Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Despair and climate research

Kate Neville and Matthew Hoffmann, two of U of T’s most climate-focused political scientists, have a piece online: So, it’s all just too late, right? Studying climate politics in a time of despair.

It’s a good piece, especially on the necessity for and challenges of “real-time research”. When I was still focused on pipelines, I often worried that I was ‘chasing the news’ with the dissertation research. As we proceed deeper and deeper into the unprecedented, as humanity dominates the operation of the planet with more power than understanding or control, the need to do research on ongoing topics will only grow in importance.

The calming quality of researching catastrophe

I find reading about and studying catastrophic accidents to the extremely calming.

First, I love the precision of the investigations into them and the determination to get as confident as possible an understanding of what failed. In the case of well-functioning regulatory systems, like the global commercial aviation industry, those findings are immediately applied to other vehicles that could be at risk of the same faults. In malfunctioning regulatory systems, as seen in the Space Shuttle program with the losses of Challenger and Columbia, the convenient but sloppy behaviour that led to unaddressed past faults persists (justifying itself misleadingly in the minds of managers because it doesn’t fail catastrophically on every mission – the “normalization of deviance” Mullane discusses) and leads to an eroded safety culture that costs lives. The meticulousness, cautiousness, and attention to detail of accident investigation reports and those who express their conclusions in the same guarded “here are the facts” style are why I love one lecture about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Second, every specific catastrophe in the past can be emotionally distanced by anyone who is alive right now. Those of us with normally functioning cognitive capacities can mentally distinguish between events which have already happened, those that are happening now, and those that may happen in the future. By virtue of having a “past” tag mentally applied, reading about nightmares like WWI or the eastern front in WWII can be cathartic in a way that would have been inapplicable to the people actually living through it. This provides an unshakeable safety about anything you can learn about a discrete incident in the past. The incident has a bearing on what things are prudent to do today and on how to do them, which is part of what makes them interesting and worthwhile to research, but all the immediate suffering and tragedy of it is now over, though the consequences of that suffering doubtless endure among those who experienced catastrophic events in the past, and then all those whose lives were influenced by exposure to those people.

Researching my Space Shuttle screenplay, about the STS-27 and STS-107 missions and generally about the legacy of the shuttle program, can be a good way to relax in times of stress, though it almost by definition serves no productive purpose. It’s at least a meditative enterprise, and a reminder about the seriousness of consequences. It has occurred to me that there’s a similarity between the path of a blast of subatomic particles generated inside a particle accelerator, a Space Shuttle disaster, and a human life. In each one, a collection of items (atoms) move through the universe, following the laws of physics.

You can imagine each like a multidimensional plume of particles over time — perhaps staying closely grouped together, perhaps exchanging matter with the space around them, perhaps widely dispersed — with each unit of matter having a location and a particle type. Any of these events can be imagined as a an animation of frames, each depicting particle positions an hour or a minute of a nanosecond before. Each is fundamentally a one-way walk: we might seem like we get the chance to make choices all the time, but we can never really reverse a past choice now. We can make a new choice now to try to counteract the old one, but that’s not the same as having made the other choice in the first place. The past is irrevocable: a trail behind us, as well as the basis for our literal physical beings. In the case of catastrophes that happen on a fairly short timescale, like days or weeks, there is an especial emotional distance that I find accompanies them. Concerned as I might be for the fates of people aboard a burning oil platform in 1988 or the crew of a WWII submarine, I know that I can’t possibly alter their fates in any way, unless maybe there are some veterans still around to help out.

Anyhow, just some thoughts with no specific credential-chasing or financial motivations. Just checking in with my fellow sentient beings!

De-anonymization

De-anonymization is an important topic for anyone working with sensitive data, whether in the context of academic research, IT system design, or otherwise.

I remember a talk during a Massey Grand Rounds panel where a medical researcher explained how she could pick herself out from an ‘anonymous’ database of Ontarians, on the basis that her salary was public as an exact dollar figure, only people with her specific job had it, and she was the only woman in that position.

The more general idea is that by putting pieces together you may be able to identify somebody who someone else has made some effort to keep anonymous.

It’s a challenge when doing academic research and writing on social movements, when some subjects choose to be anonymous in publications. That means not just not sharing their name, but not sharing any information that could be used to identify them. That gets hard when you think about adversaries who might have access to other information (in an extreme case, governments with access to masses of information) or even just ordinary people who can combine information from multiple sources logically. The date of an event described in an anonymous quote might tell allow someone to look up where it happened online. Another quote in which a third party’s actions are described could be used to determine that the de-anonymization target wasn’t that person. And so on and on like the logical games on the LSAT or the intricacies of mole hunting.

Lee Ann Fujii wrote smart stuff about this, and about subject protection in research generally.

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.