Zelle

Follow @zelle on Micro.blog.

A wonderful read on slowness and qualitative research asks an urgent question: “how can we inject slowness back into the art of qualitative inquiry?”

It’s an ethos, not a timeline. It’s about moments – mere moments – of pause. It’s about different kinds of considerations, like attention to place and history. It’s about curating ecstatic bursts of emotions like joy. It’s about uncovering wisdom and following its path.

→ 8:23 AM, Jun 12

This gem from The Jolt is what I needed today. I hope it helps tide you over in this crazy, wacky layoffs-laden environment.

Action is the sauce. It’s the only sauce. And it’s not even a secret one. Action is available to us all, democratized like air.

Today is all we will ever have to take action.

Action doesn’t take skill. It doesn’t need a big brain to make action happen. You don’t need exuberant talent. And you don’t need stacks of cash. Even when the future appears more daunting than a swarm of bees coming after your anxiety jam, action always wins.

→ 3:43 PM, Jun 5

This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all.

Source: The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates — The Guardian

→ 12:18 PM, May 31

Currently reading: The Future of Language by Philip Seargeant 📚

→ 8:24 PM, May 28

A worthwhile six-minute read on Generative AI and writing

Creative intent is the key thing, apologists say – we’ll never give up that even if we leave some of the details to machines. But generative AI undermines creative intent by robbing us of the thinking process. When we are not deliberate about the words we use, we surrender creative intent and our individuality. The ChatGPT-assisted writer’s own voice and perspective dissolve in a bland word soup of other minds.

→ 1:45 PM, May 28

Six months later

Some clarity after a six-month microblogging hiatus.

I spent half of it on corpus design and data collection. The end result is a specialized corpus on Al sampled from The Guardian.

What’s clear: building a principled, well-represented corpus is hard work. Trite but true, anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I must have spent two full weeks gathering requirements for my Spanish DNV application.

What’s clear: it’s less about “how risky is it?” and more about “will I regret not trying?” (FWIW, I’m a solo visa applicant.)

The last three weeks has been less exhilarating. I work for a company that supports publishers (CMS and other related tools) and the recent layoffs hit too close to home. To top it all off, Google has decided to do the Googling for us.

What’s clear: we have to think hard about the version of the web we want to keep.

→ 10:09 AM, May 28

That word “content”

But these paradigm shifts require more clarity in our language, not less. A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive.

→ 12:47 AM, Oct 24

Tech companies are ditching news:

Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark.

→ 2:12 PM, Oct 23

🎧 Are half the words in English from French?

A corpus linguist answers.

→ 12:50 AM, Oct 21

Anyone here on ResearchGate and/or OSF? What’s the deal with putting stuff on these sites?

→ 2:50 PM, Oct 13

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2023

→ 7:29 AM, Oct 13

The focus on manual curation appears to be working. I check the Discover tab whenever I can and, wary of extreme distraction, bookmark a good amount of links to return to later. What a delight to close an app or a tab and go back to my research.

Down the rabbit hole? Here’s an excellent piece.

→ 7:09 PM, Oct 8

Now on its second week, Lancaster University’s MOOC on corpus linguistics is a great introduction to the field.

They welcome learners from a range of backgrounds: linguistics, data science, digital humanities, social science, and more.

→ 2:34 PM, Sep 27

On psychwashing

One of my favorite client publishers, WorldCrunch, had this to say:

Though it might not seem as neat an idea, psychwashing works on the same basis. Corporations are great at hijacking topics resonating among the public — in this case, mental health — and then marketing them as core values. This does not mean that they actually care about these values or even implement them when it comes to their own employees.

Highly recommend subscribing to support a team of journalists with a commendable editorial mission.

→ 10:46 AM, Sep 21

Coming out soon: The Big Bad Bias Book 📖

Say goodbye to the complicated graphs and lists. The Big Bad Bias Book is your ultimate guide to human behavior! We organized all biases, heuristics, and regularities into a periodic table and illustrated each element of the table with a simple story, supported by use cases and references. This book will be of interest to readers, who want to study behavioral science as well as to experienced practitioners and academics, who would like to have a simple yet comprehensive overview of many years of behavioral science research in one place.

→ 11:06 AM, Sep 7

I’m in the middle of my one-year master’s hiatus, spending half of my spare time getting ready for a data science meets digital humanities sort of coursework. Now here I am in the strangely familiar world of corpus linguistics. Good thing I’m no stranger to squiggly career paths.

→ 2:35 PM, Sep 6

Today’s a good day. I’m grateful to have enough. I’m grateful to have known what is enough.

→ 11:46 AM, Sep 2

Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem detached from the original goal, yet carries the most influence.

Another good read from Morgan Housel.

→ 2:12 PM, Aug 31

I upgraded from an obsolete iPad mini to an iPad Air 5. It’s becoming the thing I wanted it to be — a research and study workhorse.

Apps aside (Zotero, Anki, etc), two features make it work like so. Split View for note-taking/web browsing as I read. Scribble for turning handwriting into typed text.

→ 7:53 PM, Aug 23

Dana's Dear Folks Letters

This past week I’ve been revisiting Dear Folks Letters by Donella “Dana” Meadows for inspiration.

Dana begins her letters with scenes from her immediate surrounding — a tragic opera live on the radio, a rainy Sunday morning with the “place sound[ing] like a tuberculosis ward,” at an airport waiting to board a plane, the birth of five calves. Her letters are a perfect reminder to stay connected to the here-and-now before we turn to weightier social issues.

And speaking of staying grounded in reality, here’s Dana urging her students to explore their beliefs:

I never tell them what I think, and I constantly poke them to explore to the core not only what they think, but why they do. Why do they believe the assumptions they believe? Why do they value what they value? I drive them nuts. They write heroically in their papers that we must preserve the biosphere for future generations, and I scrawl: Why? They tell me they believe that the earth’s resources are finite; I ask Why do you believe that?

→ 1:38 PM, Aug 19

LLMs for Social Science

Looks fun! A 3-day large language models workshop for early-career researchers in the social sciences.

→ 11:25 AM, Aug 16

Elizabeth Mackinlay, in Departing Radically in Academic Writing, writes:

BECAUSE we love words and writing, our yearning for academic words and writing to move differently in the world set them in movement — towards a way of writing that would creatively and critically revolutionise our academic work.

[…]

BECAUSE we crave academic words and writing that move us, that we feel, and can understand in our own ways.

I’m all for unimagined possibilities within academia.

→ 9:25 AM, Aug 11

Finished reading: My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout 📚

I devoured the book during my first read. I read it again over the weekend, and I loved it even more so.

→ 12:24 PM, Aug 7

Sir Ken Robinson on Finding Your Element 📺

An invigorating talk on finding and sharing your gifts. I haven’t read the book yet. I’m sure it’s a wonderful read.

→ 12:12 PM, Aug 6

Automating the News by Nicholas Diakopoulos

Finished reading: Automating the News by Nicholas Diakopoulos 📚

Who is it for? I can think of three groups.

Group One: computer scientists, machine learning researchers and and others steeped in technology and interested in algorithmic media.

Group Two: media professionals such as journalists, editors, and news developers who works with emerging generative AI technology and are eager to gain a deep understanding of algorithms in media production.

Group Three: students contemplating the future of journalism and their role within it.

I fall into the second and third groups. Before this book, I thought about degrees tailor-made for computational journalism. I found a few: Columbia University’s Dual M.S. in Journalism and Computer Science and Cardiff University’s master’s program in Computational and Data Journalism. Reading it backed up my decision to take a more pragmatic path.

→ 11:37 AM, Aug 6