github.com/daviddao/awful-ai) tracks all the ways AI is used today to affect society negatively in insidious ways
On John Scalzi’s blog, Mallory O’Meara has a Big Idea piece on her book The Lady from the Black Lagoon, concerning Miliicent Patrick, a female special effects artist (among other things) from the 50s. Things did not go easy for her, nor for O’Meara, 50 years later. Sexism and discrimination are still alive today; to think otherwise is folly.
John Warner writes on Inside Higher Ed about embracing the flail. Overcoming an uncertain process is crucial, he argues, to maximize learning and ensuring the possibility of future growth. This is heartening, as I currently feel very much like I am flailing wildly re: my exam assignments in Comparative Educational Studies.
To end on a depressive note: Casey Newton writes about the secret lives of Facebook moderators. Dammit. Now I hate people again.
]]>Late last fall, I started retreading the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb, this time in audiobook form. Starting in January, I continued with the Liveship Traders, a follow-on story in the same universe, with a shared character.
What truly strikes me in Hobb’s writing is how evocative her worldbuilding is, particularly when the civilized southlands are contrasted to the northern barbarians of the first trilogy. The subtle social commentary regarding the role of women in society from those same books are hammered in more bluntly now. We are also shown very varying perspectives on what it means to be a Man, Woman, Dragon or Liveship trying to find out who you are, and who you are meant to be. All with very believable characters, who show credible growth across the two first books and into the third.
It’s been 15 or so years since I last read these, and they hold up remarkably well.
Around January I downloaded The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills onto my Kindle. I’m currently stuck at around 30 %. It’s not you, Mills, it’s me. Turns out, you cant read your Kindle if you dont bring it with you… or take it out of your bag, or bring it up to the nightstand instead of your phone.
I do like the book though. Mills is clearly an accomplished communicator, and is delightfully snarky.
That phone, however, has an RSS reader. This past week, a few articles caught my eye:
Daniel Little writes about a new perspective on how humans think: Bodily Cognition. This is a questioning of the prevailing neuroscientific model of the brain as the Grand Computer, processing inputs and doling out neural responses. Instead, it is more productive to think more holistically about inter- and intrapersonal perception. As Little says:
rather, my suggestion here is that the metaphysical questions about “constitution of cognition” and “the real nature of cognition” might be put aside and the empirical and systematic ways in which human cognitive processes are interwoven with extra-bodily artifacts and processes be investigated in detail.
My social worker heart agrees.
On Faculty Focus, Miriam Bowers-Abbott provides another nail in the coffin in which Bloom’s Taxonomy is slowly being interred. Instead, other models for course design are shown for consideration. Kagan’s model of understanding (comprehension), transforming (inductive/deductive logic) and generating (research skills), as well as taking inspiration from workforce training programs to induce a lifelong love of learning.
I am fortunate to know that at least one of my lecturers agrees with this statement.
Andrew Gelman writes on the University of Columbia Stat blog about how Statistical-significance filtering does more harm than good. This made me turn my head — this is exactly how I am being trained, as Gelman points out. At least now, I know about the pitfalls involved.
Mike Sosteric gives me this week’s helping of we are all FUCKED. Dammit.
Through a Reddit thread (which I cant resurface right now), I’ve added some sociology-adjacent podcasts to my rotation. I’ve listened to a few episodes of Thinking Allowed, and the episodes on snobbery and the class ceiling were particularly apropos my current courses. The one on snobbery also presented a classist angle to my discussion on middle-class yearning for authenticity: It is a form of class distinction, of saying ‘I am not common!’. Sometimes while appropriating the attire and artifacts of ‘common’ people.
]]>My current fields of interest lie in the intersection of a society and individual, as pertains to adults with cognitive disabilities and the professionals and institutions that support (or hinder, as the case may be) them
Now I feel it is time to amend that statement slightly, in light of what I’ve written on this blog so far, as well as my experiences a-quarter-and-a-bit of the way toward my master’s.
I still express an interest in the structural and institutional forces that define and guide the work with (and, in some cases, even care of) people with cognitive disabilities, as well as the (semi)professional status of those employed to perform these duties.
I’ve had cause to think about which ‘style’ of sociology to pursue in the near term. Within a week, I need to propose which of my lecturers I want for a counselor on my exam paper for this term.
One is very decidedly a systems theorist; another could cite Goffmann at you all day; one is deep into inequality of education; one looks at rational choice theories and social inequality1.
While I could find interesting topics, and write decent enough papers, in all four theoretical and empirical fields, a cursory search of this blog, as well as my own mind, makes it rather obvious that, as of now, I’m gonna go and try for the microsociology guy.
As for topics, that’s a pot that better start boiling soon. I’d really like to get a move on with the writing of this thing. Early trains of thought:
The second one might have more legs, as a longer assignment. What are the terms of service regarding scraping Twitter and Instagram i wonder?2
Methodologically, this smells (as microsociology tends to do) of something mostly qualitative, with some form of observational/interview-ish/written record spelunking.
I’ll have to save my interest for dataviz and machine learning for another time, probably. Here’s hoping my proposal for machine learning as an elective next semester is accepted!
]]>Being a proper social democrat, I am, of course a member of my trade union. As such, I also receive the union magazine on a regular basis. While leafing through the latest issue, the article on “Township Mothers”1 illustrates these points.
There is outreach to the (potentially) marginalized and excluded, in which they experience empowerment and receive training in reaching out to others. This is resocialization in practice. Through establishing a sense of unity, more cohesive local communities are established, with the women learning how to be accepted as part of Danish society, and bucking (certain) statistical trends in the process.
A key part of the success of such an approach would seem to be, as Suad herself mentions, a certain amount of common ground. Through example, the Mothers are able to help architect the construction of a new, or at least altered, social identity, while retaining a connection to the past.
Which level of involvement in child upbringing is expected? What form of parenting is well-considered? Encouraging authoritative/directive parenting, as opposed to authoritarian forms of coercive control, is a perfect example of the inclusivity paradox. A (socially) ill-acknowledged practice is considered (with restrained judgement), a (socially) more acceptable practice argued for in its stead.
Whether initiatives such as these really are a way to pry the cold hand of inequality reproduction off of society’s neck is somewhat uncertain to me. There are still structural barriers for to overcome. But it does seem to be a step in the right direction.
D. (2019, February 18). Suad blev stærk som bydelsmor. Socialpædagogen, (2019/03). Retrieved from https://socialpaedagogen.sl.dk/arkiv/2019/02/suad-blev-staerk-som-bydelsmor/
Sandahl, M. ↩