The lurking researcher

Lately, most of my "field work" (lurking) has taken place in a confusing field:

Screenshot from February 28, 2016

Within some circles, this is hardly a strange place to conduct field work. There have been some very compelling articles written lately by people who spent a lot of time in these trenches, including Bergstrom's "'Don't feed the troll': Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit.com" (2011) and a lot of Massanari's amazing work. I would suggest "#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures," which was informed by Massanari's long-term participant observation and ethnographic study (2015, p. 1).


I've always spent a considerable amount of what I consider formative time on the Internet so it's only recently that I've become aware of how often people distinguish between the online and the "real." In many ways, this is similar to Robert Park's attitudes towards the library. In "Digital gender: Perspective, phenomena, practice" (2015), Arvidsson and Foka presents this issue nicely:

Steeped by strong social imperatives and a profound neglect towards the very materiality of human life (Hodder, 2012; Latour, 2003), past Internet research tends to imagine “cyberspace” as a distinct realm. This has caused life “online” to become understood as somehow separate from the “ordinary” aspects of the human experience, ignoring in absurdum how our technologies affect even the most mundane parts of life (Heidegger, 1977; Yoo, 2010) and how digital materials give shape to human emotions (Goel, 2014).

 They continue:

In order for future scholarship to seriously tackle the societal challenges brought forth by the WWW, the Internet must, in other words, be understood as part and parcel of the “real”: a generative information infrastructure (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2010) with profound consequences for real bodies, ultimately affecting both what we are and who we can become (Haraway, 2013; Hodder, 2012; Wajcman, 2000).

I included both of these lengthy quotations because they perfectly sum up where Internet research is coming from and where it should ideally go in order to become more meaningful.


One aspect of online field work that interests me is how to deal with your position as researcher. The first time I had to conduct research outside of the library was during my last year of my undergraduate degree. Although it wasn't exactly field work, I had to make observations and conduct a series of interviews over several visits to a community museum in Montreal. There, my role as researcher was clear. Online, however, it becomes more difficult to differentiate between the researcher or researcher-observer or researcher-participant or Reddit-lurker.


My current topic doesn't require me to be an active participant in these communities. It is merely helpful to get a sense of the communities. The research I've been doing, however, is opening my eyes to the possibilities of studying groups of people or communities online and the changing tools required to do such studies. Just as in the physical world they: share and organize information; do or don't have agency; do or don't have access; appear and disappear; and leave traces. 


References

Arvidsson, V. & Foka, A. (2015). Digital gender: Perspective, phenomena, practice. First Monday 20(4).

Finding the way to the field

     In order to locate the field for different types of information research, I took a closer look at our readings on ethnography and tried to draw out some of the assumptions paired with the field:

• Is the “natural environ” of the subject of study (Hartel, 2010, p. 852)
• Involves a gatekeeper, gaining access, and the continual renegotiation of roles throughout the life of the research (Davidson and Leyder, 1994, p. 169 & 171)
• A place that generates information, but under constraints that require multiple stages of notetaking in order to capture the entirety of the observations. (Hartel, 2010, p. 854; Davidson and Leyder, 1994, p. 172)
• Is generally limited to a single, small-scale place of social interaction. Though multiple fields may be used, usually other fields are mentioned as contextualization and a single field is selected for research (Davidson and Leyder, 1994, p. 174)

     I think that part of the difficulty in locating this field in an information context is less to do with The Field itself, and more to do with the incredible variety in subjects of study. A field for a traditional bibliographer will look largely different from the field for an IS specialist examining adoption rates, which is different again from the field of a librarian studying patron behaviour.

I wanted to consider the field of two research projects I am currently working on, paired with the above understandings. 

     The first, the collation of early printed Japanese texts. The particular book that I hope to study complicates the notion of the field because each copy is located in a discrete geographic location. Anywhere from Cambridge University, to the National Diet Library in Japan. In this case, the notion of selecting a single field for small-scale research doesn’t apply. Even with the narrow scope of a single publication, there are many fields, each with their own context and gatekeepers, which are arguably the natural environment of the book.

     Secondly, I am involved in a project focused on bibliographic records as preservation for variant versions of MMORPGs. In this case, studying multiple games and attempting to understand very small changes between patches, the field is very much online. Again, the notion of a single field is complicated. The project covers numerous games and involves publisher-provided information, community sourced information, and the in-game communities themselves. Each element is governed by its own gatekeepers, generates distinct information, and requires separate contextualization.

     While I strongly believe that both these projects use the direct gathering of information produced from work in their various fields, challenging the concept of a field can expand potential sources of primary information; where the subject of study retains its power to surprise.

Sources:

Davidson, J., & Layder, D. (1994). Methods, sex, and madness. London: Routledge.

Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66(6), 847-874.

Illuminating Statistics

Source:

Population Statistics, Natural Resources Canada, http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geograph/atlas-canada/selected-thematic-maps/16880

This post comes from a memory that goes back years, to when I was still in middle school, and first learned exactly how interesting and useful statistics could be. Growing up in Toronto, it never did truly sink in when I was younger exactly how large the population of this city is in relation to the rest of the country. When I finally saw a map similar to the one I've posted above, it really did clue me in to exactly how sparsely populated so much of Canada is. Although this information is from 2006, but it is unlikely to have changed too much since then.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately two thirds of Canadians lived within 100km of the United States border (2006 Census: Portrait of the Canadian Population in 2006: National portrait, Statistics Canada) at the time this map was created. More than anything, this helped me realize, when I was first starting to learn about history, exactly how large a role the environment and climate can play. Settlement, according to the map, is denser in the east, and is still focused around rivers and in places where the weather was simply warmer. Many aspects of Canadian history can be seen in this map. Although much of this seems very obvious now, it did not when I first saw a map like this one, and in all the time that has passed since I have never seen a better visual representation of how strongly the patterns of human habitation are dictated by the environment we live in. In looking at the question for the week, specifically an instance in which statistics have been particularly illuminating, there certainly has not been any other time when statistics left quite so large an impression on me.

These particular statistics are also a good example of some of the stronger and more clearly reliable statistics that are available. They come from a reliable institution that was counting what is ultimately an observable fact. Opinion polling and similar statistics in particular, although certainly capable of accuracy, are not necessarily able to be trusted to the same degree. Although potentially very useful, without knowing exactly how and when they were gathered statistics may prove more misleading than anything else.

Sources:

Natural Resources Canada. Population Statistics. http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/selected-thematic-maps/16880

Statistics Canada. 2006 Census: Portrait of the Canadian Population in 2006: National portrait. http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-550/p3-eng.cfm#archived

Fear not statistics!

I have never been good with numbers and statistics. I actually dreaded them for a long time, because anytime I came across numbers or statistics, I felt that there was something obvious I should understand, a pattern I should see, but I just did not. During my studies, I tried to stay away from statistics courses, and instead chose courses were I could engage with reality through words. Little did I know that I would have to work with statistics when I started my Master's degree in... French Literature!

I became a research assistant for a retired professor at the University of Ottawa when I started my Master studies in French Literature there in 2012. I had not idea about what type of work I would actually be doing, but when I heard that a professor was looking for someone to work on 18th century manuscripts recently acquired by the University Archives, I went to meet her and basically asked: where do I sign?

The professor I was working for was a very busy researcher and gave me very few directions as to what I should be doing with the manuscripts, except that they were constituted of many disparate texts and that we should be trying to find common threads and see how they all fit together.

As a first task, she asked me to inventory all the people that the author named in the manuscripts (she was a member of many scientific and literary circles and let me tell you, she knew A LOT of people). The manuscripts were about 2000 pages in total, so I spend the next few weeks (read months) reading and noting all names and their occurrences in an Excel spreadsheet (see below part of the spreadsheet).



After I was done, I sent my spreadsheet to the professor, still unsure about why I spent some much time gathering this information. When I met with her, she was really excited and that the spreadsheet would be perfect for a communication at the upcoming Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference.. I was stunned. AGAIN there seemed to be, in that mass of data, an obvious pattern or truth that she was seeing and I was not... After discussing with her, and actually spending some time look beyond the names and numbers, I realized that it was actually true: there were many things that could be said and understood from all this statistical data about the manuscripts, and even about the life of the author. Moreover, there a whole dimension of the work we could not have understood without statistics.

I ended up presenting at the conference, and my presentation was actually titled "The surprises of an index". Yes, you read that well. And to my pleasant surprise, I actually had little work to do in order to convince other researchers at the conference that such statistics enabled us, for example, to qualify the manuscripts as autobiographical (this is simply stated here, but one our argument was that members of her family were cited the most often and used to tell her personal story) and to map a network of her personal relationships, but also a larger network of relationships between people of the scientific, literary and political circles and the high society of Paris during the 18th century.

This experience absolutely changed my views on the use of statistical data in any type of research. And even if patterns and truths remain less obvious to me when hidden in statistics, I still say to myself: "Fear not statistics"!

The dark, yet enlightening, nature of statistics

As much as I love baseball (April is too far, I’m excited about Jays spring training beginning March 1^st), every time I think of statistics, I always think of the probability that I will develop some form of cancer in my lifetime.  It’s gruesome, I know, but immediately out of high school I spent the next eight years of my life living in and out of Sunnybrook and Princess Margaret hospitals, as my mother is a leukemia patient.  She’s a fighter, and thankfully in remission, however when you’re immersed in a particular environment for such a lengthy time it begins to shape the way you think about everything.

What I’ve learned about the world is that in 2015, 3,500 Canadian men will have been diagnosed with leukemia – 1,550 will have died from it.  This means that if I were to be diagnosed, there is a 44% chance that I will not survive.

When it comes to the probability of being diagnosed, 2010 estimates determined that 1 in 53 Canadian men will develop leukemia during his lifetime, and 1 in 96 will die from it.

When these values are ascribed to human lives, and more particularly as Canadian male lives, they force me to visualize myself in a room with colleagues, friends, and family members, making the reality of the disease much more apparent as I recognize my loved ones and myself as belonging members to this demographic. There is a transformation that data undergoes when it becomes anthropomorphized through statistics, making it no longer abstract but powerful and impactful.

The good news is that we can use these emotional statistics to push for improvement…  Improvement in our quality of life, allowing us to make healthier life choices, improvement in the funding and research done to fight the disease, and improvement in the relationships we build and maintain, knowing how precious life is.

Source: http://www.cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-type/leukemia/statistics/?region=on

Future-proofing libraries

One story is that is consistently told in statistics is that exciting (or terrifying, depending on the company) story: the future of the library. This is perhaps commonplace to those of us who work in libraries. Every interaction at the reference or circulation desk becomes a check or an entry on the stats sheet. Even as I write this I have to stop and add a tick to the right column of the stats sheet.

The librarian's love of stats and surveys is joked about often. The Twitter account, @FakeLibStats, is a great example of a widely-shared inside job:

44% of librarian nightmares including the beeping of barcode scanners #beep #beep #beep

— Fake Library Stats (@FakeLibStats) February 22, 2016

And more appropriately:

78% of librarians blog profile is from when they were trying to get a job their last semester of library school

— Fake Library Stats (@FakeLibStats) February 16, 2016

That might be too real right this second.

Statistics are about survival as I learned very quickly. Numbers, in this case, appeal to a perceived objectivity that allows us to make rational decisions.

Source: University of Toronto Libraries. 2013-2014 Annual Statistics. PDF.

Source: University of Toronto Libraries. Annual Report 2015. PDF.

In Statistics Without Tears, Derek Rowntree writes:

It is by making sense of our experience that we human beings grow wiser and gain greater control over the environment we live in... we have this capacity for noticing things... We notice... similarities and differences... patterns and regularities - especially when such features could endanger us or, alternatively, be turned to our advantage. (14)

He also notes that statistics can be seen as a "set of methods of inquiry" (17). These lines of thinking can help explain the prevalence of statistics in libraries. Statistics are proofs and arguments. They can be used for advocacy and promotion. Below are some examples of infographics that use statistics to promote libraries.

(These are cropped images. To view the whole infographic, follow the links below!)

Source: OpenSite

Source: McGill University Library

Source: Toronto Public Library Strategic Plan

Source: eBook Friendly

What's most interesting to me about these statistics is that they are tied to very emotional subjects but use "cold hard facts" to appeal to stakeholders.

Some libraries are starting to see the limitations of these methods, however. The Princeton Theological Seminary Library has implemented library impact story logs to supplement the statistical data. Jenifer Gundry explains that "even with a wide range of data gathering and feedback mechanisms, ...[they] realized that... [they] were still missing... the stories that lie in the gaps between data sets" (Gundry). The library uses these stories as a way of advocating for library services alongside the regular statistics. While statistics give the broad picture and can be very useful, initatives such as the story logs can give us "an additional lens on the scope and scale of our patron's scholarly activities" and remind us "of the variety of the patron experience," as Gundry shows.

 -----

Gundry, Jenifer. "Micro Assessing: Library Impact Story Logs." College & Research Library News. 76.6 (2015): 302-322. Web.

Rowntree, Derek. Statistics Without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.