Blogging

We’re having a live, almost Presidential-style “debate” in the UK on the program “Question Time”, ahead of our almost Presidential-style election. If you fancy “live blogging” it, like the Americans did, the place to go is perfect.co.uk. I won’t be myself; I will be sulking because an impromptu meeting at work plus childcare duties has caused me to miss out on a drink with the creme de la menthe of the UK blog community. Or maybe I will; much depends on how much of a fuss I think there is going to be over the Attorney General’s advice furore. Never has the phrase “the coverup is always worse than the crime” seemed so apposite; if they’d just published this straight off it would have convinced those who supported the war, and not convinced those who didn’t, for no net loss. Publishing it now after having fibbed so much about its contents, looks pretty bad.

Amardeep Singh at the Valve presents us with a long quote from Samuel Johnson on aesthetics. It’s a nice quote, but I prefer the one below the fold (taken from The Rambler no. 106), which seems quite apposite to the enterprise of blogging.
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Thanks to the SQL gurus who responded so quickly to my “question”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/22/sql-query-query/. Their help allowed me to get the data I wanted, namely, a table showing how often each of our authors has posted in each of our categories. A matrix like this allows for a “correspondence analysis”:http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stcoran.html of the joint space of authors and topics, in the spirit of “Pierre Bourdieu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804717982/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.

I’ve updated the analysis from the original post, following some of my own advice to amalgamate the categories that different people were using to post a short joke or trivial item (like “Look like flies” or “Et Cetera” and so on). I grouped all of them into a “Trivia” category. “Books” and “Literature” were grouped together, as were “Internet”, “Intellectual Property” and “Information Technology”. Finally, I also grouped “British Politics” and “UK Politics” into a single category. Unfortunately I had to drop Jon Mandle from the analysis (sorry Jon!) because none of his posts has a category.

Correspondence analysis lets you represent two kinds of entity simultaneously in two dimensions, allowing you to see how the elements of each entity are related to one another, and to those in the other entity. The idea is to reduce high-dimensional spaces (many authors, many categories) to low-dimensionsal ones with minimal loss of information. The figure below (also available in “a larger size”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dudi-ct.png and in “PDF format”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dudi-ct.pdf) gives the results for the CT data.

The results are interesing. You can assess the similarity of authors and categories to one another by their closeness on the diagram — or, more specifically, by the size of the angle formed between any two entities and the origin. Entities further out from the origin are more influential in structuring the dimensions that the figure is constructed on.

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Any MySQL gurus out there, who also know about WordPress’s database structure? I have a question for you.
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I was reading this article in Wired when I came upon the claim that “Google: Accounts for almost four out of five internet searches (which includes sites that license Google’s search technology), and 75 percent of all referrals to websites.” No references are offered for these figures. The rest of the piece is filled with other supposed facts without one link to or mention of a source.

Having followed the search engine market for a while the numbers in the quote above sound suspicious to me. I have never seen figures suggesting that Google (with or without affiliates) accounts for 80 percent of all searches. I contacted the author for his sources. To his credit, he got back to me very promptly. However, he did not point me to a source that can verify the information. (I do not quote from personal communication in public unless I indicated to the author that I would – which I did not – so I will not give you his exact words, but there is no source with the above figure that I can pass on to you or a collection of sources whose aggregated information leads to the above number.)

Newspaper and magazine articles do not require citations so unless the source is mentioned in the text as part of the article (e.g. “a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found…”) then the reader has no way of verifying the information (unless the reader decides to contact the author and the author responds). In academic writing, it is well understood that you have to cite your sources whether you are referencing ideas or specific facts. I realize that this may be tedious to do on the limited pages of newspapers and magazines. However, it seems that in online publications there should be less of a constraint to cite sources. If the reporter did his or her job and looked up relevant references for an article then why not link to them? Sure, if these are proprietary sources then that may be difficult. But I am sure that is not always the case. Yet we rarely see references to original sources in traditional newspaper and magazine pieces.

Now that the above article has appeared in Wired with the mentioned numbers stated as supposed fact, future writers (of blogs, newspaper articles, academic papers or what have you) can simply cite the Wired piece as the source of these figures and be done with it. And then we will have an unverified (and highly unlikely) figure taking on a life of its own.

PS. It is a whole other issue to figure out what it really means that a search engine accounts for x% of all searches. That may still just mean y% of all users (where y is a much smaller number than x). You can read more about this here. It would take a whole other post to get into why this may also be relevant here. I’ll leave that for another time.

And still they come … another mySociety project, aiming to kick some life into the carcass of democracy in the UK. Give up guys, it’s dead, that’s what I say.

No seriously. Notapathetic.com is a laudable effort, allowing those of us who really really don’t think voting is worth bothering with to differentiate ourselves from those who merely don’t understand the question, can’t be bothered or (surprisingly many) didn’t realise that there was an election on. You can record your reason for not voting for posterity. Don’t be put off by the fact that a lot of the putative reasons on the website look a bit pathetic; there is going to be some proper analysis of the reasons (I’ve apparently signed up to hand-classify a hundred, so make yours interesting), so the unsystematic ones will tend to cancel out. So if you’re intentionally not voting (even if live in Birmingham or Blackburn and thus suspect that you will end up voting Labour by post anyway), pop along to notapathetic and tell the world why.

I had sort of promised to put this link up last week, but well, you know.

Dwight Merideth, “The GOP Is Robbing Us Of Our Christian Heritage”:

Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 211 Judges to the Circuit Courts. Democrats have appointed 122. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 813 trial Judges to the District Court bench while Democrats have made 508 such appointments.

If the Federal Judiciary is comprised of a bunch of liberal activists, it is the GOP who put them there.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, “When Reality Outstrips Irony …”

“It is unfortunate in our electoral system, exacerbated by our adversarial media culture, that political discourse has to get so overheated that it’s not just arguments, but motives are questioned,” Tom DeLay, 4/16/05

“The Democrats’ hateful, moronic comments are beyond the pale, and the Democrats know it, but they don’t care because they have nothing to offer the public debate but rage, resentment and quackery.” Tom DeLay, 12/16/03

Fred Clark, “And have not charity”:

Elimination of the estate tax would result in a decrease in charitable giving of up to 12 percent… For many vital nonprofit agencies on the front lines, a 12-percent drop in charitable giving will mean they have to close their doors.

On the other hand …

There is no other hand.

tbogg, “Ride the wild Bolton Mobius strip….”

John R. Bolton — who is seeking confirmation as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — often blocked then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and, on one occasion, his successor, Condoleezza Rice, from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran, according to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton.

Matthew Yglesias, “New Depths Discovered”

According to Landay’s sources, the administration only wants reports showing that terrorism is going down, and if the State Departments methods don’t produce that result, then there report just won’t be done. Lovely.

via Pandagon, Inquiry Finds White House Role in Contract

A White House aide was told about potential problems with the Education Department paying a conservative commentator to promote an administration policy but did not prevent the contract from being renewed, according to a new government report.

Via Andrew Sullivan, former Reagan and Nixon speechwriter Jeffrey Hart:

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.

Brad DeLong, “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps? (I’ve Got to Stop Saying “National Review Has Reached Its Nadir” Department)”

But the point isn’t to provide or critique economic analysis, is it? The point isn’t to inform the readers of National Review, is it? The point is that Paul Volcker–chosen by Republican Richard Nixon’s staff to be Undersecretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, chosen by Republican Arthur Burns to be President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, chosen by Republican Ronald Reagan’s staff to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board–has written something inconvenient for the Bushies inside the White House. And so National Review undertakes the mission of trying to murk the waters with clouds of ink.

And in this squid-like task, actual knowledge of the economy or of economics is a positive hindrance. The less the writer knows, the better.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, “No surprise”

And how is this for a laugh?

Reducing agricultural spending by $5.4 billion is [was? AT] a key part of the administration’s plan to cut the federal defict in half. So far, however, the the Senate Budget Committee has agree to cuts amounting to just $2.8 billion.

The Federal deficit is currently over 400 billion.

“Lee Scoresby” on blogs:

A recent hypertext trail of posts and comments, which I followed from Obsidian Wings to Jane Galt, sparked some thoughts I’ve been entertaining about another paradigm that might be useful for thinking about at least some of what goes down on weblogs. In brief, the idea is that one things good weblog discussions and postings do is to recreate the important experience of late-night collegiate bullshit sessions.

Discuss, with reference to the larger claims advanced in the original post.

Last week, I asked newish bloggers to send me links to their strongest posts. One of the smarter traditions of the right-wing blogs is their various “Carnival of the ….” link roundups, in which blogs volunteer themselves for links from higher-traffic blogs by presenting the posts that they are proudest of. On the left, we don’t do so much of that.

If none of my fellow Timberites object, I’m going to try to do this once a month or so. People who began blogging after January 1, 2004 or so are invited to send me links to their best posts as the month goes on. Also, anyone is welcome to suggest a better name for these sorts of roundups. “Carnival of the Reality-Based” seemed kind of lame.

Dave at The Big Lowitzki’s Random Ravings asks, “What is pro-life?”

Taryl Cabot at non-ecumenical ramblings has a fun post about inventions that still need inventing (N.B.- I think that this was the post that I was referred to… stupid Blogspot. If I’m wrong, I’ll change the link.)

Kenneth Rufo at Progressive Commons has a long and serious post about rhetoric and strategy, titled “How Not to Respond to the Luntz Memo”.

The Corpuscle has a letter to a young person, “Young Person’s Guide to Democracy”. (I’m liking this one, too: “Brand New Gay Stereotype, Gratis”.)

Adam Kotsko has obviously had his share of pledge drives.

Nick at News From Beyond The North Wind has a post about another corner of the Victorian attic, the Keswick Museum.

Alex at Bloodless Coop has a meditation on the intersection of reason and politics that doesn’t let the political left off scot-free.

Alex is also a member of a terrific group blog on neuroscience and psychology called Mind Hacks. Here’s a fascinating post on the drug ketamine, a recreational drug that produces symptoms similar to those seen in schizophrenia.

Diana Rhoten writes in Inside Higher Ed about the brain drain from academia.

With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.

Rhoten argues that these can’t serve as substitutes for traditional public intellectuals, but they share some of the same motivations:

On many levels, the new generation I’m describing shares little with Trilling, Wilson, and other old-school public intellectuals. Yet by choosing to leave the academy, they demonstrate at least one thing in common: They need, want, perhaps even crave a larger public.

Rhoten identifies blogging as one of the possible paths that intellectuals can take out of the academy; I’m not sure that she’s right. More precisely, blogging offers academics a means of connecting with that wider public without having to leave the academy. My personal motivation for taking up blogging was to get into arguments about all of the things that I can’t really write about as a political scientist – science fiction, modern literature, curious historical facts – and to express strong and non-scientific opinions on politics. I used to joke that I wanted to be Susan Sontag when I grew up; someone who wrote fiercely argued and dense essays for the New York Review of Books. Blogging isn’t that, but it does give license to write in a freewheeling way, to speculate, to polemicize and to give a bit of free rein to your hobby-horses. All of which is to say that blogging isn’t ever going to be a substitute for academia, but it is a valuable ancillary activity. It allows you to write pieces that may or may not connect to your scholarship, but that never could see the light of day in an academic journal. At the same time, this can feed back in valuable and unexpected ways into your academic work. I suspect that over the longer term blogging will become increasingly attractive to scholars who want to connect with that wider audience, but who don’t want to give up their scholarship. You can become a low-rent public intellectual, without having to give up your day job. I don’t know if there are any people who’ve been lured away from academics by blogging, but I do see quite a number of academics who use blogging as a means of blowing off steam, and of writing about things that they couldn’t otherwise write about. Not substitute, complement.

I wasn’t watching it tick over, and I missed the party but Technorati just passed 1 billion links, of which this blog accounts for 311. Here’s the Technorati Top 100, including Crooked Timber at #59.

I don’t know exactly what to make of this number. A link can be anything from part of an extended debate to a cut-and-pasted item on a blogroll. Still, its obvious that the blogosphere is still growing rapidly and in all dimensions. There’s some more data, here , herehere

Non Prophet notices that Focus on the Family is pushing Hugh Hewitt’s Blog, and apparently encouraging its members to start their own socially conservative blogs. The interview in the link is little more than Hewitt’s usual “righties rule, lefties drool” schtick. It’s interesting, however, that they think that it’s helpful to their movement to have a bunch of brand new right-wing blogs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with encouraging people to start blogs, but it isn’t immediately obvious to me how this would help a movement.

I suspect that, to the extent that this is helpful, it’s more about creating a community of activists than it is about the blogs in and of themselves. I strongly suspect that a person who starts and maintains a political blog is likely to end up significantly more involved as an activist (volunteering, donating, making calls and emails to politicians and media) than the same person would be if he hadn’t started one. Someone who starts a blog sees current events differently, for better or worse; even a mildly partisan blogger can’t help looking for angles, comments, or points to score. Plus, blogging puts a person in contact with a bunch of like-minded people on their best, funniest, most intelligent behavior. (Present company excluded, of course.)

In any case, it can’t hurt, and new bloggers can use some encouragement. This is a rambling way of saying that newish bloggers should feel free to send me a link to a post that you’re proud of. I’ll post a link roundup of the ones that I like sometime next week.

For now, let me recommend Finnegan’s Wake. Although the authors have the boorish manners of Yalies, it would probably be a pillar of the left-wing blogs if it had been started in in 2002.

I know this doesn’t sound healthy, but I’ve, I’ve … started a blog: a literary studies group blog. It’s called the Valve and it just got turned on. I’ve written a whopping great Holbonic inaugural post, a rewrite of themes I’ve hashed out before: blogging, academe, literary studies. (Some folks might say I’m repeating myself. I do hope I’m improving myself.)

I’m probably going to lighten up at J&B and Crooked Timber for a time and focus on this new project. Just so you know where to reach me. Please drop by and link to us and all that desirable stuff.

Scott McLemee’s column today looks at some very interesting anthropological research on the Iranian blogosphere. Alireza Doostdar writes about a controversy in the Farsi-speaking blogosphere over whether or not blogging leads to increased vulgarity – sloppy language, bad grammar and intellectual overreaching. According to Doostdar, there was quite a vituperative argument between a small group of intellectuals, who deplored bloggers’ bad writing, and various bloggers, some of whom accepted the criticism and promised to do better, others of whom challenged the authority of the intellectuals by making deliberate grammatical mistakes and issuing their own polemics. This is interesting in itself – but perhaps even more interesting as a contrast to what’s happening in the English speaking blogosphere. I understand that there is a strong and lively classical tradition in Farsi, which there isn’t in English – most modern English literature is written in (or otherwise appeals to) the demotic. Thus, in one sense, it’s unsurprising that there hasn’t been the same sort of argument as there was in Iran. Instead, we’ve had the ongoing debates over the relationship between blogging and journalism.

Nevertheless, it strikes me that English language political blogging is still an emphatically vulgar activity – it demands a straightforward, relatively direct writing style that readers can easily understand. There’s a set of unwritten rules of rhetoric among blogs, which tend to militate against jargon and indirect argument. CT is a bit of an outlier in this regard – we do occasionally have quite technical posts or lengthy and discursive ones – but we’re still far closer in writing style to, say, Kevin Drum, than to the average academic journal article.

While expert knowledge provides clear advantages, it doesn’t preserve the expert from the frequent necessity of having to muck in with her commenters in order to get her point across. This has its disadvantages, as witnessed by the ever recurring statistically illiterate nonsense about the Lancet. Still, in general, it’s a good thing. Blogging is vulgar in the original meaning of the word – it’s ‘of the crowd,’ and bloggers who try to keep their readers at a distance are likely to find themselves without any. I suspect that this is why some blogs that one might have expected to have a substantial impact in the blogosphere, such as the Becker-Posner blog, have been relative failures. They try to play by a different set of rules. The Becker-Posner blog has interesting arguments, but it’s rather reminiscent of those German academic seminars where the senior professors talk exclusively to each other, and the junior people are supposed to be edified by the conversation. There’s not much of a sense of open dialogue to it – and open, democratic, sometimes demagogic dialogue is what the blogosphere is about (and, for all its faults, should be about).