Inverse relationship between beer and publication

This is bad news.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

Possible silver lining:

Some scientists suggest that biologists in the Czech Republic could prove to be an anomaly, given that the country has a special relationship to beer, boasting the highest rate of beer consumption on earth.

Review: Holland, ed. Remote Relationships in a Small World (2007)

I ran across Remote Relationships in a Small World a month or so ago in a publisher’s catalog, and I thought it looked pretty promising, seeing as my work is gravitating towards studies of social networks and mobile communication. The collection of essays are intended, according to editor Samantha Holland, to provide new research on social relationships conducted online. This, I assume, is the source of the title, which suggests that the digital age has both made the world smaller by allowing for instant communication across time and space, but at the same time that time and space is real and has a real effect on the relationships conducted online.

The three chapters that jumped out at me were Holland’s chapter (with Julie Harpin) on the use of MySpace by British teenagers, Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby’s study of the use of WebCT forums and blogs in online learning, and Simeon J. Yates and Eleanor Lockley’s study of male and female cell phone use. (The complete TOC can be found here.)

Holland and Harpin presented the results of a pilot study of teenage British MySpace users, following the usage habits of 12 teenagers. Their results seemed to confirm the work of boyd and Ellision (2007) in that the teenagers they studied tended to use MySpace to communicate with people they already knew socially. Additionally, the authors found that, unlike the typical stereotype of the digital loner, the social network was a “hive of sociability.”

Similarly, Finlay and Willoughby’s chatper didn’t break any new ground. They found that a minority of the (mostly male) students using their course forum and individual blogs would post offensive messages, and that this behavior tended to alienate other users. After their mostly textual case study, the authors concluded that for an online learning space to be a real community of practice there needed to be scaffolded interactions with the community so that users could become socialized to it, a feat which was not possible in their 12-week course.

Finally, Yates and Lockley examined the use of cell phones by men and women in a number of different contexts: at home, on the train, and in other public places like restaurants and coffee shops. They found that the men in their study tended to send shorter messages than the women, and that the longest messages were sent in conversations between two women. Like Holland and Harpin, the authors found that the participants in their study tended to not use their phones to contact or converse with strangers, but rather to keep in touch with people who were close to them, both physically (neighbors) and emotionally (friends and relatives).

I found this collection to be a bit of a mixed bag. While the studies I mentioned here were interesting, and had interesting conclusions, I found myself wishing they were a bit more rigorous. This was particularly the case with the Holland and Harpin and Finlay and Wiloughby chapters. While each was interesting, neither broke new ground, and both seemed to merely share the overall theme of the online texts they collected. Admittedly the Holland and Harpin study was a preliminary one, but, that being the case, I wonder why it was included in this collection.

The Yates and Lockley chapter suffered from the opposite problem. The authors used a large number of measures—surveys, observation, diary studies, focus groups—but the analysis and discussion of these measures seemed abrupt to me. I would have liked to have seen them choose some of the data to focus on with more depth and detail, rather than have them present this cornucopia of data.

That said, I found the book to be useful, not the least for the support, however tentative, that the studies included in it lend to the thesis that social communication is used more to keep in contact with people in existing social networks, rather than create new contacts. Somewhat ironically, these studies seem to suggest that our online relationships aren’t so “remote” after all.

Written Communication publishes my Wikipedia article

The article, “Patterns of Revision in Online Writing: A Study of Wikipedia’s Featured Articles” is behind the paywall, but you can view the abstract here.

Wesch on collaborative research

Michael Wesch at Digital Ethnography has posted a description of a collaborative research environment developed by one of his classes.

During the first month of the semester the Digital Ethnography class of 2008 has been hard at work trying to leverage various online tools to improve our collaborative research efforts. We have managed to pull together a number of free tools into a single research platform that I think is going to work out very nicely.

Wesch then goes on to describe how he and and his students have cobbled together a shared, online environment for recording their research notes and other materials using Netvibes, Zoho, wikis, and other tools. It seems like a great setup, particularly for this application: researching digital environments.

I am curious, however, to see how similar tools will be used for other kinds of research, particularly research of non-digital subjects. Any good tool needs to be 1) suited to the task and 2) suited to the user. My suspicion is that while Wesch’s online research environment works great for digital research—for example, Wesch describes a tool for displaying online video next to a research form, the latter of which can be filled out while the video is playing—I wonder if its usefulness for other research tasks—say, traditional library research—will be somewhat limited. Some users simply don’t like to read a book in front of the computer, for instance. (Although, people’s habits are rapidly changing, so it may turn out that I’m completely wrong about this.) In short, this is a great setup for online research, but its efficacy for other kinds of research will depend on individual user’s habits and what it is they want to study.

Review: John Scott, Social Network Analysis (2000)

I recently picked up a copy of John Scott’s Social Network Analysis: A Handbook when I was researching methodologies I could use in my study of Wikipedia and social networks. Scott, a sociologist, provides both a history of the development of social network analysis and an introduction to the basic terminology and concepts related to the discipline. While this second edition doesn’t seem to have been updated to account for the developments in the field since the first edition of 1991, I found it to be a more than adequate overview of the concerns and methodology of social network analysis.

(I have to provide a caveat here: I am not a sociologist and I’m completely new to social network analysis, so any criticisms—or praise—of this book on my part may be completely off-base. For example, I have no idea how social network analysis has developed over the last 15 years, so I’m not really competent to judge if Scott has left out any important additions or modifications to the theory and methodological practices used in social network analysis. My comment above is based solely on my impression in reading the text that the majority of Scott’s references in the text are pre-1990. Anyway, you should take most of my claims in this post with a grain of salt.)

Overview
Scott’s book is organized into three main sections: the first and second chapters outline the history of social network theory, while chapters 3–8 introduce basic terms and the methods of network analysis. Finally, an appendix lists software tools for conducting social network analysis with short reviews of each software package.

In chapter 2, Scott outlines the history of social network theory. According to him, it began with the focus on societal structures in the work of anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown during the 1920s and 1930s. Later, researchers, particularly a group centered at Harvard, combined elements of gestalt theory and the mathematical tools of graph theory to analyze these structures. One of the chief developments of this research was the formalization of the theoretical principles of network analysis, which helped to determine the basic methodology of social network analysis, and the development of the sociogram, a digram of the nodes and links in a network.

The remainder of the text serves as an introduction to social network analysis and the terminology and best practices used by network researchers. According to Scott, analyzing social networks is primarily a process of collecting and storing data. However, that data isn’t attributive data about a subject. Rather, it is relational data; that is, data about the connections between subjects. For this reason, when researchers collect social networking data, they should focus on these relations. The primary method of doing this is with incidence or adjacency matrices, where the former record binary information about the existence of a connection between two classes subjects and the latter record information about the number of connections between the members of a particular class. Further, these matrices can be directional, indicating that the connections between subjects do not necessarily flow both ways.

The analysis of social networks can be conducted using positional or reputational approaches. When using the positional approach, researchers are interested in investigating the social position that a particular subject occupies, whereas with the reputational approach, which is used primarily when there are no stable positions to investigate, researchers have their subjects suggest other subjects, and the connections between those subjects are mapped.

Final thoughts
Throughout the text, Scott emphasizes the difficulty that many researchers have with social network analysis because of its foundation in matrix algebra. However, there isn’t much math in the book, and what math is there is explained in an understandable manner. He acknowledges that most researchers will rely on software tools to do the number crunching for them, so he spends more time explaining the research rationale and grounds for using particular approaches to the study of social networks, emphasizing that individual projects will require different approaches and that researchers should understand what their tools are measuring, even if they aren’t sure how they are measured. As a rhetorician, I found Scott’s repeated insistence that researchers have a clear idea of their research goals before choosing the tools they will use so as to make sure that those tools are the best for their particular design to be refreshing, and it was easy for me to see how this type of analysis would be a good fit for ecological studies of social phenomena.

Overall, I found the book to be an accessible and readable introduction to the techniques of social network analysis.

Teens privacy savvy

CNET News is reporting on a Pew Internet & American Life Project study called “Teens and Social Media,” which found that teenage girls tend to blog more than teenage boys (35% and 20%, respectively) and that teenage boys post more videos online than girls (19% of boys have posted a video online compared to 10% for girls).

However, for me the most interesting news is that teens take greater measures to protect their privacy online than adults do.

But how safe are teens being in protecting their personal information and images? More safe than adults, apparently. About 66 percent of teens with a social network profile restrict access in some way and 77 percent of teens who upload photos restrict access some of the time, while only 58 percent of adults who post photos restrict access.

For video, a smaller percentage (54 percent) of teens restrict access, about the same as adults.

Facebook user statistics

Using Facebook’s new ad system, Paul Francis has collected and published demographic data on Facebook’s users.



As Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch originally reported, Francis’s data indicated that Facebook users were almost two-thirds women. Francis has since updated his results, pointing out that when he originally collected the data, he was unaware that Facebook users could choose to not select a gender, a fact which skewed the number of female users higher than they actually are.

via Tech Crunch

SCMLA presentation: Wikipedia and revision

I just got back from the SCMLA conference in Memphis; the weather was great, and I got to hear some interesting presentations from my panel-mates.

Here is a copy of the slides from my presentation via Google Docs. The presentation reports the findings of a study I conducted on revision practices on the site.

Enjoy.

New Wikipedia study: Zealots and Good Samaritans

Denise Anthony, Sean W. Smith, and Tim Williamson of Dartmouth have released a new study of volunteer help on Wikipedia. In the paper, “The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia,” the authors argue that the quality of Wikipedia articles depends on “Good Samaritans,” or infrequent posters who maintain article quality, and “zealots,” dedicated users who spend a great deal of time on the site. Essentially, Anthony et al. argue that Wikipedia maintains its quality through the quantity of its users.

Here’s the abstract:

New forms of production based in electronic technology, such as open-source and open-content production, convert private commodities (typically software) into essentially public goods. A number of studies find that, like in other collective goods, incentives for reputation and group identity motivate contributions to open source goods, thereby overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to the open-content online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that quality is associated with contributor motivations, but in a surprisingly inconsistent way. Registered users’ quality increases with more contributions, consistent with the idea of participants motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous “Good Samaritans” who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed “zealots” contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.

via The Wired Campus

Mischaracterizing sources (Wes Anderson edition)

Jonah Weiner has a new piece in Slate bashing Wes Anderson for, among other things, his depiction of non-white characters in his films. Weiner’s argument centers primarily on Anderson’s new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, which is set in India (and which I have not seen). While the argument is largely compelling, one of Weiner’s claims so misrepresents a scene from The Royal Tenenbaums that it damages the whole. Here’s the quote:

Anderson generally likes to decorate his margins with nonwhite, virtually mute characters: Pelé in Life Aquatic, a Brazilian who sits in a crow’s-nest and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese; Mr. Sherman in Royal Tenenbaums, a black accountant who wears bow ties, falls into holes, and meekly endures Gene Hackman’s racist jabs—he calls him “Coltrane” and “old black buck,” which Anderson plays for laughs; Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore, the Indian groundskeeper who occasionally mumbles comical malapropisms (Anderson hired this actor, Kumar Pallana, to do the same in Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket). There’s also Margaret Yang, Apple Jack, Ogata, and Vikram. Taken together, they form a fleet of quasi-caricatures and walking punch lines, meant to import a whimsical, ambient multiculturalism into the films.

While in aggregate I think Weiner has a point, I think his summation of the scene between Danny Glover’s Henry Sherman and Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum is tremendously misleading. Here’s the scene that Weiner is referring to:

I think it is really difficult to describe Glover’s reaction to Tenenbaum’s racial taunts as “meek endurance.” On the contrary, the scene explodes into a furious shouting match, and, unlike Weiner’s claim that all Anderson’s non-white characters are “virtually mute”—with the implication being that they are one-dimensional caricatures—Glover’s dialogue is succinct and his performance in the scene is extremely nuanced.

I understand the impulse that led Weiner to overstate his case here: once you have created a theory, it is easy to assume that that theory is totalizing and to try to apply it to all situations. This is a problem faced by everyone who has ever tried to create an argument. However, I think the Glover example suggests the difficulties in trying to be this totalizing. A more nuanced argument would account for this apparent aberration—I would suggest that it might have something to do with Glover’s status as a professional actor, a status that is not held by many of the performers who played the roles of the offensive characters Weiner lists—or possibly scrap the argument in favor of one that could account for this scene.

Human-animal hybrids

William Saletan in Slate reports on the combination of human cells with animal eggs in the UK. The resulting embryo would have 13 animal genes and over 20,000 human genes. The research has been allowed in the UK with the stipulation that the embryos be destroyed within 14 days of their creation.

I recently read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and this story reminded me of his description of hybrids. Hybrids are, roughly speaking, the combination of nature and society—or, in this case, subject and object—to form a new entity that isn’t easily quantifiable as either. One of Latour’s arguments about modern culture is that it attempts to categorize all hybrids as either natural or societal, a move that the British government appears to be making here. On the one hand, the number of animal genes is limited by the government to make sure that the embryos aren’t too non-human. But, on the other hand, the embryos have to be destroyed within 14 days of their creation because they aren’t human enough. It looks like Latour called this one.