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livSomebody said on Twitter that there should be a new acronym: tv;dw for "too video; didn't watch". And the same day I saw that remark, an LJ friend linked to a really interesting TEDx video. I thought about it and decided it was likely to be interesting enough to justify 15 minutes sitting watching the video, and indeed it was. It contained actual relevant scientific information and some thoughtful and new to me analysis, unadulterated by the kind of hipstery flashy mostly bullshit that sometimes plagues mediocre TEDx stuff. But it was 15 minutes of video of a woman speaking, occasionally panning out to show a lecture theatre audience listening to her, and with a smattering of visual aids consisting of stock photos of eg a shattered windscreen to represent a car crash.
If that content had available as plain text, it would have lost nothing because all the information was in the words. And it would have taken me 3 minutes to read and I'd have absorbed and remembered it a lot better. As it was, I was paying attention, I was interested in the topic, the speaker was engaging and her argument well-constructed, and yet I found it hard to follow the detail and by the end of the 15 minute segment I'd have struggled to reconstruct more than the basic gist of what I'd just heard. So in fact if I really wanted to assimilate the information, I'd have to go back over the video and rewatch key elements, and it would have ended up taking me not 5 times as long as reading an essay, but 10 or 20 times as long.
I could come over all righteous about how video is inaccessible to d/Deaf people. (One person in seven has significant hearing loss, that's a lot of people to exclude by providing your information as uncaptioned video.) Or it's inaccessible to poor people who don't have consistent access to fast broadband on tap and big screens with good video and sound and enough private space to watch video without disturbing others. But the truth is, it's inaccessible to me, able-bodied, neurotypical, cognitively abled, highly educated me with my several hundred pound smartphone.
It's inaccessible to me because I'm hyperlexic and a heavily kinaesthetic learner. I absorb information well by reading, and really quite poorly by listening to speech and even worse if there are a lot of visual distractions. (Hyperlexic is a self-diagnosis, but I reckon if the profile fits me and lots of the advice given for dealing with hyperlexic folk is useful to me, it doesn't matter too much whether I'm "really" hyperlexic.)
The thing is, I spent the first 30 years of my life in a world where my preferred learning style is hugely, hugely privileged, and now the shoe's on the other foot. You wouldn't believe the amount of praise and positive attention I got for the fact that I could read at high-school level by the time I started full-time school. I found pretty much all of my school education easy because all I had to do was read the relevant chapter in the text book and I'd grasp everything I needed to know about the topic. That facility, at least as much as any exceptional native ability, got me into an elite university, where again I was completely unfazed by having to work my way through huge stacks of technical articles and remember and understand the information.
As a result of all this, I ended up with a really cool job as a university lecturer. It's my responsibility to make sure that what I teach is available and accessible to people across a whole range of comfort with absorbing information from written text. Some actually have specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, others are just plain happier with information in pictorial or aural form or learn in a much more interpersonal way than I do. Part of the problem here is that the people who succeed in the kind of life path that is most likely to lead to becoming an academic are most often people like me. Not exclusively, but there's a clear bias. And it's very easy to fall into complaints of how students today are lazy and un-rigorous and have no attention span and are spoiled by growing up immersed in a multimedia environment with constant entertainment so they can't concentrate enough to absorb large amounts of complex information etc etc. It's actually pretty clear to me that there isn't much correlation between preferences for text versus video and either willingness to work hard or intellectual ability. I also don't believe that dense written texts are inherently a superior way of transmitting information.
I may be annoyed by the whole TED video thing – I would far rather all that content were available as written essays – but I also acknowledge that there are lots of people in the world who are able to learn about a whole range of topics with far less pain than if the internet had got stuck in the plain text only 80s. I'm likely to continue to post to this blog with long essays, long paragraphs and complex sentences employing a lot of fairly specialist vocabulary, because that's what I'm relatively good at. But I'm not going to pretend that makes me superior to people who make videos or audiocasts or who write in a less verbally dense style.
This piece on literacy privilege gets referenced a lot, and while I don't agree with absolutely all of it, it's worth considering. I've also been seeing over the past few months the beginnings of what could be a fruitful discussion about the relationship between various social justice movements and academia, and how access to the kind of education that gives people authority is heavily entangled with social class. A lot of this discussion is superficial and unproductive; the iteration which brought it to my attention was a bunch of transphobic so-called feminists complaining that expecting them to care about trans women as well as cis women is really oppressing them for being working class and coming from outside the academy. I've often seen variants of this, where people spuriously claim that being bigoted is part of their working class identity and criticizing them for it is mere snobbery. I have no time for this line at all, it's ridiculous and the assumption that working class people are all racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist etc is itself far more classist than any criticism of anyone's vocabulary. If you start arguing like that you end up in this sort of place!
However, I think there may be an actual issue here. I know historically it's been an issue with feminism, but I'm most conscious of the problem as it applies to GSM activism (what used to be called the gay rights movement). It certainly doesn't take a whole stack of university degrees to comprehend that women who were assigned male at birth are women and are part of the struggle against misogyny. You don't have to be middle class to think that couples who want to get married should have their marriages recognized by the state, independent of gender. But people who are thoroughly embedded in the Queer community are using really sophisticated and complex and yes, academic models of gender and often seem to take post-modern literary theory pretty much as read. That's a good thing in many ways, let's base our understanding of human gender and behaviour and sexuality on actual research rather than always falling back to the kind of extreme simplification you can easily explain to a five-year-old. But I do worry that it may potentially exclude some people who really ought to be included in GSM solidarity.
Back when the discussion was happening, I bookmarked the following essay by Catherine Baker on intersectionality, academic language, and where to put my big feet. I really appreciate the way she thoughtfully addresses valid criticisms without engaging the "boo hoo, you called me transphobic, you hate the working class!" defensiveness that started the debate. Thing is, I am similar to Baker in some ways, I do care about these things, but all my ways of caring about them involve doing lots of background reading and coming to a detailed understanding of the academic underpinnings of intersectional feminism and Queer theory and so on, and I want to be sure that I don't get too self-righteous about what a virtuous person I am for having done this background reading, which after all comes easily to me. But I'm also different to her in that I'm in the natural sciences rather than the humanities, and that means that my direct influence takes place in a culture that can be really pretty resistant to that strand of academic thinking. Even as a professional academic and someone who loves reading and language, I find some of Baker's writing a bit impenetrable because I just don't have the humanities background! I mean, I can get round that because as she astutely points out,
If that content had available as plain text, it would have lost nothing because all the information was in the words. And it would have taken me 3 minutes to read and I'd have absorbed and remembered it a lot better. As it was, I was paying attention, I was interested in the topic, the speaker was engaging and her argument well-constructed, and yet I found it hard to follow the detail and by the end of the 15 minute segment I'd have struggled to reconstruct more than the basic gist of what I'd just heard. So in fact if I really wanted to assimilate the information, I'd have to go back over the video and rewatch key elements, and it would have ended up taking me not 5 times as long as reading an essay, but 10 or 20 times as long.
I could come over all righteous about how video is inaccessible to d/Deaf people. (One person in seven has significant hearing loss, that's a lot of people to exclude by providing your information as uncaptioned video.) Or it's inaccessible to poor people who don't have consistent access to fast broadband on tap and big screens with good video and sound and enough private space to watch video without disturbing others. But the truth is, it's inaccessible to me, able-bodied, neurotypical, cognitively abled, highly educated me with my several hundred pound smartphone.
It's inaccessible to me because I'm hyperlexic and a heavily kinaesthetic learner. I absorb information well by reading, and really quite poorly by listening to speech and even worse if there are a lot of visual distractions. (Hyperlexic is a self-diagnosis, but I reckon if the profile fits me and lots of the advice given for dealing with hyperlexic folk is useful to me, it doesn't matter too much whether I'm "really" hyperlexic.)
The thing is, I spent the first 30 years of my life in a world where my preferred learning style is hugely, hugely privileged, and now the shoe's on the other foot. You wouldn't believe the amount of praise and positive attention I got for the fact that I could read at high-school level by the time I started full-time school. I found pretty much all of my school education easy because all I had to do was read the relevant chapter in the text book and I'd grasp everything I needed to know about the topic. That facility, at least as much as any exceptional native ability, got me into an elite university, where again I was completely unfazed by having to work my way through huge stacks of technical articles and remember and understand the information.
As a result of all this, I ended up with a really cool job as a university lecturer. It's my responsibility to make sure that what I teach is available and accessible to people across a whole range of comfort with absorbing information from written text. Some actually have specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, others are just plain happier with information in pictorial or aural form or learn in a much more interpersonal way than I do. Part of the problem here is that the people who succeed in the kind of life path that is most likely to lead to becoming an academic are most often people like me. Not exclusively, but there's a clear bias. And it's very easy to fall into complaints of how students today are lazy and un-rigorous and have no attention span and are spoiled by growing up immersed in a multimedia environment with constant entertainment so they can't concentrate enough to absorb large amounts of complex information etc etc. It's actually pretty clear to me that there isn't much correlation between preferences for text versus video and either willingness to work hard or intellectual ability. I also don't believe that dense written texts are inherently a superior way of transmitting information.
I may be annoyed by the whole TED video thing – I would far rather all that content were available as written essays – but I also acknowledge that there are lots of people in the world who are able to learn about a whole range of topics with far less pain than if the internet had got stuck in the plain text only 80s. I'm likely to continue to post to this blog with long essays, long paragraphs and complex sentences employing a lot of fairly specialist vocabulary, because that's what I'm relatively good at. But I'm not going to pretend that makes me superior to people who make videos or audiocasts or who write in a less verbally dense style.
This piece on literacy privilege gets referenced a lot, and while I don't agree with absolutely all of it, it's worth considering. I've also been seeing over the past few months the beginnings of what could be a fruitful discussion about the relationship between various social justice movements and academia, and how access to the kind of education that gives people authority is heavily entangled with social class. A lot of this discussion is superficial and unproductive; the iteration which brought it to my attention was a bunch of transphobic so-called feminists complaining that expecting them to care about trans women as well as cis women is really oppressing them for being working class and coming from outside the academy. I've often seen variants of this, where people spuriously claim that being bigoted is part of their working class identity and criticizing them for it is mere snobbery. I have no time for this line at all, it's ridiculous and the assumption that working class people are all racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist etc is itself far more classist than any criticism of anyone's vocabulary. If you start arguing like that you end up in this sort of place!
However, I think there may be an actual issue here. I know historically it's been an issue with feminism, but I'm most conscious of the problem as it applies to GSM activism (what used to be called the gay rights movement). It certainly doesn't take a whole stack of university degrees to comprehend that women who were assigned male at birth are women and are part of the struggle against misogyny. You don't have to be middle class to think that couples who want to get married should have their marriages recognized by the state, independent of gender. But people who are thoroughly embedded in the Queer community are using really sophisticated and complex and yes, academic models of gender and often seem to take post-modern literary theory pretty much as read. That's a good thing in many ways, let's base our understanding of human gender and behaviour and sexuality on actual research rather than always falling back to the kind of extreme simplification you can easily explain to a five-year-old. But I do worry that it may potentially exclude some people who really ought to be included in GSM solidarity.
Back when the discussion was happening, I bookmarked the following essay by Catherine Baker on intersectionality, academic language, and where to put my big feet. I really appreciate the way she thoughtfully addresses valid criticisms without engaging the "boo hoo, you called me transphobic, you hate the working class!" defensiveness that started the debate. Thing is, I am similar to Baker in some ways, I do care about these things, but all my ways of caring about them involve doing lots of background reading and coming to a detailed understanding of the academic underpinnings of intersectional feminism and Queer theory and so on, and I want to be sure that I don't get too self-righteous about what a virtuous person I am for having done this background reading, which after all comes easily to me. But I'm also different to her in that I'm in the natural sciences rather than the humanities, and that means that my direct influence takes place in a culture that can be really pretty resistant to that strand of academic thinking. Even as a professional academic and someone who loves reading and language, I find some of Baker's writing a bit impenetrable because I just don't have the humanities background! I mean, I can get round that because as she astutely points out,
academia has allowed me to feel comfortable when I’m reading something and run into new concepts with difficult names. But still, there's a communication issue here.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 12:30 pm (UTC)I am also frustrated with the video-all-the-things tendency. Besides being aware of the access issues - a good friend has adult hearing loss, and I am well aware of how few things are adequately captioned - I just plain read faster than I can watch something, for an equivalent amount of content (and actually, it was a TED transcript that confirmed that for me.)
But I know I'm not like many other people there. (And I argue that my reading speed has a substantial genetic component - it's how my parents met - so it's not even like I can take credit for it.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 12:45 pm (UTC)obviously there are people who can't access video content, and also people who can't access text content. Why not provide both where reasonable?
On the academic feminist/queer/etc theory point:
ech, I hate arguing with people about this. Because I'm really bad at words. Not individual words; I'm quite good at learning new words, especially new words for things that I was lacking a word for... but this whole "essay writing" thing really passed me by.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:09 pm (UTC)I absolutely agree with you about video-all-the-things. It's not just an excuse, it really is terrible for accessibility. At the same time, I read exceptionally fast and fluently, and that puts me in a minority among the general population. Like you, I don't even slightly take credit for that, it's almost completely about my parents' skills and attitudes.
I think my preferred solution is a) to use videos for actually conveying visual information, rather than just making a film of a person talking, or worse, a film of a person holding up signs with words on, which I really hate with a passion. And b) to jolly well provide a transcript by default. Though I have to admit, I don't provide audio versions of every written post I make to help people who struggle with reading or have visual disabilities, so perhaps I'm a hypocrite!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:13 pm (UTC)The academic Queer theory stuff, please don't feel obliged to address that point if you're not comfortable talking about it! I wasn't really trying to start an argument, just noodling a bit.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:35 pm (UTC)I think my frustration is often with the way that Americans Who Have Degrees have almost *all* done a whole lot of high-level essay writing; and many have had the opportunity to study Women's Studies (or something like that) no matter what they major in.
Text-to-speech automation is getting very good; but video-to-text automation is *awful* so I do think there's more necessity for people to provide transcripts of lectures than recordings of text.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:38 pm (UTC)Yes, the problem does seem to be that nobody has all of the time, capability and inclination to produce the multiple versions.
As you say, I'm not really motivated to produce a video version of any old thing I jot down in an LJ post, because it's a whole lot of effort even to just read it into a camera, more so to practise until you don't suck at it (I have no experience of reading things into cameras and I'd bet it's not something you get right on the first try) and even more so if you want to tailor it for video (by cutting down on complicated sentence structure on the one hand and including illustrations where feasible on the other). So I've never actually done that for anything I've written, and if I did then I'm sure I'd only make the effort for one or two really deserving cases.[1]
I'm tempted to say that it's more important the other way round – that if someone produces a video of something not inherently completely visual, then it's worth writing a transcript. But actually it turns out that that takes a hell of a long time too, and if I were a prolific creator of videos then I bet I wouldn't have the time to transcribe them all as well. Also, the one-sided position that video requires text but not vice versa smacks rather of the 'literacy privilege' you mention, in that people who do watch videos more readily than they read (for whatever reason) are still excluded. Perhaps there's nonetheless an argument there on grounds of automated processing like search (a major virtue of text is that you can find it on Google, or grep it for the quotation you were trying to find again when you come back to it), but even so it seems to me that if the main aim is to be inclusive then videos of things would be potentially useful. (And also, of course, audio-only.)
I've occasionally seen fora in which a video or audio file is posted, and then there's a mechanism through which a third party can submit a transcript if anyone has the time and inclination to write one. LJ had that for a while, for instance, with its phone-posts. But I haven't seen those in a while and don't know what happened to them (perhaps totally spurious 'transcripts' containing spam might have become a problem?), and certainly it seems to me that you'd need quite a motivated third party to bother transcribing things – that takes even longer than just watching the video, and if you're capable of doing it then a fortiori you also aren't one of the people who most needs the transcript, so that will cut down on the number of people prepared to go to the effort.
I'd have to suppose that the only way you'll reliably get anyone to make the effort of preparing multiple versions of things is if they're paid to, and that instantly cuts you back down to the small fraction of published content which is perceived as marketable by someone with the resources to pay for that sort of work. So I think my dispiriting conclusion is that you can be inclusive on the writing side (allow as many people as possible to create and publish stuff) or on the reading side (allowing as many people as possible to consume a given thing), but not both at once. :-/
[1] I wonder, now I'm thinking along these lines, if 'How to Report Bugs Effectively' might be an interesting thing to experimentally translate into a video. Going by the fact that people have unsolicitedly sent me translations of it into 14 different languages, it does seem to be the one piece of writing of mine for which there's demonstrable demand for variants accessible to different groups of people. And if you did it as a video, you could actually show some kind of examples – you could show a GUI application misbehaving, then show an unclear bug report attempting to describe that failure, and then show a couple of entirely different clips of misbehaviour that the bug report as written had not distinguished between. Hmmm.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 01:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 02:05 pm (UTC)I do feel a bit comforted by people pointing out that if someone can't read my writing, they can use automated text-to-speech tools. Maybe it's ok for me to be grumpy about uncaptioned videos with no transcript after all!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 02:11 pm (UTC)I suppose I'm not taking an absolutist position that all video must be captioned. It's more that if you're making a video of a person reading text from a pre-prepared document, it would be a courtesy to publish the text of that document as well. And also that you shouldn't go around making it deliberately hard for people to transform your information into a format they can use, perhaps through being over-zealous about protecting copyright.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 07:25 pm (UTC)You may have noticed at least one of your regulars being not only resistant, but at times bordering into active hostility.
Furthermore I think it's not the humanities per se, but parts of the humanities. Lying approximately 2ft from my right foot in an untidy pile on the floor is Rawl's A Theory of Justice, an academic text from a field that is a part of the humanities, which I bought and (started to) read because I thought I should have more perspective on something I disagreed with. I stopped because I kept disagreeing too much, but the style and accessibility is fine. Some day I should check to see whether my hunch that I'd get on with academic history is true; I certainly get on with popular history texts.
That language and gender textbook, for me, mostly fine. There are a few bits of it which seem to take an insufficiently critical look at things that aren't fine. Random example; there's a mention of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. This is allegedly based on a linguistic notion of performativity - a classic example of a perfomative utterance is "I hereby name this ship the Queen Mary". I say allegedly because there is a leap from the linguistic concept to Butler's concept that feels a lot like a non sequitur. If memory serves (possibly it doesn't), an explanation of how one concept related to the other (by more than mere word association) was conspicuously absent. Theoretically I should go to the source of the idea and read up, like I've done with Rawls. Except I'd bet more than the cover price of the relevant book that attempting to read it would not be a satisfying experience. This is just a random example.
One thing is finding lots of people who seem to see the badness I see, and to express their dissatisfaction in far stronger term, and are far less charitable in their interpretation of what is going on. But still; academic work in that mode... feels to me a lot like work done on the basis of some religious tradition; maybe there's some rigour there, but it's not authoritative for anyone outside the religion.
[ I worry now that I'm not being constructive here, that I don't have a constructive way to argue about this. ]
Incidentally, none of these gripes apply to intersectionality. I've heard it said that some people are nervous about intersectionality because they see it as leading to individualism; I don't see this as a problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 09:43 pm (UTC)We had a speaker come out to our school to talk about 21st-century learning tools, changing from content-scarcity models where teachers dictate and students dutifully record, to content-curation models where teachers help students make sense of all the available content. And he said that notetaking was doomed, that teachers should just give students their notes to study from. That it makes no sense to have the non-experts writing the study guides — shouldn't the experts do that? Of course, I was sitting there taking notes through the whole thing, because that's how I learn, that's how I process, that's how I stay engaged and keep from getting distracted or falling asleep. And I know perfectly well how bad students' reading comprehension is, how eagerly they will memorize a phrase without having any idea what it means. And I feel like notetaking is supposed to combat that, so people can ask questions and make sense of things.
I took an MITx class last year, with all these great video lectures, and of course I couldn't stand the slow pacing of the lectures, or how time-consuming they were to watch. I just read the textbook. That worked fine. I'm sure the lectures were great for someone.
The other problem with videos, of course, is that you can't read them on your phone in public, or in any other circumstance where they will disturb other people. Given how much of people's web use is mobile these days, you'd think that would have more of an effect.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 10:49 pm (UTC)Surely you don't need to — this is what screenreaders are for. Going in the other direction is more difficult.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-21 10:54 pm (UTC)I find that a rough transcription of an audio piece in a dialect/accent/context I'm familiar with usually takes me about twice as long as it takes to play the spoken piece. Other dialects take longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 12:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 01:06 am (UTC)When I was an undergraduate, people would occasionally ask to borrow or photocopy my notes if they had missed a lecture; my usual response was "sure, but they may not do you any good." At the time I was thinking of the shorthand I sometimes used (which drew on Greek, Spanish, and predicate calculus); a more official set of notes would probably be in something closer to standard English (or standard German or French or Japanese, depending on the language of the university). I don't know whether I would, now, do better to watch a video of the professor giving that day's lecture, rather than use professionally prepared notes. (We weren't offered prepared notes back then; I had enough to do trying to keep up with the assigned reading as it was.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 09:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 09:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 09:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 10:03 pm (UTC)It is a bit like a religion in some ways, but so is natural science, it's just less obvious when you're swimming in it rather than observing the field as an outsider. I know in theory the scientific method is totally the antithesis of religion, but most actual working scientists aren't using the scientific method in any kind of pure way. Certainly most journal editors and grant funders aren't.
I have a lot of frustrations with this sort of academic mode, especially the more literary end of it. But what are the alternatives? Not studying human behaviour and societies at all? Being massively physicalist about it, either only studying what can easily be quantified, or trying to design research questions in a reductionist way?
Intersectionality... the only serious complaint I've seen about it is that sometimes it can be an excuse for telling people, you're not allowed to care about women until you've fixed all the problems that also affect men, war, poverty, hunger, racism, disease, everything. That's obviously not reasonable. For my part I can't see the point of calling yourself a feminist if you're only interested in women exactly like yourself, if you hate disabled women and trans women and poor / lower class women and foreign women and religious women and women of colour, then you're not meaningfully working for women.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-22 11:29 pm (UTC)The closest thing I can point to; in philosophy, there's the analytic/continental split, and I've found that where something stands on that divide is a pretty good predictor of whether I'd like something or not - things associated with continental philosophy also seem to share the badness. The examples I gave show this. Rawls was in the analytic tradition, Butler was associated with continental philosophy.
One thing is that the issue is not with the social sciences and humanities, not even with the humanities, but with parts of the humanities. These days I'm quite interested in linguistics and psychology, and read research papers and textbooks, it's all reasonable enough.
Part of the problem seems to be theory, although see analytic philosophy for a counterexample of this; Rawls' book has theory in the name. It is also not particularly quantitative, and generally works by presenting arguments. And some of his ideas aren't particularly physicalist[1]; we're asked to imagine a set of essentially disembodied people, with no knowledge of who they are or even what their psychological tendencies are, and to imagine what sort of a contract they'd endorse. Theory seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the problem.
History; history isn't science, and no worse for not being science.
It turns out that chemists use lots of words too; I remember having arguments with my previous boss about how much of the content of the average chemistry paper could be formalised into something that could be put in a database; my view was that the freedom of flowing text was essential even for fairly humdrum papers.
I have a hunch here that there's something to do with nonliteral language here. I was looking at some of the fallout from the Sokal incident yesterday, one of his complaints is with "a vocabulary that intentionally elides the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them". This seems to be another marker for the problem. In other cases there is an open, wilful, and unapologetic disregard for the fact/value distinction, which seems to be another marker for the problem.
(forgettable footnotes which are entirely skippable)
[1] In fact I think this is a misuse of the word; as I read it, physicalism is about ontology[2], not epistemology. One can study all sorts of social, psychological and linguistic subjects without worrying too much what, if anything, minds are made of, although sooner or later questions about brains are going to emerge. Does it make a difference to your research project to know that brains are made of neurons? Within theoretical linguistics I've seen people answering "yes" and "no", my personal experiences lead me towards "yes" but this is essentially amateur speculation.
[2] It turns out that I have metaphysical beliefs. I believe that there is an external world, I believe that electrons exist (they might even be a natural kind); I'm not a positivist, I'm a scientific realist[3]. I think. FSVO "scientific realist". I'm conflicted about "secondary qualities" such as colour.
[3] I think you can be a perfectly good scientist without being a scientific realist.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-23 08:51 am (UTC)Readability allows you to view online articles with your choice of theme (e.g. light-on-dark vs. dark-on-light), width, and font size. There's a bookmarklet but you can also use it just by logging in to the site and pasting a URL into your reading list. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to view things that would require you to be logged in to the hosting site, e.g. a locked Dreamwidth post; it doesn't work on all pages; and it generally doesn't show the comments. When I added this post to my reading list, it displayed the body of the post fine but the comments were absent.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-23 11:38 am (UTC)he other thing I find difficult is, ironically enough, providing transcripts! I've always lectured fairly spontaneously, I rely minimally or not at all on notes. I flatter myself that my lectures are more engaging because I'm speaking naturally rather than reading a pre-prepared script, but for accessibility reasons I need to provide the students with such a script, and I struggle with that.
I do keep hoping that the shift to mobile will provide an incentive to make content more accessible, because people with high-end smartphones and data plans tend to have more influence than people with disabilities or who have to rely on years out of date systems or public terminals. But instead it seems like people are trying to improve the technology of mobile phones and tablets to make them more like handheld fully functional computers. It seems to me that no amount of technical innovation can overcome the physically small screen size and the problems of noise in public places, but what do I know?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-23 11:45 am (UTC)