Category: tools of the trade

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I’ve given two talks this summer to colleagues in my school. This arises from work I’ve been doing learning from and supporting neurodivergent students in Philosophy, Theology & Religon departments in an ongoing support/tutorial group since 2020. They’re brave and amazing students, and I’ve learned so much from them! I realised it was high time that I shared some of that information with colleagues, and it was a lot of work synthesising what I’d been thinking about and trying to open it up to others, particularly thinking towards others (neurodivergent or not) who hadn’t been on the self-learning and unmasking journey I’ve been on.

Do please feel free to have a look at the slides and let me know if you have thoughts. I’ll be continuing to revise and present this work.

https://jeremykidwell.info/slides/presentation-20230614-teaching_neurodiversity/presentation-20230614-teaching_neurodiversity.html#1

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I’m an amateur anthropologist at best, having taken the plunge as a post-doc in 2015. Having not taken Anthropology 101 (or 701 for that matter) I was left to consult with colleagues in various departments on the best mode of induction. Aside from “do the work” (e.g. fieldwork), a common piece of advice that I received was to read ethnographies. A lot of them. One common adage, particularly in US anthropology departments, is that a PhD student should try to read 100 ethnographies. I’ve not quite gotten there myself, yet, but found the principle to be a good one. Don’t start with the technical manuals and methods handbooks, though do consult these as well. Start with practice and studying the practice of others. In passing this advice along to students and other researchers, I’ve often been asked how to find ethnographies and get started on this journey. I’ve gradually accumulated a list of works based on my own interests which includes folks like James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Margaret Mead, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Gregory Bateson, Roy Rappaport, Clifford Geerz, Talal Asad, Roy Wagner, Maurice Bloch, Paul Rabinow, Bruno Latour, Arjun Appaudurai, James Clifford, Lila Abu-Lughod, Keith Basso, George Marcus and Donna Haraway. I’ve also been delighted to discover the work of more recent “greats” like Saba Mahmood, Anna Tsing, Veena Das, Stephan Helmreich, Paolo Gerbaudo, Gabriella Coleman, and Michael Jackson. You can see my interests here in more-than-human anthropology, science & technology studies, netnography etc.

There are specialist areas not represented in the list above where you can do a deep dive – into visual ethnography or auto-ethnography (two other interests of mine), and it’s not hard to find a few recent journal articles on a given methodological niche and the trace citations backwards to the key reference points in monograph form.

If you’re looking to get into the field, it’s also worth keeping an eye, or reading backlists arising from the various anthropology prizes. This includes prizes awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (including the Gregory Bateson prize).

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There’s a terrific interview this week on the Inquiring Minds podcast with Nate Allen, one of the lead moderators for the r/Science subreddit. Colleagues will be especially interested in their discussion of the r/Science AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) events they run which host sciences who have recently published results for an interactive, carefully moderated and pretty high-level conversation with the 15 million + users on that forum. Check it out here: https://art19.com/shows/inquiring-minds/episodes/3992f5e7-b17a-4319-b5c7-979719ed4572

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Usually we tend to think of the WWW as a tool for research, and I’ll dive into some of the ways that I make use of specific tools to search and mine the web for resources into a later post, but today I wanted to share a bit about how the web can serve as a subject for research. Web social science is the next big thing, with regular sessions now appearing at many major academic society conferences. If you want to get the big overview, I’d recommend you start with Robert Ackland’s recent book, Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (University users can click here to read the book online via the University of Edinburgh library). Ackland’s book is a terrific resource, covering both qualitative and quantitative modes of research and he covers a large range of tools from online surveys and focus groups, web content gathering and analysis, social media network analysis (which I’ll discuss in a future post), and online experimentation. For an author who is quite technical the book covers a very helpful range of ethical considerations, surveys a range of contemporary methodological literature, and he presents the domain of research involved in each of these which would be accessible to a readership that hasn’t done this kind of work before. A few years ago when I began doing web social science and social network analysis, I found Acklands book to be a terrific catalyst into the wider field of web studies. Continue reading →

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post about my favourite GIS tool QGIS, geospatial software tends to be used in a rather narrow subset of academic research, i.e. mostly environmental scientists and geologists. The reasons for interest there are somewhat obvious, I think, but this is not as much the case for the humanities and social sciences. I was recently having a conversation with a colleague who asked me why maps might be part of my research toolkit and this got me to thinking. There are some good reasons for researchers to be suspicious of cartography – particularly inasmuch as the “gaze” from above can tend to lend a sense of “mastery” and unwarranted epistemological confidence. James C. Scott conveys this powerfully in his book Seeing Like a State.

However, with a bit of humility in hand, geospatial data can be a terrific tool for learning and teaching. Continue reading →

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Between 2010-2012 I worked with two other colleagues in Divinity to integrate student writing with blogs into one of our courses. We were able to devote some focussed attention to the relative merits and demerits of using blogs in teaching thanks to some funding from the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme here at the University of Edinburgh (I’d encourage colleagues to apply as it’s a great way to secure resources to explore tech in pedagogical context and PTAS is great about providing avenues for dissemination). If you’d to read a bit more about it, we’ve written up some of our results which were published in 2012 which you can read here. Looking back on the experience of working with this technology in a teaching context over three successive teaching years I have to say that the use of blogging by students is not automatically successful, nor does it necessarily improve the learning experience. An instructor has to be careful about integrating the technology into a learning context which suits its contours as a form of media and a process of content generation. Continue reading →

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One of my favourite new tools that I’ve added to my social scientific research into environmental activism and religion in Scotland over the past three years has been geospatial work or GIS (short for Geographic Information System). Scholarship in the sociology of religion often works with very large data sets (like censuses), but this work is very seldom parsed out on a geospatial basis. This is a huge loss, I think, as there are a number of important ways that geography inflects demographic data sets. Continue reading →

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I’ll often be working on my laptop when a colleague walks past, sees a command-line window open with lines scrolling and says something like, “well that looks scary!”. The producers of the matrix captured this sentiment well with their now classic screen image that shows indecipherable characters cascading down a screen.

I think that one of the least appreciated tools might be the command line. Most folks assume that it is the exclusive domain of software engineers (or Matrix insurgents) and miss out on the efficient data manipulation that is just one step away on the command line (or if you write your own code, but we’ll save that for another post!). Continue reading →

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Timelines are an amazingly useful tool. Because my work is so interdisciplinary, I’m always trying to situate my teaching on a particular text or subject within a historical context. Over the years I’ve found that the ability to bang out a quick timeline can really help as a handout for students or a visual for your powerpoint while you’re teaching to quick anchor a subject in its context. As a grant-writer, timelines can also also be a really helpful way of visualising a project, setting milestones, etc.

There are a wide array of timeline-makers that are web-based or make for tablets and smartphones, but having tested about a dozen of these, I’d say that none are really worth the effort. I’ve gravitated towards two desktop software products for different reasons. Continue reading →

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Have you ever had the sense that some term or word which we take for granted might have come into popular use very recently? Or perhaps you wonder if popular usage of some descriptor might have waxed and waned over time? If you’d looking for a quick way to visualise this as data, check out Google’s NGram viewer. If you haven’t already spent time using google books, then I’d recommend you start there. They’ve become a digitizing juggernaut, sometimes in cooperation with University libraries in an effort to create what they describe as “the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books.” And honestly, they’re probably right.

Having millions of digitized books available is an absolute dream for big data folks such as myself, and Google has been accommodating to people wanting to run research on the database. This can be quite sophisticated, but you can also use NGram viewer for more basic searches. Head on over to the site to check it out for yourself: https://books.google.com/ngrams. There are a few basic functions – you can narrow the search field (which defaults to 1800-2000) and specify the language. You can also run comparative searches on several words, just separate them with commas. Give it a whirl – and let me know in the comments what strange discoveries you make!

I tried a quick search on the much contested term “sustainability” and confirmed that it is indeed a word that no one really bothered using before 1980. There you go.

sustainability

If you want to go really wild, Google makes all their data available through an API. I have in mind to spend some more time working with this tool on my next project which will look at the early (pre-1920) history of environmentalism in Britain and America. Stay tuned for more charts!