AMALGUM is a machine annotated multilayer corpus following the same design and annotation layers as GUM (Georgetown University Multilayer Corpus), but substantially larger (around 4M tokens). The goal of this corpus is to close the gap between high quality, richly annotated, but small datasets, and the larger but shallowly annotated corpora that are often scraped from the Web.
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What Makes Individual I’s a Collective We
I came across this article some time ago and marked it as something to examine when there was time. I’m working on the time part, but I wanted to note it here for a couple of reasons:
First, the relationship between the individual and collective is central to folklore studies and, I think, makes folklore a good fit for the study of complex systems but with an action-able focus. (That is, we look at texts as they flow through networks of individuals: texts give us relationships and the values and ideas behind behaviors.)
Second, I think there’s something to be said in swiveling the point of view to texts themselves as collections of clauses and passages.
All that noted, here’s the abstract and the URL
What Makes Individual I’s a Collective We: Coordination Mechanisms and Costs
Jisung Yoon, Chris Kempes, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Geoffrey West, Hyejin Youn
For a collective to become greater than the sum of its parts, individuals’ efforts and activities must be coordinated or regulated. Not readily observable and measurable, this particular aspect often goes unnoticed and understudied in complex systems. Diving into the Wikipedia ecosystem, where people are free to join and voluntarily edit individual pages with no firm rules, we identified and quantified three fundamental coordination mechanisms and found they scale with an influx of contributors in a remarkably systemic way over three order of magnitudes. Firstly, we have found a super-linear growth in mutual adjustments (scaling exponent: 1.3), manifested through extensive discussions and activity reversals. Secondly, the increase in direct supervision (scaling exponent: 0.9), as represented by the administrators’ activities, is disproportionately limited. Finally, the rate of rule enforcement exhibits the slowest escalation (scaling exponent 0.7), reflected by automated bots. The observed scaling exponents are notably robust across topical categories with minor variations attributed to the topic complication. Our findings suggest that as more people contribute to a project, a self-regulating ecosystem incurs faster mutual adjustments than direct supervision and rule enforcement. These findings have practical implications for online collaborative communities aiming to enhance their coordination efficiency. These results also have implications for how we understand human organizations in general.
Read the full article at: arxiv.org.
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On Folk History
and how people talk about the past
In my two years with the U.S. Army I found they were very focused on narrative and messaging, and largely understood narrative as messaging. That is, they did not think about narrative so much as a way to shape or structure information but simply as the content. What they needed to learn were two things: genre and people.
Genre because stories come in different packaging that affects how we receive those stories: indeed, if we mark them as “stories” or as “news.” E.g., jokes vs anecdotes.
People because stories only get around because people tell them, as they themselves are getting around, and they only tell stories that are useful, that help them get around.
What the team assigned the task of developing a framework for the Army eventually arrived at was the concept of social information systems. (That is, folklore with network theory built in.)
Back from the Army I continued to work on materials, and I began to wonder about how often the humanities and the human sciences—the entities that comprise CoLA—use narrative. In particular, how often we assume something is narrative.
Having spent three decades doing field research, and having recorded hundreds of hours of interviews, I was fairly well equipped to assess how much, or how little, ordinary people “out there” tell stories, and, when they do, what kinds of stories they tell. (And how frustrating it can be when you have set out to “collect stories”—which is a weird concept, but that’s for another time.)
What I discovered “out there” is that, even when you set out to collect history, few to no people tell the kind of large set pieces that have been romanticized by scholars and are now embedded in our larger imaginary. What people have, what they tell, are collections of small stories that circle around, are connected to, certain moments in time or topics of interest.
And by small stories, I mean small stories. Stories of a half dozen to maybe a dozen clauses. Small.
And those stories intermingled with, or perhaps were embedded in, a lot of other discourse: arguments and speculations, information and reports, and descriptions of all kinds. E.g., “there used to be a cinema there on that corner, and if you walked around there, then Ms. So-and-so’s shop was right there and she’d give any kid who was nice a piece of candy.”
People talk about all kinds of things and in all kinds of ways and only sometimes is the way they talk in the form of a narrative, of this-then-that.
When I reported these findings in my dissertation, my director—who had literally written the signature work on folk history and local legends in Northern Ireland—responded simply: I had talked to the wrong people.
Now consider this response for the blindness it manifests. Here was one of the finest scholars I have met but he could not see that ordinary people told history, and they told it in their own way. His assumption was, guided by that collector impulse, that the folklorist’s task was to identify the extra-ordinary tellers, the people who told history the way it should be told, the true keepers of collective memory. This ignores the collectivein collective memory. Rather, it prefers the individual memory that claims to know all. If you are thinking this is not only a projection of scholarly expertise but also a remarkable convenience—in that interviewing one or two people is always easier than interviewing a dozen or more—then you would be right.
The text that set me on my journey was one I in fact collected from a woman who was known in her own community as their historian. If you asked about historical matters, at some point the person with whom you were talking would turn to you and say, “But you better go ask Ms. Bridgwaters. She’ll know better.”
Elizabeth Bridgwaters was the scion of her community. She had paid her dues as dietician in the public schools, had run for city council, and had been a preacher in the AME church. In her late eighties when I encountered her, Ms. Bridgwaters enjoyed taking her time in telling a story, but intermingled with all the other things she told me across 15 hours of recordings and many other hours unrecorded, she told me the following in the moment that a community center, which had once been a school, was in danger of being transformed into something the community itself did not want.
It’s interesting you know.
When I was a little girl,
most black people lived on the east side of town.
But some black people lived over here.
But they didn’t want us over there.
So they built a school over here.
It’s a text that fascinates precisely because it is so poetic, using paired deictic instances, there and here, as a way to transform the pronomial reference scheme, turning them from black people to the powers that be and reinforcing it with a building.
In the 15 years that followed that research, my first fifteen years here—against, I started at age 5, I spent a lot of time focused mostly on material folk culture and folklore theory, but this moment, this bit of discourse weighed on my mind, called on me to find it a better place, a place within the larger home of folklore studies.
Ten years ago, with the book on the crawfish boat revolution done, I decided to return to the study of vernacular discourse and to the puzzle of how people talk, when people tell stories, and what those stories look like both as stories and as pieces of a larger discursive repertoire available to individuals to make use of.
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An Origin Story
Yonder.ist has its origins in some of my earliest childhood memories. Growing up in the small town of Franklin, Louisiana, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents, who lived out of town, on a road that followed a curve in the Bayou Teche known as “Irish Bend.” In the middle of the curve, and across the bayou, was the White Gold sugar mill, where both my grandparents worked. They lived in a six-room house that belonged to the company which was flanked by a horse field on one side and my grandfather’s garden on the other. Behind the house, behind the slowly collapsing chicken coop and horse shed, there was a sugar cane field that stretched all the way to the bayou.
Across the road there was a set of even larger fields, at the edge of which there was a band of trees that defined the horizon. When my grandfather told stories, he would often situate them “over yonder,” and when he said that he would wave his index finger in the direction of the tree line. As a child, I understood that yonder was a place just past that tree line. It may even have been called Yonder.
My grandfather had only a fifth-grade education, and he was by all accounts a difficult man. He was, when I knew him, already a bit bent by age. He and my grandmother fussed, as we like to say in Louisiana, at each other, but they also seemed to share an unexpected tenderness for each other. She always made him coffee the way he liked it every morning, and he always sat quietly while she watched her “stories” in the afternoon (aka television soap operas).
Both of them were patient with me, my grandmother teaching me checkers and pinochle (and letting me win more times than I can count even now, decades later), and my grandfather listening to the stories I told. They had a box of toys just for us grandkids out on the back porch, and there, after a Sunday lunch with the family drawn together for a few hours, my grandfather would follow the grandkids out onto the back porch, sit in a lawn chair, and listen to a series of stories as we lined up to tell him. How carefully he listened I do not know, but I know he stayed in that chair, nodded his head, and gave us the audience we wanted and, perhaps, needed.
Yonder.ist is my attempt to capture the fullness of that experience, to honor it, and to highlight just how important such moments are.
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Hello there!
“Hello there!” is my take on the traditional “Hello world!” which has become of those “first thing” you are supposed to do when learning a new language. In Python, it would look like:
print("Hello world!")
While some of what we will discuss here will include the computability of narrative features of discourse—that is, how we can use computers to analyze stories—the focus of our discussions will really be on stories and storytelling. And so, it seems to me, it is better to begin with “Hello there!” a line from the original Star Wars, later subtitled “A New Hope.”
“Hello there!” first makes its appearance when the hooded figure who has been kneeling over Luke Skywalker hears a noise, looks up, and pushes back his cloak to reveal a white-haired and bearded old man. Wizened some might say, and the resonance with wizards is not unintentional we can safely assume. Spying a huddled and afraid R2D2, the old man says “Hello there! Come here little one.”
Later revisitations of the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi had him using it as something of a catch-phrase at various moments in the prequels.
I’ve long liked it as the first line that, in introducing the audience to Kenobi, emphasizes his open and gentle nature, a nature he has maintained despite seeing, as we learn later, so many of his friends killed and his own apprentice turned against him.
It’s a good first line. So, “Hello there!”
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A Star to Steer By
This semester I am teaching a class on Project Management in Humanities Scholarship. I have seen enough graduate students stumble when shifting from the managed research environment of course papers to the unmanaged research environment of the thesis or dissertation, that I thought it would be useful to try out some of the things we know about how best to manage projects in general as well as offer what I have learned along the way. The admixture of experts agree this works and this works for me I hope opens up a space in which participants can find themselves with a menu of options from which they feel free to choose and try. Keep doing what works. Stop doing what doesn’t.
We are a month into our journey together and almost everyone has finally acceded to the course’s manta of doing something is better than doing nothing (because the feeling of having gotten anything done can be harnessed to build momentum to get something more important done), but there are a few participants who are still frozen at the entry door to the workshop where each of us, artisan-like, is banging on something or other.
All of them have interesting ideas, but some are struggling with focus. I think this is where the social sciences enjoy an advantage. They have an entire discourse, which is thus woven into their courses and their everyday work lives, focused on having a research question. What that conventionally means is that you start with a theory (or model) of how something works; you develop a hypothesis about how that theory applies to your data (or some data you have yet to collect because science); and then you get your results in which your hypothesis was accurate to a greater or lesser degree.
Two things here: the sciences have the null hypothesis, which means they are (at least theoretically) open to failure.[^1] The sciences also have degrees of accuracy. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say things like “this largely explains that” or “this offers a limited explanation of that” in the humanities? Humanities scholars would feel less stuck because they would be less anxious about “getting it right.” We all deserve the right to be wrong, to fail, and we also deserve the right to be sorta right and/or mostly wrong. Science and scholarship are meant to be collaborative frameworks in which each of us nudges understanding just that wee bit further. (We’re all comfortable with the idea that human understanding of, well anything, will never be complete, right? The fun part is the not knowing part.)
The null hypothesis works very clearly when you are working within a deductive framework but it is less clear when you are working in an inductive fashion. Inductive research usually involves you starting with some data that you find interesting, perhaps in ways that you can’t articulate and your “research question” really amounts to “why do I find this interesting?” Which you then have to translate/transform into “why should someone else find this interesting?” Henry Glassie once explained this as the difference between having a theory and needing to data to prove it, refine it, extend it and having data and needing to explain it.
There is also a middle ground which might be called the iterative method, wherein you cycle between a theory or model, collecting data, and analyzing that data. Each moment in the cycle helps to refine the others: spending time with the data gives you insight into its patterns (behaviors, trends) which leads you to look into research that explores those patterns, trends, behaviors. Those theories or models then let you see new patterns in your texts that you had not seen before, or, perhaps, make you realize that, given your interest in this pattern, maybe you need different texts (data) to explore that idea.
I see a lot of scholars, junior and senior, stuck in the middle of this iterative method without realizing it and don’t know which moment to engage first. What should they read … first? (I have seen the panic in their faces.) What I tell participants in this workshop is that it doesn’t matter. They can start anywhere, but, and this is important, start. No one cares whether you start reading a novel (and taking notes) or reading an essay in PMLA (and taking notes). 99% of managing a project as an independent researcher is just doing something and not letting yourself feel like you don’t know where to start. Just start.
Will it be the out come be the project they initially imagined? Probably not. But let’s be honest, that perfect project they initially imagined lived entirely in their heads—as it does for all of us. It was untroubled by anything like work. (That’s what makes it ideal!) It was not complicated by having to determine where we might publish the outcome, who might be interested, to what domain you might contribute. It was also unavailable to anyone else, inaccessible to anyone else, and probably incomprehensible to anyone else. As messy and subpar as the things we do in the hours we have are, in comparison to that initial dream, they are at least accessible to others, who will probably find them interesting and/or useful.
To be clear, I usually press workshop participants and students to start with data collection / compilation (and not with a theory). Mostly that’s because I am a folklorist (and some time data scientist) and I feel at my most driven when a real work phenomena demands that I understand it. To a lesser extent, as comfortable as I am with my own theoretical background, I find the current explosion in all kinds of theories a bit overwhelming. I prefer to let the data tell me what data I need to go learn, else I might end up going down the rabbit hole of great explanations and never get anything done!
[^1]: The sciences are currently undergoing a pretty severe re-consideration of the “right to be wrong.” With the cuts in funding to so many universities — because, hey, the boomers got their almost free ride and shouldn’t have to pay for you — the American academy has shrunk, creating greater competition for the jobs that remain, which has meant that scientists often feel like they can’t fail. Failure must be an option when it comes to science, and scholarship. When it isn’t, we end up with data that has been, perhaps purposefully or perhaps unconsciously, miscontrued because the results need to be X.
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Raising a Worldbuilder
A recent comment I made on the current state of education in the humanities on LinkedIn drew a fair amount of attention. I’m not linking to that comment here as it was of a moment, but there are some things I have observed based both on being a parent of a particular kind of thinker as well as documenting similar kinds of thinkers out in the world. I call them world builders here, but they might also be called immersive thinkers.
Origins
In the car one morning on the way to her school I commented to my daughter that the rain had made driving a bit more difficult than usual and that I would have to make sure to keep two hands on the wheel. It was, for me in that moment, simply a metonym for paying attention, and, I confess, a way of letting my daughter know that her dad may not be paying as close attention to our conversation as we both often enjoyed. Over the years of a morning commute that got her to school and me to work, we had enjoyed a wide variety of conversations, which sometimes ran sufficiently wild, especially at her end, that I had to remind her, as a way of reminding myself, that driving was the higher priority.
A little too often my reminders came out more as a chides, which I always regretted. As was often (thankfully) the case, my daughter performed some conversational judo on it by responding, “What if you had three hands?” Her first thought was that I could drive and wave to drivers nearby, but quickly she spun the idea out into a variety of possibilities before settling down into playing a variety of instruments with three hands: there was a three-handed piano piece, then a three-handed guitar melody, and then a three-handed trumpet call. The sounds grew wilder, weirder and her laughter built from giggles to squeals.
Her first move displayed the power of divergent thinking, something which has been explored quite a bit over the past few decades in creativity studies, but her next move was to dwell in a particular domain, to immerse herself in a world, and to play with the possibilities there. For the time being, I would like to call that immersive thinking. It is surely related to that kind of thinking that we sometimes call rich mode or right brain thinking in a way that I want to spend more time thinking about — and to which I am open to suggestions![*]
World-building was, and is, like a reflex action for my daughter. From the time she could speak, she spun out stories. She usually enacted the stories, dramatizing them with props and costuming if she was a character or animating a wide variety of objects, some of them more obviously meant for such use and others not. I can’t, for example, count the number of times objects at restaurant tables came to life and led complex social lives when adult conversation became uninteresting to her. My wife and I saw utensils be sisters, salt and pepper shakers be parents, and a tented napkin become a home.
It was, and is, an amazing thing to watch, but as many creative individuals know, such an ability does not come without its penalties. While her school labeled her a “deep creative,” it seemed largely a way of admitting they were unable to come up with a plan on how to make a space within which she could learn and grow to suit her own abilities and interests. Don’t get me wrong: she did well (enough) in school, but that’s largely because we worked hard at home for her to adapt to the regimen at school. And so she got high marks, but those marks were also regularly accompanied by comments from, well-meaning and really nice, teachers that she “did not pay attention” as well as she should, that she was “daydreamy” or that “sometimes she just phones it in.”
One could perhaps fault the teachers, but I rarely find individuals are the problem in these circumstances. More often a system is at work. In this case, I think it’s fair to blame a larger educational ideology that has come to rely upon standardized tests as one of its central metrics. In a moment that resembles the classical economics parables about unintended consequences, what we so many of us face, as parents in the paroxysms of our children or ourselves, is an entire educational system which many believe is headed precisely in the wrong direction for what looks like reasonable, well, reasons.
Indeed, an entire cluster of industries have arisen around the wobbling of the educational infrastructure in our country. The technorati favor two flavors that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first flavor is that articulated by Ken Robinson who argues that our schools are stuck in the industrial age, anxiously trying to turn out uniform widgets in a moment where standardization couldn’t be less useful — the assumption being that things are changing more quickly and more predictably than ever. I don’t subscribe fully to this latter notion, but it’s not hard to see that the current context for businesses favors only a few large incumbents with stability, but employment with those incumbents, as two decades of layoffs and jobs moving from one part of the world to another have provied, is not stable. In other words, institutions have stability, but only individuals at the top of those institutions get to enjoy the fruits of that stability.
Outside of those narrow mountaintop retreats, there’s a whole host of changes taking place as industries transform in the face of an amazing amount of computing power. My own industry, higher education, is facing such a transition, but think about even the way manufacturing is changing as building components becomes less about removing metal by mill and lathe work or stamping and cutting but more about “printing” them by building up a part molecule by molecule. Suddenly, economies of scale matter less and sheer imagination matters more. (Well, you’ll still need quite a bit of capital to have such a “printer” at your disposal, but that’s a return to a history we have seen already — i.e., the original printing press!)
What to do with our little geek, our world builder?
Here’s the short of it: our daughter was a geek. She had all the classic geek traits: she prefered to be fully immersed in a problem or project or world and she oscillated between wanting external affirmation for her accomplishments and not caring what others think. Most geeks I know are like this. Many of them truly believe they don’t need anyone’s approval, and for a few of them that may very well be true. I also know, speaking as a geek (I think) myself, that, yes, sometimes a nod from someone you respect is not only all you need, but it is something you really want.
A lot of curricula which have high geek probabilities have switched to more project-oriented pedagogies. We are seeing more of it engineering, and it has always been a prominent part of architecture. But what to do with our geeks, our world builders in other domains? How do we re-rig systems at least to allow them to think the way they think?
An example from her experience:
For a time, our daughter was in the school choir. Every year the choir put on a musical. One year it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; another it was The Wizard of Oz. Every year students auditioned for a role in the play. Now, how do you suppose those auditions took place? Did it come after a watching the film version or reading all or parts of the book? Did it come after listening to some of the story’s most famous passages and songs? That is, did it allow an immersive thinker an opportunity to do what they do best, get inside a world and look around, elaborate it, play with it? No, the auditions were songs from some place else, handed out the week or so before the auditions. Students were told to practice the songs, do their best, and decisions would get made.
Now, that approach works if a student is procedurally-driven and understands the necessity, or already desires, adult approval. It doesn’t work at all for the student that needs to live and breathe inside a thing, to get a sense of it, to find their excitement there.
Fundamentally, this comes down to the difference between teachers as the center of a curriculum and students at the center. As a teacher myself, I know I can’t be all things to all students, and in a post to follow, I want to think more about how education might be made better for more kinds of learners than it currently is. In fact, I worry about one recent trend in particular: the rise of the master teacher and what that means for learning differences — here, learning differences are meant much more broadly than they are in the education industry.