Metadata as a machine for feeling in Germaine Greer’s archive

ABSTRACT

What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.

This article argues that sentiment analysis offers a new and highly productive method of interrogating archival metadata, and that, as a method which privileges emotive understandings of content, it is particularly appropriate to the study of feminist archives like Greer’s. It also argues that these kinds of detailed finding aids are new datasets that reward analysis in their own right, and particularly when considered in dialogue with—rather than simply used as straightforward navigational tools for—the ‘original’ archival content.     

Virtuality,Technology Use,and Engagement Within Organizations

Multinational organizations are turning to collaborative technology to enable virtual organizational structures. While collaborative technology provides distributed workers with new affordances to form relationships and share knowledge, collaborative technology also has complex, interwoven implications for virtual organizing. To disentangle these concerns, this study considers four key dimensions of virtuality—spatial dispersion, temporal dispersion, dynamic structure, and functional diversity—in relation to technology use and engagement with peers within an organization. Survey data were collected in a multinational organization that facilitates work through extensive use of collaborative technology. The results of structural equation modeling reveal connections between two dimensions of virtuality, use of collaborative technology and peer engagement in the organization. Findings suggest that understanding interactions in virtual organizations requires a more nuanced approach to virtuality and active management of technology implementation. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that managers need to actively manage the deployment of new collaborative technology by focusing on specific characteristics of work groups.     

What’s in a Name: Differential labelling of plant and animal photographs in two nationally syndicated elementary science textbook series

This study investigated plant and animal photographs in elementary science textbooks to discern whether there were disparities in the number of plant and animal photographs or in how those photographs were labelled. We examined the Life Science sections of two nationally syndicated (USA) textbook series. For each text, we identified the photographs with plant and/or animal content and evaluated them for two features: (1) the subject of the photograph, and (2) the specificity of the label (name) provided. We found that photographs with animal subjects were more numerous than those with plant subjects; they also represented a greater diversity of animals and had a higher instance of repetition than did plant photographs. We also found a significant naming disparity: animal photographs were three times more likely to be provided with a specific label (common name) than were plant photographs. Not only were plant photographs less likely to be provided with a specific name for the plant (e.g. orchid or dandelion), but also they were commonly identified only by the name for a plant part (such as flower or leaf) or life‐form (e.g. tree or shrub). To address the disparity revealed by this study, and to encourage student interest in and knowledge about plants, we recommend that educators go beyond textbooks to expose students to a diversity of named plants, and present plants as distinct organisms rather than as a collection of parts.     

On Masters and Apprentices in Physical Education

This paper discusses the impact of the mentoring role of faculty on fostering a quality educational experience for graduate students. Although potentially significant graduate students naturally gravitate to work with significant faculty, it is the mentoring role of the advisor that allows the student's potential to be realized. Clues to the impact of this mentoring role are gleaned from Zuckerman's (1977) analysis of American Nobel Prize laureates. To promote a quality advisor–student relationship, departments need to look beyond the student and considerations of the norms and regulations of entrance and ongoing program criteria. One necessary and very significant precursor will be the presence of quality faculty.     

The effect of gender,deceit orientation and communicator style on macro‐assessments of honesty

Recently, deception research has focused primarily on micro‐analytic methods of lie detection (e.g., eye contact duration, response latency, vocal errors). This study adopted a macro‐assessment approach, where deception detection is based on global evaluations of communication, specifically honesty evaluation based on communicator style. 385 subjects viewed four different videotape segments of individuals participating in a simulated job interview. Two of the individuals were truthful throughout the interview, and two fabricated false information on some questions. Subjects were asked to evaluate or assess the honesty level of these individuals, as well as assess a number of communicator style dimensions. Multiple regression analyses revealed that honesty assessments can be predicted from communication style characterized by high friendliness, attentiveness, and preciseness, and low animated and dramatic styles. Some differences were observed for communicator style predictions of honesty based on liars/truthers, subject gender, target gender, and deceit‐orientation differences. Implications for future research are noted.     

Creating Persuasive Messages Advocating Organ Donation

Most people state that they would be willing to be organ donors, however only a small percentage of the population has actually signed an organ donor card. These studies focused on persuasive messages that encourage people to sign organ donor cards. In the first study, people reported their attitudes and knowledge involving organ donation. Results indicated that donor card signing was related to overall knowledge about donation. When only considering those people with positive attitudes toward organ donation, their overall knowledge about donation explained their willingness to sign organ donor cards. In the second study, people read a message involving organ donation before they were asked to sign an organ donor card. The content of the message (i.e., narrative vs. statistics) and the affect of the message (i.e., humorous vs. sad) were manipulated. Results indicated that narrative messages were more effective than statistical messages. Additionally, humorous messages were more effective than sad messages.     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

The Crux of Crucial Experiments: Duhem's Problems and Inference to the Best Explanation

Going back at least to Duhem, there is a tradition of thinkingthat crucial experiments are impossible in science. I analyseDuhem's arguments and show that they are based on the excessivelystrong assumption that only deductive reasoning is permissiblein experimental science. This opens the possibility that someprinciple of inductive inference could provide a sufficientreason for preferring one among a group of hypotheses on thebasis of an appropriately controlled experiment. To be sure,there are analogues to Duhem's problems that pertain to inductiveinference. Using a famous experiment from the history of molecularbiology as an example, I show that an experimentalist versionof inference to the best explanation (IBE) does a better jobin handling these problems than other accounts of scientificinference. Furthermore, I introduce a concept of experimentalmechanism and show that it can guide inferences from data withinan IBE-based framework for induction.

1. Introduction
2. Duhem onthe Logic of Crucial Experiments
3. ‘The Most BeautifulExperiment in Biology’
4. Why Not Simple Elimination?
5. SevereTesting
6. An Experimentalist Version of IBE

   6.1 Physiologicaland experimentalmechanisms

   6.2 Explaining the data

   6.3IBE and the problemof untested auxiliaries

   6.4 IBE-turtlesall the way down

7. Van Fraassen's ‘Bad Lot’ Argument
8. IBE and Bayesianism
9. Conclusions