If you are interested in case studies of democratization, Polity has just released an article where I analyze the role of religious practices and institutions in normalizing a democratic transition: Democratic Civil Religion and the Kleisthenic Reforms.
Author: Lucas J
Lucas is a student researcher and professional analyst who is interested in the organizational culture of modern and historical bureaucracies.
I am pleased to announce the launch of The Parisian Parliamentarians Projet as a collection on the Internet Archive!
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TAPI 2024
Here is a hot-off-the-presses notice about this year’s edition of the Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute. It is free to attend, and workshop attendance now permits participants to claim a badge!
Unlock the Power of Text Analysis with TAP Institute
Are you looking to elevate your research skills and dive deep into the world of text analysis? The TAP Institute by Constellate offers an exceptional opportunity for scholars, educators, and data enthusiasts to gain expertise in text analysis and pedagogy.
What is TAP Institute?
The TAP Institute provides comprehensive training through expert-led sessions and practical experience. Participants will explore advanced text analysis techniques, access rich datasets, and join a vibrant community of like-minded professionals dedicated to digital scholarship.
Why Join TAP Institute?
- Hands-On Learning: Engage with real-world datasets and tools.
- Expert Instruction: Learn from leading figures in text analysis and pedagogy.
- Community Building: Network with researchers and educators from various fields.
- Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or just starting, the TAP Institute equips you with the knowledge and skills to excel in digital scholarship.
Ready to Enhance Your Skills?
Visit the TAP Institute page to learn more and register for upcoming sessions. Don’t miss this chance to advance your career and join a community committed to innovation in text analysis.
Start your journey with TAP Institute today and transform the way you approach research!
This society may be of interest to those pursuing digital humanities projects on a topic in French history: https://h-france.net/. The index of (digital) primary sources it maintains is particularly comprehensive: https://h-france.net/professional-resources/research-tools/.
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Text Analysis Guides
For those who might be interested in experimenting with text analysis I highly recommend Melanie Walsh’s guide. It walks researchers through the basics of installing and using Python, data collection, and applying text modelling tools. Researchers can even experiment with running the code directly on the website. Those interested in smaller guides to specific portions of the research pipeline can find a wealth of notebooks on the Constellate GitHub site.
This article presents an interesting proposal for making a standardized, modular public administration graduate degree accessible to civil servants. I am agnostic about how or by whom this level of training should be developed, but I agree with the author that governments across Canada have a need to identify the skills that define someone as a ‘professional’ civil servant. I would love to participate in such a program because it would help me understand how my skills and training can benefit an employer that is neither a charity nor a private corporation. Right now, I find that I think of myself as X type of professional who happens to be working for a public service body.
This might seem like a subtle difference, but most professional certification bodies define their members’ capabilities with respect to the value they generate for their clients. But in the case of public servants, the best case scenario is one in which they generate value for citizens who may not be aware of their work. Satisfying ‘clients’ or employers is a secondary source of value in a public servant’s work. This is because citizens’ willingness to pay for public service bodies depends on civil servants’ ability to benefit society on purpose in their capacity as professionals. Public service bodies’ social value goes down if public servants tend to benefit society accidentally or as a by-product of satisfying their job descriptions.
An interesting article about the prevalence of cybercrime and the costs of defending against it: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-cybersecurity-cybercrime-hack-canada/. It is interesting that the move to remote work has created business opportunities for hackers, security consultants, and the cloud providers that host virtual private network access. Corporations and governments are almost guaranteed to lose money to crime, to security measures, or both. Should the costs of managing cyber risks be passed on to consumers/taxpayers? Or are they more like maritime shipping hazards that should be handled primarily by insurers? If so, digital services could only be delivered economically by the largest multinationals, much as in the maritime shipping industry.
To complicate the picture further, there are high environmental costs to maintaining all the processing power that supoorts AI-driven hacking and real-time security monitoring. But so are the costs of pushing the office workforce to commute more regularly. Should customers be asked to pay for carbon offsets for security measures, or should taxpayers and drivers be asked to pay for road maintenance, tolled roads, energy efficient vehicles, and so forth?
Here is a handy introduction to the basic principles of machine learning: Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning – What’s the Difference?. While reading it I paused to wonder whether there is any way to use machine learning for analyzing causal relationships. Machine learning automates the creation and evaluation of models but it doesn’t identify confounding variables, to run robustness checks, etc. I imagine that the predictions based on ML results tend to be rather conservative since they extrapolate the present to the future, rather than use a series of past events to identify root causes. Please feel free to correct me if there are already ML tools that have causal research functionality!
I just ran across this user group that might be of interest to those of you who are dealing with the technical challenges of using open-source/freeware research tools: Ottawa PC Users’ Group. As per the group’s History page, this group was founded in the pre-World Wide Web era of restricted Internet access were peer-support was an important factor in gaining access to software, training, and connectivity. I would encourage researchers to think about user groups that might be pertinent to their work; downloading software is easy today but training is extremely expensive and operating systems often introduce glitches that are not present in controlled lab environments.
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Reading as Visual Processing
I ran across this very interesting article explaining that data visualization works because it draws our brain’s attention to outstanding features within our field of vision. This helps us get on with the business of thinking about what we are seeing rather than simply looking for something to focus on. I got to thinking about the way that I read text sources and decided that something similar must be going on. If I ready a difficult passage several times, I always read the exact same words. This defeats the purpose of filling in the context of the phrases I did understand, but it suggests that our brains are actively searching for salient features in a text without us knowing about it.
I don’t know how these insights could help me read better, but it does help me trust that my version of speed-reading picks up whatever I am able to process in the moment. Has anyone else had an experience similar to the one I am describing? Do you find the presence of marginal notes or keywords helpful in drawing your eye to particular passages? Does font or paragraph length make a difference to how much you pick out?
Lucas Jerusalimiec 