My (Re)Turn to Narrative

My first serious research project as a folklorist was an attempt to understand the constructed spaces of Urban Appalachians. I received a lot of nice attention for it, and Erika Brady, who was then editing Southern Folklore, shepherded it steadily through to publication. For my dissertation, however, I focused on a kind of sociolinguistic study of oral histories. My original plan had been to return to Louisiana to interview black and white men and women who had worked in the sugar cane industry. I was curious to see who remembered what and how. I couldn’t, at the time, afford the project, and I knew of no funding agency interested in such work.

I took the basic idea, however, and re-focused my efforts on a set of speech communities in Bloomington, Indiana. I had, thanks to a friend, come across a murder that had taken place in 1946 that had galvanized the town and thus had become a kind of legend among middle-aged speakers and, as I discovered, a reference point for older speakers. The project was interesting to me for a number of reasons:

• it took place among members of the Bloomington community who had no direct connection to the university itself, which as anyone who has visited the area knows, dominates the town in the present;
• the speech communities reflected by the individuals I found were not unified, but they were related in ways that I could objectively describe;
• the two speech communities, one black and one white, had been themselves cohesive in the past by all accounts, though they were in the present fragmented with the passing of various members;

While the murder was my starting point, I never really got around to a fine-grained analysis of the different accounts. For one, my ability as a white male researcher to access the full range of accounts was stymied by social stigmas experienced long ago but still painful in the present. That is, the older black men who would speak with me did not want to talk about the incident, pointing, indirectly through the other stories they told, to the racism that frightened them during the period. Older black women felt more free, if only because in some sense the murder revealed sexual peccadilloes in the white community. Those peccadilloes constrained older white women in their discussion and were transformed into a rape scene by older white men.

Fascinating stuff, and I will write about it one day, but what grabbed my attention in the moment was the range of materials that I gathered that were not in the expected discursive mode.¹ That is, all the literature about oral history and life stories focused on narrative, usually grand narratives of the kind one only encounters from avowed, and revered, tellers in a community.

And yet, and yet, as I listened to hours upon hours of tape on my Sony Walkman D3 (now fondly remembered), I found myself with a diverse collection of relatively small narratives and a whole lot of material which was decidedly not narrative in nature. Often it was what I came to call oral exposition, though I never really offered a thorough definition of that term. That is, I had a whole lot of discourse that, if it seemed narrative in nature, it was because the person was walking me through a neighborhood or landscape that had once existed and they used the walk as a way to tour a lost world. It is a highly effective technique, of course (and one I encourage interviewers to use as a kind of memory prompt) but the narratives that are produced are not really stories so much as geographies: “This was here. That was there.” in the form of “And then, if you kept on going down Third Street you’d get to old man McCullough’s store.”

The kind of analysis resulted in very discrete texts that were, I now understand, marked up:

We can, however, make some distinctions between durations, sorting out lines and clauses by how long a situation lasted, allowing us, as Jean Ellis Robertson notes to determine “what durations events were that people recall in chronological order or else not recall as a chronology” (1983:47). Such a scheme might also reveal whether people recall events of a fairly short duration or enduring situations. Robertson suggests the following time-scale index:

Table 3.1: Time-Scale (D=duration) D0 - Period of time lasting up to a minute D1 - Period of time greater than a minute and up to an hour D2 - Period of time greater than an hour and up to a day D3 - Period of time greater than a day and up to a week D4 - Period of time greater than a week and up to a month D5 - Period of time greater than a month and up to a year D6 - Period of time greater than a year and up to a decade D7 - Period of time greater than a decade

If we return to assign the following values to each of the lines: our “first example where Hugh Goble describes his work as an excavator, we can (D7) He was in the excavating business, (D2) so he called me to come up and showed me the job. (D6) And we dug house basements. (D6) And that was when they were remodeling a lot filling stations, (D6) making them super service and that sort of thing, (D0) so I said, yeah, I’ll take it. (D6) So I worked there about two years and a half. (D2) And then we came back to Bloomington. (D6) At that time, my brother-in-law— he’s passed away— but at that time he owned a furniture store, United furniture.

At the time, I had no idea that people were writing about things like TimeML. I knew that some portion of sociolinguistics was interested in this kind of discourse analysis, but everything with which I was familiar was much more oriented toward making generalizations about particular kinds of performances or about particular kinds of groups or about particular kinds of performances within particular kinds of groups. But I was, and am, interested in something more like structuralism: how these texts are part of a generative model that might possibly be located in the human mind.

It’s taken me a decade, D6 above, to discover geeks like me who delight in this kind of thing. (Again, my thanks to Tim Tangherlini.)

Of course, I have thoroughly enjoyed in geeking out with the guys who make the crawfish boats and all sorts of other machines and tools that do real work like food come out of the dirt, but I have also observed that the academic audience for such work is very small and the interstice is an awkward one.

The number of folklorists who are interested in material culture studies has always been something you could count on two hands – at peak moments of when you also counted graduate students, you might need to take your sock and shoes off. It has been great to discover the history of technology, and I was delighted by the reception I encountered when I attended the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, but there the interest in things agricultural and also regional meant a lack of sexiness that I had already felt at the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society. I could carp about this all I want, but it’s not going to change anything. Folklore studies and anthropology have continued to drift apart, which means that academic folklorists in AFS are increasingly housed in the departments of literature and/or languages. They are going to be more interested in texts than in things.

More importantly, the number of folklore jobs will always be limited and occasional. The number of jobs for people doing textual studies is larger, and the number of jobs for those interested in doing so “digitally” is enjoying some prominence now. As the saying goes – and I’m a folklorist so I gotta go with the proverb: carpe diem.

So I love the boats, and I love the guys who make them. And I hope the door that it opens onto human creativity is as interesting to readers of the book as it has been to me to write, but it will be the last of that work for a while for me. As my editor generously offered when I last saw him at the annual meeting of AFS in New Orleans: material culture is hard to write about and do it well. It’s been incredibly difficult to balance spending time with my family, attending to the non-stop parade of inanities my university produces, and to maintain a steady stream of fieldwork experiences that I then transform into useful texts that I can then review and fold into a scholarly script.

I’m not saying text studies are easier, but I am ready to spend some time with data that is already at hand and let’s me focus on analytical models and possible connections with colleagues near and far.

MLA, CCCC, and ChatGPT

The MLA and CCCC have formed a commission, of some sort, to develop a policy, of some sort, with regards to ChatGPT. They are asking people to take a survey. I did, and I decided to save my answers so that I could think about them some more.

Has your institution, department, or other unit proposed or developed policies about ChatGPT or other AI text generation technologies? If yes, please describe it.

Like a lot of people, I wasn’t fully prepared for ChatGPT et al to emerge quite so quickly as a force. Luckily, for me, I had already planned a semester in which active learning in the classroom would take place. To that I simply added more in-class writing assignments, essentially dodging the issue of ChatGPT for the time being. In my discussion with my students, who were more clueless than some of the folk running around proclaiming the sky was falling, I simply noted that I expected them to turn in work that was theirs alone. But I should note that I had not yet fully experimented with the possibilities yet. Havign done so, I still remain fairly unconcerned: I was underwhelmed by ChatGPT’s responses to my prompts. What ChatGPT offered were the kind of competently to well-written non-answers produced students who have been well groomed but ill educated.

Have you developed any classroom policies about students’ use of ChatGPT or other AI text generation technologies? If yes, please describe it.

I am working on a digital storytelling class for Fall 2023, and I think I am going to build at least one ChatGPT experiment into the class. Students already know the technology is out there: how can they use it for good? And by that perhaps there is also room for “their own good,” given the inequities they face. Honestly, if they wanna highjack instutitional systems that already imagine them as cogs to be churned out for a labor market, who am I to blow against the wind?

What concerns, if any, do you have about use of ChatGPT and other AI text generation technologies in teaching?

My chief concern is that it will only devalue writing further, eroding the already weakened position of the humanities. Why write when you can have a bot of some kind do it for you? I think we’re going to see a host of weak scholarship and science get published in a lot of places – we’re all thinking lower-tier journals but we may also find ourselves surprised. Given that universities have farmed out tenure and promotion to journals and presses, why wouldn’t people do it?

I honestly don’t know that I won’t encounter such an article, or book, and be able to tell. But, again honestly, there is so much formulaic writing (and analysis) already out there getting shoved through various publication pipelines, that it might as well be bots. That is, I would argue that we have already boticized ourselves. (That’s a terrible verb, but you get my meaning.)

Getting the Story Right

I think we can all agree that any story that helps people in general and policy makers in particular more aware of the importance of nuclear deterrence is important. It was a great pleasure then to be interviewed by Adam Lowther, host of the NucleCast podcast, about how stories work, and how scientists, scholars, engineers, and others involved in nuclear deterrence can get better at tellings stories that matter to us all.

Listen to the podcast.

Learn more about the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance Deterrence Center.

One Hour a Day

The need to read.

1000 Reads!…?

ResearchGate recently notified me that I had reached a milestone: my research items had reached 1,000 reads. Ignoring for a moment the awkwardness of “research items,” which we can, I think, chalk up to ResearchGate making it possible to publish a variety of materials, I want to think about what “reads” means here, because in the age of citometrics et alum these kinds of quantifications may eventually play more of a role than any of us might wish.

As a member of a department personnel committee, I recently enjoyed reviewing the work of three terrific junior faculty members, all of whom I will note here deserve to be tenured and promoted without delay. All three offered not only impressive vitas and compelling portfolios of materials for personnel committee members to peruse, but also had very polished slide decks, each of which featured various composite scores of semesterly SEIs (Student Evaluation of Instruction). All three are smart enough to know that SEIs are biased in a variety of well-documented ways and, when they consist of 7 fairly subjective questions, offer little of statistical significance. They are also smart enough to know that the same institutions that don’t invest in faculty also tend to think things like SEIs are acceptable forms of assessment and even development. (The kind of professional development I have in mind would not only include funding for travel to conferences but also funding a teaching resource center staffed by people with a real focus on educating college-aged students as well as funding of teaching pairs and training for faculty on how to be better assessors of their own, and their colleagues’, approaches to teaching.)

So add up some scores, calculate an average, and include that in graphic on a slide. Put another way, it doesn’t matter how meaningful, or meaningless, the number is, so long as it is a number.

And that probably reveals my attitude toward a milestone like 1000 reads, because … is it? Is it really 1000 reads? Or is it 1000 downloads? Or 1000 views of a page from which you could download the text, which is how Academia.edu seems to work. (More on that later.)

Google Scholar seems to hew to the more conventional approach to counting things by counting only citations. However it is not entirely clear how they are arriving at those counts: is it only from materials also deposited in/with Google Scholar? I ask because, to be honest, the portfolio of my materials with Google Scholar is not complete. Nor is it complete with ResearchGate nor Academia.edu. Perhaps worse: the make-up of the portfolio on each is different, with Google Scholar having older materials, Academia having more conventionally humanities materials, and ResearchGate getting more computational materials.

In all honesty, there was no principled division of materials because I have never been quite sure which one was worth investing the effort to upload everything, and, really, my goal was to put everything in a GitHub repository. (I’m still working on this.)

In a better world, researchers could post their open access, or otherwise being made accessible, materials in a repository of their choosing and then these sites/services would simply index things there. That has not happened and it’s my guess that that is not going to happen. Academia wants you eventually to invest in a premium membership, like LinkedIn, and Google simply wants to keep you in the GooglePlex. ResearchGate seems to be able to remain in the “if you get enough users the money question will answer itself” phase. Their “About Us” pages hints at perhaps eventually rolling out a job search service or … something.

In the mean time, we got numbers. And I guess you could put them in a slide deck. Or an annual performance evaluation. Or something!

Convergences

Earlier today I was watching a documentary on a climactic event in the middle ages that, as they so often do, changed the course of history. The documentary’s argument relied heavily on one particular scholar, who was quite compelling, but early in the film’s diegesis it pans across the books in his study as a way of establishing his bona fides, as if to say: “Look here. He’s read all these books. He must be smart.” It’s a trope really, one that the past two years of video conferencing has made commonplace. I tend to kinda zone out during these moments, but the glazing of my eyes was halted when the camera panned to the complete set of Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature. (I think they are out of order.)

Well, you don’t see that every day, and I was delighted and paid that much more attention to what followed.

Later, I noted what I had seen to fellow folklorists on the social media platform where we gather, and which is now relentless in its delivery of ads. Of late, a number of those ads have featured decks of storytelling cards or “storyteller tactics.” I can’t comment on the content of these things, because they are extravagantly priced: Fabula’s Storytelling Cards retail for $150 and Pip Decks’ Storyteller’s Bundle starts at $190 for just the digital deck and goes to $250 for the physical deck to be included. (For more, see Fabula and Pip Decks.)

What I can say is that folklore studies missed the boat when it comes to commoditizing the indices.

Developing Your Net Presence & Portfolio

I was recently asked to present to graduate students in our program some ways to develop their “net presence.” Given the many possibilities, and how fragmented the internet feels, I decided to distinguish between three categories/sites of activity:

1. sites that feature or index your work as a scholar/scientist
2. sites where you communicate more personally and directly about yourself and the reason for your work
3. sites where you network

There are perhaps, probably, other categories or kinds of sites, and if anyone has any recommendations, please feel to make revision suggestions or create your own list and let me know to point people your way.

Sites that Feature or Index Work

There are a lot of (too many) places that collect scholarly work either for direct distribution (Academia.edu or ResearchGate) or to point to places where it can be found (Google Scholar or ORCid). In the case of the first two, they offer ease of use, centralization, and tracking and compiling of download statistics: both are fond of telling you how often you have been searched (and found) or how often a paper has been downloaded or cited. This is much more feedback than you get from a site you host yourself, or even from a lot of journals (at least in the humanities).

Sites that Offer a More Personal or Direct Vision

As convenient as indexing cites are, they are not great places to host things like personal, research, teaching, and inclusivity statements. Some may let you post a vita, but you will need to update that and upload it regularly. And while many of the sites provide you a place to have contact information, they often prefer to keep you inside their walled garden. Finally, few of them offer you the chance to explore possibilities like making other kinds of materials available, like blog posts.

When it comes to personal websites, academics have a built-in SEO advantage: by having a university point to our website, it gets a bump in most page rank algorithms. With a little enterprise, one could link to a website from a Twitter account or an Instagram account or some place like Medium. Speaking of Medium, one could easily post there, and it might even be possible to build a small portfolio site there. (I have no idea how well that would work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on Medium has written about using Medium as a kind of web host.)

Once upon a time, and to this day, I pay for a shared hosting service that allows me to run a custom WordPress site – the software is freely available from WordPress.org, but most people I know use WordPress.com. It’s free for a basic site, but if you want to own your own domain, things begin to get a bit expensive. There are other services like WordPress, e.g., SquareSpace, that offer a fairly easy user experience and a kind of one-stop shop for functionality. (WordPress has, I think, achieved the Microsoft Word moment in software where it can do almost anything well enough but at the cost of doing anything really well.)

There are alternatives to WordPress: if I were starting over, I would look closely at Tumblr. I know Tumblr has a reputation for weirdness, but the fact is that it is now run by the same people who run WordPress, and you can point a custom domain at your account and you can actually present a custom website (or at least a customized one).

I haven’t explored it yet, but the Humanities Commons lets you create a site of some kind. If you’re a member already, you would be a fool not to try it out. It could be everything you need.

Finally, if you want to geek out, there is the option that I used for this website (and this blog), GitHub pages. Editing markdown files isn’t for everyone, but there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that everything you create is contained in plain text files and easily downloaded. You could even create files within the GitHub repo interface in your web browser. (I’m working on notes on how I set up this site and my teaching site that I will post a little later this spring.)

Sites Where You Network

And then there’s always establishing a presence in some sort of venue like Twitter or Mastodon (default to hcommons.social if you think you’re going to stay in the academy) for microblogging. (I suppose Instagram and/or TikTok have their academic regions as well, I’m just not familiar with them.) If you are thinking about leaving the academy, or even if you aren’t but you like to have your bases covered, setup an account on LinkedIn. It’s klugey, to my mind, but it seems to have a steady presence in the corporate world. (And remember to link to your website!)

What to Present …

That’s a whole lot about where you can go, and it assumes that you already have a variety of what’s to present: essays, papers, syllabi. But as my colleague Maria Sever notes, “Thinking about how to target [a] site to multiple audiences (academic and non-academic) is [a] struggle.” To be honest, I have changed directions on what exactly I publish on my blog a couple of times.

When I first began back in the mid-aughts, I published anything and everything that came to mind. I used it like a blog. I captured not only research notes but also things my kid had said or done. I enjoyed the cross-talk between academics and technologists, but those “bloggy” conversations dried up as social media platforms emerged and became easier for more people to use and also as blogs themselves became places where people made a name for themselves and/or became publishers. As that happened, I posted less personal stuff and more professional stuff. A lot of my early experiments with Python got picked up by places like CNRS or Duke Library. I began to consider my words more carefully before I posted them, and soon my publishing stream dwindled.

I let the website lie fallow for a while, especially after I get by a copyright claim — a fallacious one that eventually got dropped (I’ll tell that story one day), but as my time with Army drew to an end and I knew I wanted to get back to academia, I also knew that I wanted to have as many conversations as I possibly could, and I wanted to try things out that I could then show others how to replicate. For that reason, I decided to shift from WordPress to GitHub pages.

But in keeping with what I thought was the best part of keeping a blog, all those notes, I decided to still keep a blog, but just do so internally. I bounced around a number of apps, but in the end I decided I would go with an app I already had and used, Devonthink. I had recently decided to pare down the number of apps I use and focus on using them more deeply. Devonthink is just one of those apps that rewards you for your investment. (I tried Obsidian and a bunch of the other currently hot PKM apps, but Devonthink offered me the least friction and the most functionality — web clipper? Check! Markdown editor with preview? Check. Easy import of files? Check! Easy export? Check. Done.)

So, for now, I have an internal bloggy kind of note-taking setup, and an external GitHub blog-like public site. I post to Twitter and Mastodon now and then. I can’t keep up with all the networking sites. I don’t know about you, but I have things I want to read, ideas I want to explore, and explorations I want to write about.

How Platform Businesses Work

I don’t know that the term enshittification adds anything to the debate, but I understand why Cory Doctorow is trying to come up with a term that encapsulates most of the dynamics of platform capitalism – a term I had not encountered before but find really useful. The essence of Doctorow’s argument is that platforms begin by being “good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

Most readers are familiar with the idea that “if you aren’t paying for it, then you’re the product.”¹ Doctorow builds on this idea to demonstrate how, repeatedly, platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and now TikTok have first ensured a user base; then captured businesses seeking to sell to those users – or, in a Russian doll moment, influencers seeking to build a following so that they can sell themselves to businesses; and then having captured the entire ecosystem, proceed to raise the rent on the now-dependent businesses. In Amazon’s case, they actually auction off placement in search results, driving up business costs, which raises prices to consumers, but then allows Amazon, which sees all, to offer their own products in the more profitable segments at lower prices precisely because they do not charge themselves for placement.

Doctorow’s hope is that eventually this amounts to self-strangulation. My take is that, like Mark Twain, the news of Facebook’s imminent demise is exaggerated. Moreover, as it dies, and for however long it dies, Facebook will still make an enormous amount of money.

Ajami

A friend of mine pointed me to reporting by Futurity on the discovery of Ajami, a form of Arabic script modified to capture local spoken languages in Africa. It has apparently been in use for quite some time, and undermines claims by colonial operatives that natives were illiterate. Far from it, as it turns out! Across West Africa people had taken the Arabic script that came with the spread of Islam and used it to capture the sounds of the languages they spoke, thus making it possible to record a variety of information. Even better: it appears that the effort to document Ajami has been institutionalized. (My training in linguistics is largely autodidact, so I don’t know what the technical term is for this. A kind of creole perhaps? At the very least a hybrid written language?

Researcher Positions

I’ve seen a number of almost/somewhat generic researcher positions that I think humanities majors with some computational abilities could not only manage but make a real difference. The convergence of quantitative and qualitative approaches not only to the research which is often the focus of these jobs but also the ability to communicate that research and to adapt to changing circumstances is something we could be really developing in university programs.

Here’s one such position with the details of the particular organization removed, but I have seen so many positions like this that this almost feels like a template that’s been adapted:

Summary

The Researcher position supports the execution of research initiatives in support of organizational objectives and to the progression of the HR profession by producing content for publication online and in print. This position is focused on researching all things work, worker and workplace and may include topics such as human resources, workplace economic impacts, diversity, equity and inclusion, racial injustice, and worker benefits.

Responsibilities

Research & Data Analysis

Conduct primary and secondary research on work, worker, and workplace topics

Design and execute concurrent research studies from start to finish, including defining objectives, developing research plans, designing, and programming surveys, analyzing results, summarizing findings, and creating final deliverables Adapt research practices to meet business needs

Content Development

Produce well-researched content for publication online and in print in compelling and creative ways to foster and elevate customer understanding and help achieve product and/or business impact.

Develop related content for multiple platforms, such as websites, email marketing, product descriptions, videos, and blogs.

Utilize industry best practices and familiarity with the organization’s mission to inspire ideas and content.

Project Management, Collaboration, & Communication

Organize schedules to complete drafts of content or finished projects, collaborating with team members within deadlines and ensure timely delivery of materials.

Act as a brand ambassador, ensuring that all projects fit the client’s style and voice Communicate and collaborate internally and externally to support the research functions to bring high quality proposals, reports, deliverables, presentations, etc. to fruition and help bridge alignment within and across diverse teams to meet business objectives.

Qualifications

Experience

2 years of professional experience in research, project management, or data analysis

Proven time management skills, including prioritizing, scheduling, and adapting as necessary

Proficiency with computers, especially writing programs, such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint