collective memory, history, data, and ghosts.
because reading the Paper of Record can make a person think things.
*****
z"l
yosef hayim yerushalmi
here is the NYTimes obituary - look at the bottom for the priceless correction, where it becomes clear that some assimilationist zionist shmuk wrote the file obit... daytshmerish, ivritmerish, and denial of palestinian existence all in one not-to-long memorial piece!
yerushalmi deserved better. he was a historian of collective memory, and of the gaps between history and collective memory. when i was in college, i got to take a seminar with him on medieval sefarad (listed in my transcript as "Medieval Spanish Jewry", leading to the occasional expectation that it be listed through the sculpture department). yerushalmi was a chainsmoking, suit-wearing type whose class was in some ways far more lecture-based old-school History-with-a-capital-H than i wanted it to be, but very useful nonetheless. and the parts of his work that i've read since then make it clear that he was a better writer than teacher (at least for me, then). read him.
*****
a report on the new information radio advertisers have about radio listenership, based on monitoring rather than self-reporting surveys.
now, as anyone who's talked with me about HIV risk factors knows, i tend to be appalled by research that relies on self-reporting. this seems a different situation, however - not because the self-reporting's any more accurate a reflection of folks' behavior, but precisely because it is inaccurate in a different context.
risk factor self-reporting, especially around sex and drugs, encourages folks to give inaccurate responses that erase socially disapproved behavior. with HIV, this means massive underreporting of injection drug use, of straight-identified men having sex with men, of masculine-identified men (straight-identified or not) getting fucked by men, of sex work, of sex with sex workers, of numbers of sexual partners, &c. otherwise known as A Massive Problem, or, Part Of Why We Don't Have Meaningful Primary Prevention.
but self-reporting on radio listening, while no more accurate, should generally be weighted toward responses that overreport what folks want more of on the radio. which seems like a very good thing. and a case in which 'more accurate' data leads to a less satisfying result for almost everyone. surveillance-based data will reflect what folks listen to when they can't actually listen to what they want because it's not on. self-reporting won't. again: much better data through less 'accuracy'.
which is why i was less than thrilled by this article on a new book pushing the idea that science based on massive data-sets based on increased computing power is both an emerging paradigm shift (in the precise and classical thomas kuhn sense) and a universally good thing.
here's an excerpt:
The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,” Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, said in an e-mail message. The resulting transformation is occurring in the social sciences, too.
“As recently as five years ago,” Dr. Lazowska said, “if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.”
“Today,” he added, “you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.”
The shift is giving rise to a computer science perspective, referred to as “computational thinking” by Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
in other words, research projects and analysis are being driven by where massive quantities of data are easiest to find (rather than by thinking through what kinds of data would be useful to looking at a subject or question). which is an approach that can reveal interesting things, but not necessarily meaningful ones. for instance, it can produce statistics about online exhibitionism and use of highly sexualized language among teenagers, and fuel a moral panic. but - unlike a concentrated interview project, or an ethnography - it can't give you any sense of what those behaviors mean to the folks who participate in them, of whether and in what ways they are in any way different from previous teenage cohorts' exhibitionism, flirting and dish, or, in fact of much of anything that could help you understand your observations.
which isn't to dismiss large data-sets. i'm a huge fan of the work that folks have done using mapping and large quantities of government data, especially around police and prisons. but even this amazingly powerful and useful analysis is only as useful as its connection to the day-to-day lived experience of folks in neighborhoods targeted for prison recruitment and suffering from the lack of support for folks leaving incarceration. and that experience isn't particularly accessible to statistics, and is most useful as "thick description" which can engage with contexts and histories. without that kind of approach, to paraphrase the classic example (in the name of r. geertz in the name of r. ryle), you can't tell the difference between a blink and a wink.
*****
one dead fundamentalist can get on the front page; half a million dead queers can't even get into the part of the paper that counts as "news". it's enough to make a person hate straights, even if they didn't already.
but the project that the Times reported on under "Fashion & Style" is amazing, and the article itself isn't too bad, aside from its placement.
the project itself is right here, under the deceptively unassuming name "The Gay History Wiki".
the wiki, developed by the fabulous Lady Bartlett, is an attempt at documenting everyone killed in philadelphia by government, corporate, religious and social bigotry through the HIV virus. not just the famous figures and powerful cultural workers - though essex hemphill and joe beam, among others, are there - but everyone. and not just with a bare name, or a single beautiful quilted square, but with as thick a description as our collective memory can produce, created by as many people's remembrances as possible.
i'm pleased to see this project getting some major press attention - even in a ghettoized, demeaning, bigoted manner - partly because it may spark parallel or related projects elsewhere. and partly because Lady Bartlett has been such a strong presence in the show i spent last summer working on, which will have its full run in new york in early january(!). the show, Between Two Worlds, or, Who Loved You Before You Were Mine deals with the collective memory among current young queer and trans folks of the moments on either side of the beginning of the epidemic - the legends of the lost utopia of gay male sexual culture before, and the lost utopia of queer radical culture after... one character in the show has one of its points of origin in Lady B, and we had the amazing good fortune to have Lady B play that character in a chamber version of the show at the short mountain radical faerie sanctuary...
so: mazl tov Lady B!
and if you know or knew HIV+ folks in philly, help save our community's past by participating in the wiki project...
*****
and a final word from uncle walter (emphasis mine):
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
*****
z"l
yosef hayim yerushalmi
here is the NYTimes obituary - look at the bottom for the priceless correction, where it becomes clear that some assimilationist zionist shmuk wrote the file obit... daytshmerish, ivritmerish, and denial of palestinian existence all in one not-to-long memorial piece!
yerushalmi deserved better. he was a historian of collective memory, and of the gaps between history and collective memory. when i was in college, i got to take a seminar with him on medieval sefarad (listed in my transcript as "Medieval Spanish Jewry", leading to the occasional expectation that it be listed through the sculpture department). yerushalmi was a chainsmoking, suit-wearing type whose class was in some ways far more lecture-based old-school History-with-a-capital-H than i wanted it to be, but very useful nonetheless. and the parts of his work that i've read since then make it clear that he was a better writer than teacher (at least for me, then). read him.
*****
a report on the new information radio advertisers have about radio listenership, based on monitoring rather than self-reporting surveys.
now, as anyone who's talked with me about HIV risk factors knows, i tend to be appalled by research that relies on self-reporting. this seems a different situation, however - not because the self-reporting's any more accurate a reflection of folks' behavior, but precisely because it is inaccurate in a different context.
risk factor self-reporting, especially around sex and drugs, encourages folks to give inaccurate responses that erase socially disapproved behavior. with HIV, this means massive underreporting of injection drug use, of straight-identified men having sex with men, of masculine-identified men (straight-identified or not) getting fucked by men, of sex work, of sex with sex workers, of numbers of sexual partners, &c. otherwise known as A Massive Problem, or, Part Of Why We Don't Have Meaningful Primary Prevention.
but self-reporting on radio listening, while no more accurate, should generally be weighted toward responses that overreport what folks want more of on the radio. which seems like a very good thing. and a case in which 'more accurate' data leads to a less satisfying result for almost everyone. surveillance-based data will reflect what folks listen to when they can't actually listen to what they want because it's not on. self-reporting won't. again: much better data through less 'accuracy'.
which is why i was less than thrilled by this article on a new book pushing the idea that science based on massive data-sets based on increased computing power is both an emerging paradigm shift (in the precise and classical thomas kuhn sense) and a universally good thing.
here's an excerpt:
The advent of inexpensive high-bandwidth sensors is transforming every field from data-poor to data-rich,” Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute, said in an e-mail message. The resulting transformation is occurring in the social sciences, too.
“As recently as five years ago,” Dr. Lazowska said, “if you were a social scientist interested in how social groups form, evolve and dissipate, you would hire 30 college freshmen for $10 an hour and interview them in a focus group.”
“Today,” he added, “you have real-time access to the social structuring and restructuring of 100 million Facebook users.”
The shift is giving rise to a computer science perspective, referred to as “computational thinking” by Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
in other words, research projects and analysis are being driven by where massive quantities of data are easiest to find (rather than by thinking through what kinds of data would be useful to looking at a subject or question). which is an approach that can reveal interesting things, but not necessarily meaningful ones. for instance, it can produce statistics about online exhibitionism and use of highly sexualized language among teenagers, and fuel a moral panic. but - unlike a concentrated interview project, or an ethnography - it can't give you any sense of what those behaviors mean to the folks who participate in them, of whether and in what ways they are in any way different from previous teenage cohorts' exhibitionism, flirting and dish, or, in fact of much of anything that could help you understand your observations.
which isn't to dismiss large data-sets. i'm a huge fan of the work that folks have done using mapping and large quantities of government data, especially around police and prisons. but even this amazingly powerful and useful analysis is only as useful as its connection to the day-to-day lived experience of folks in neighborhoods targeted for prison recruitment and suffering from the lack of support for folks leaving incarceration. and that experience isn't particularly accessible to statistics, and is most useful as "thick description" which can engage with contexts and histories. without that kind of approach, to paraphrase the classic example (in the name of r. geertz in the name of r. ryle), you can't tell the difference between a blink and a wink.
*****
one dead fundamentalist can get on the front page; half a million dead queers can't even get into the part of the paper that counts as "news". it's enough to make a person hate straights, even if they didn't already.
but the project that the Times reported on under "Fashion & Style" is amazing, and the article itself isn't too bad, aside from its placement.
the project itself is right here, under the deceptively unassuming name "The Gay History Wiki".
the wiki, developed by the fabulous Lady Bartlett, is an attempt at documenting everyone killed in philadelphia by government, corporate, religious and social bigotry through the HIV virus. not just the famous figures and powerful cultural workers - though essex hemphill and joe beam, among others, are there - but everyone. and not just with a bare name, or a single beautiful quilted square, but with as thick a description as our collective memory can produce, created by as many people's remembrances as possible.
i'm pleased to see this project getting some major press attention - even in a ghettoized, demeaning, bigoted manner - partly because it may spark parallel or related projects elsewhere. and partly because Lady Bartlett has been such a strong presence in the show i spent last summer working on, which will have its full run in new york in early january(!). the show, Between Two Worlds, or, Who Loved You Before You Were Mine deals with the collective memory among current young queer and trans folks of the moments on either side of the beginning of the epidemic - the legends of the lost utopia of gay male sexual culture before, and the lost utopia of queer radical culture after... one character in the show has one of its points of origin in Lady B, and we had the amazing good fortune to have Lady B play that character in a chamber version of the show at the short mountain radical faerie sanctuary...
so: mazl tov Lady B!
and if you know or knew HIV+ folks in philly, help save our community's past by participating in the wiki project...
*****
and a final word from uncle walter (emphasis mine):
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.