Writing – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

Subject-specific databases

One of my main strategies for organizing information is to create databases for subjects of interest. I’m using the term in the broad Wikipedia sense of “an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically” here, and it includes everything from a single folder where PDF versions of all the references cited in a particular monograph of mine are stored to financial tracking spreadsheets, records of my weight, and sets of original RAW files for my photoshoots.

So far for my PhD research I have set up a few:

A spreadsheet of all accredited Canadian universities, with pertinent information about each divestment campaign I have identified
A master timeline for significant events in all campaigns, as well as events relevant to university divestment that happened in other institutions, like municipalities
A list of all scholarly work about university divestment campaigns, including which school(s) the authors looked at
A spreadsheet with titles and links to common document types at many campaigns, including detailed petitions like our ‘brief’, recommendations from university-appointed committees, and formal justification for university decisions
The consent database specified in my ethics protocol, which has also been useful for keeping tabs on people who I’m awaiting responses from
(Somewhat embarrassingly) A Google sheet where I manually tally how long each MS Word chapter draft is at midnight each day

For my earlier pipeline resistance project I had started putting together a link chart of relevant organizations and individuals, as well as a glossary and timeline.

I would love to have more formal training (and ideally coding ability) for working with more flexible kinds of databases than spreadsheets. That would be useful for debugging WordPress MySQL issues, but more importantly for more fundamental data manipulation and analysis. I haven’t really coded (aside from HTML and LaTeX) since long-passed days of tinkering with QBASIC and Pascal during the days of my youth in Vancouver. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to learn Python as a means of building and playing around with my own SQL databases…

Boot camp day 2

I spent much of today’s boot camp doing research online about Canadian university divestment campaigns and trying to contact people who have been involved.

Even though all the campaigns have happened since 2012, there’s a lot that has clearly already disappeared from the internet, though some of the websites established by campaigns remain in the Wayback Machine. There also seem to be some campaigns that never progressed beyond a petition on gofossilfree.org which a single person could set up in a few minutes. Helpfully the site lets you try to contact the person who set up the petition, but I don’t think I have gotten any responses so far from any campaigns that don’t offer more substantive evidence like a Facebook page or a media report.

I had hoped it would be possible to interview a fairly large number of people from each campaign, both to help develop a detailed timeline and to get into my core research questions about the effect the experience had on people. That may yet prove true for some campaigns – especially large ones that happened fairly recently – but my hopes of being able to get in touch with one or two people from each campaign and then easily reach a large group of others seem unlikely at this point to be fulfilled.

The early mornings of the dissertation boot camp have been a bit disruptive, especially alongside rather disrupted sleep. A friend of mine who I worry about often has been incommunicado for an unusual length of time, to which my brain naturally responds with a lot of directionless worry and speculation. There’s also another situation where I thought two friends were being treated badly by a third person, but it seems that despite being essentially vetoed my effort to encourage a change of behaviour has just left all three of them upset with me.

On the plus side, it seems like we have found someone to take over the room from our housemate who is moving out.

Word versus LaTeX for academic publishing

There are some good discussions online about the relative merits of different types of software for writing long scholarly documents like a PhD thesis. For instance, Amrys O. Williams’ “Why you should LaTeX your dissertation; or, why you don’t have to write your dissertation in Word“.

I’ve seen the plusses and minuses of using LaTeX in academic and activism contexts first-hand and the dominant set of considerations for me concern collaboration. Theoretically, as a free and open source typesetting system LaTeX ought to be ideal for preparing complex documents. Unfortunately, whether they are university professors or student activists, it’s likely that few or none of your potential collaborators will already be familiar with LaTeX syntax or comfortable providing comments on a document in the format of LaTeX source code.

For my dissertation I have decided to write the whole thing as chapters comprised of Microsoft Word files, for the ease of my committee members. They won’t have full citations, but just the unique identifiers and any other details which I will eventually need to produce a citation in LaTeX. This way, my committee members can provide comments on Word documents and, once I have everything nailed down, I can spend a few days moving all the text into LaTeX for the preparation of the final dissertation. This way committee members also won’t be distracted by a need to minutely copy edit formatting and other trivialities, since each chapter explains that it’s just a draft for review with precise formatting to be done later.

I would rather just write the whole thing as LaTeX code in TextMate, avoiding the need to use Word at all, but a central necessity of writing a doctoral thesis is soliciting and incorporating input from committee members so all told the approach of writing in Word and later typesetting in LaTeX seems to have the most to recommend it.

Data collection and writing up

My central aim for this summer was to focus on developing my PhD research project. To that end I didn’t seek a teaching assistant position or other paid work, like commercial photography or the time I helped run the Summer Residence Program at Massey College.

Mostly that has gone well. I’ve gone from seeking ethical approval to beginning to conduct interviews with people at a variety of schools. I’m putting together a detailed timeline of events that took place in each Canadian campaign, based in part on the idea of cycles of contention from the theoretical framework behind the project. I have started writing the first three chapters — on the issue context, literature context, and activist repertoires — and I have a lot of ideas for each.

For the fall and winter terms I have accepted three TA positions. One is yet another second year Canadian politics course, with tutorials to lead and grading. The other two are grading only (though I will be giving a lecture in one) within the School of the Environment. TA work will be a distraction from the dissertation, but it can also be useful for structuring time and will help with maintaining general financial stability.

I expect that in September it will become much easier to contact research subjects efficiently, as students, faculty, and administrators awake from their summer comas. We’re looking for a new third floor housemate as well, since the current occupant of our largest room is leaving to pursue a job opportunity selling supplements.

Isolation for accomplishment

From August 21st to 23rd I will be doing an internet-free dissertation boot camp. In some ways it’s a bad match for my project and the current state of my research, since a lot of my research materials are in an encrypted archive on a computer I won’t be able to bring with me, while a lot of non-sensitive material is online in GMail and Google Docs.

Still, if it just means hunkering down with some of the literature review materials which remain that will fully justify and occupy three days.

Suspension of disbelief and Westworld

The suspension of disbelief has a particular peculiar character within the science fiction genre. While there is certainly sci-fi that rejects all standards of realism rooted in actual science, and which might thus be better seen as a kind of fantasy with technology, most sci-fi seeks to imagine things that could be possible in the real universe, at least if the requisite technologies and aliens show up.

When experiencing science fiction, I find myself always cataloguing two kinds of consistency and places where each breaks down. First there is consistency within the world established by the narrative. If the robots in chapter one can be easily fooled by colour photocopies of people’s faces it shouldn’t change for no reason in chapter two. In a broader sense the internal rules of the universe should be consistent. If multi-year travel times between settlements are a major part of a fictional universe, the economic and political life of the settlements should be compatible with that. The second kind of consistency is with the known rules the real universe follows. This is routinely violated by sci-fi with comic book or action hero physics, where the capabilities of technology depend on the emotional stakes and the needs of the plot, rather than serving as a template for what the characters are free to do.

I have watched the first two seasons of Westworld with both kinds of consistency in mind and have been much more frustrated by internal inconsistency than by straight-up scientific impossibility. Perhaps with the big exception of “what powers the hosts?” the show doesn’t pose many straight-up problems of practicality. Rich and determined enough people could do most of what has been depicted so far (ignoring the question of whether copying and creating conscious beings is possible as depicted). Since a lot of the show is shoot-em-up gore, perhaps the most frustrating internal inconsistency regards what it takes to actually kill the robots (called “hosts”) and specifically why damage to their physical bodies can in any circumstance damage the small protected orbs which are supposedly their brains.

It makes sense in the emotional and Western contexts that one well-placed bullet brings down anybody, but it doesn’t make sense anymore when the constraints that are supposed to make the durable, re-usable robots into suitable targets are no longer being applied, and especially when some robots just shrug off bullets now because they have been reprogrammed. We’re two seasons in and everybody is still being killed because their tougher-than-humans replaceable bodies get damaged in ways that would make a person bleed to death or otherwise no longer be able to keep vital organs functioning.

Probably the writers have an answer or will roll one out subsequently, while most fans will put it down to the rule of cool on the basis of wanting to see more human-style gunfights between the robots. To me it comes across as unsatisfying, however, and a failing or unwillingness to think through the implications of the premises which the writers have already established. They’re taking a lot of the Ghost in the Shell universe where “bodies are a dime a dozen”, but sticking with gunshot wounds as a mechanism to sometimes-permanently sometimes-temporarily kill robots. The inconsistent treatment of guns is unsatisfying in other ways too, like how apparently there was some system built into the park to keep real guns from injuring human guests (suggesting some omnipotent operating system controls everything in the park) but which one person then shuts down in only that very limited way. The way they control explosives doesn’t make sense either, with the control room approving one explosion specifically for an important guest, but robots apparently playing with real nitroglycerin in several of the park’s programmed narratives. If guests are interacting with real wagonloads of nitroglycerin, how do they not get routinely blasted to pieces? And if the park can control how badly humans versus robots are hurt by nitroglycerin explosions, why don’t we see the evidence of that kind of control in other places?

It’s basically standard in fiction that characters important to the plot are impossibly competent with their weapons, while anyone attacking them is impossibly incompetent (like the much-mocked stormtroopers in Star Wars), but this is taken to an implausible degree when a single person with an antique pistol kills whole squads of mercenaries with submachine guns before any of the mercs can notice what is happening and use a weapon.

Science fiction is meant by many authors as a means of exploring philosophical ideas, as well as the implications of technology, and allowing inconsistencies and implausibilities may be intended to serve that purpose. That’s fine as far as it goes, and it’s not for me to tell authors what plot contents are or are not appropriate in their creations. Still, to some degree the task of creative worldbuilding depends on the contents holding together with each other and when that common basis is eroded by inconsistent treatment it diminishes the plausibility and immersiveness of the entire world.

Recent productivity

Lately I have been getting a lot of writing done.

I have a few thousands words each in my first three thesis chapters, providing context on campus fossil fuel divestment, going through the relevant literature, and discussing the repertoires from which activists draw their tactics.

A non-academic book project is also developing, with almost 23,000 unedited words down.

I haven’t been working much on my space shuttle screenplay, which is probably a good sign. In some ways it’s my non-urgent unrelated fallback project for when everything else is going badly.

Mabee on Sojourner Truth and Frances Gage 2/2

If friends and students of Truth wish to reassess their views, they might stop depending on Gage’s report as if it were reliable, and depend instead on the reports of the speech that were published at the time, especially the fullest one, in the Bugle. If not as dramatic as Gage’s report, the Bugle report is terse, portrays Truth as speaking in a folksy style that rings true, attributes to her some of the provocative ideas that Gage’s report attributed to her, and is much more likely to be authentic:

One of the most unique and interesting speeches of the Convention was made by Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave. It is impossible to transfer to paper, or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and truthful tones. She came forward to the platform and addressing the President said with great simplicity:

May I say a few words? Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded; I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights [sic]. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now.

As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and a man a quart — why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much — for we won’t take more than our pint’ll hold.

The poor men seem to be all in confusion and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have women’s rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.

I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept — and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?

But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

Mabee, Carleton. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York University Press, 1993. p. 81–82. “[sic]” in original.

Mabee on Sojourner Truth and Frances Gage 1/2

[Frances] Gage‘s report, gradually becoming well known, wove myths about [Sojourner] Truth, myths that helped build up Truth into a heroic figure. Nevertheless, we must ask whether the frequent uncritical use of Gage’s report in recent years has led to misleading interpretations not only about Truth and her place in history, but also about early black-white relations at large.

When we compare Gage’s 1863 report of Truth’s speech with available records written in 1851 soon after the event, the comparison suggests that we should heed Gage’s own warning that she had “given but a faint sketch” of Truth’s speech. The comparison suggests that, unless evidence to the contrary shows up, important parts Gage’s report regarding the atmosphere of the convention, the contents of Truth’s speech, and the effect of the speech on the convention should be considered false. The comparison suggests that Gage, the poet, intended to present the symbolic truth of Truth’s words more than the literal truth; that Gage, the novelist, imagining that Harriet Beecher Stowe was looking over her shoulder, felt pressed to make Truth’s story more compelling than it was; that Gage, the passionate advocate of blacks’ and women’s rights, embellished her report to strengthen the causes she favored, imposing her own ideas and expression on what Truth said. Disappointing as it may be, the comparison makes it unlikely that Truth asked the thrilling question, “Ar’n’t I a woman?“, the principal words by which Truth is known today.

If we depend on contemporary accounts as more likely than Gage’s to be reliable, then we perceive that when Sojourner Truth began to speak, there were no signs of panic, no hissing, no mobbish opponents whom she could overcome. Then we find that Truth’s words, unadorned, if less dramatic and smooth than Gage wanted them to be, did not make her the one star of the convention, as Gage indicates, but nevertheless made her impressive.

When Truth’s biographers, following Gage, say that she turned the convention around from opposing to favouring women’s rights, we have to suspect that they may be telling us more what Gage wanted us to believe than what really happened. When recent writers on women’s and blacks’ history claim that white women advocating women’s rights were hostile to black women’s participation in the women’s movement, and they base their claims especially on Gage’s account of the supposed hostility to Truth at Akron, we have to wonder whether they are distorting history. Unless evidence to the contrary turns up, we have to regard Gage’s account of Truth’s asking the “Ar’n’t I a woman?” question as folklore, like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. It may be suitable for telling to children, but not for serious understanding of Sojourner Truth and her times.

Mabee, Carleton. Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York University Press, 1993. p. 80–81

genre experiments

For two years I have been working on an art project.

I’m not sure whether the concept predated when I first heard James Allard’s lecture on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but the lecture is a great demonstration of how labeling does interpretive work when it comes to art.

Presented with a digital file, we may struggle to decide what it is in both a technical and artistic sense.

Perhaps it’s an HTML file with embedded image files being displayed in a web browser, or the raw data from the sensor of a digital camera. In either case, it’s also an object within a software and operating system-defined architecture and also bits physically written to some data storage medium.

From an artistic perspective, it may be a line from a play quoted in a piece of art which has been photographed and posted online (or a screenshot of a cell phone app displaying a tweet of a digital photo posted online of a print of a photograph taken illicitly in an art gallery, on display in that art gallery).

The multiple presentations of the same data are the idea of interest: like all the exposure and white balance modifications that can be applied to a raw file from a digital camera, meaning that every photograph arising from that process is an interpretation.

These experiments are also intriguing insofar as they concern cybernetic relationships between individuals, organizations that archive data (like search engines), algorithms nobody fully understands, and governments. The location of a data file on the internet does everything to establish its visibility and significance.

The idea of the project is that every distinct work within it is presented to the viewer with multiple possible modes of interpretation, whether they are based on data architecture, metadata, or the cultural and political content of the human-readable image.