Works discussed in the presentation “Democratizing the Democratization of Measurement: From the Three Estates of Expertise to the Encounter of Values”, presented August 5, 2024 to the Society for the Study of Measurement, meeting at UC Berkeley.Continue readingDemocratizing Measurement
So, it’s taken a bit with the start of the year, but I’m a doctoral student again. Thank you McGill Sociology! This year’s incoming cohort is perhaps the Department’s largest ever, with 11 new Ph.D. students, as well as 6 new M.A. students. It’s a great group that has bonded remarkably well. I feel very…Continue readingThe next step
So, it’s been an unexpectedly (and unintentionally) long time since my last post. I’ve been working on my M.A. thesis project, which I had intended to document in this blog. I wanted to update where things stand. This site sets out a larger research program, to identify the dimensions that describe our ideologies of childhood.…Continue readingResearch projects and time constraints
Cyber-utopianism was always bunk. The web was never democratic and it has become more or less what techno-realists like myself always expected it to become: a new playground for capitalism. It didn’t happen without resistance and that resistance certainly hasn’t stopped. But from the first moments that networking moved beyond the military and academic research,…Continue readingCultures of the Web Wrap Up
It is difficult for me to engage effectively with the representation of characters in video gaming, online or off, for the simple reason that I have engaged with gaming almost not at all. The gaming apps I use most are different implementations of Sudoku and Solitaire, with the occasional diversion of a word game or…Continue readingWhat is an Orc?
According to the ITU (see below), 61.8% of Cubans used the internet in 2019, though other sources have lower numbers (49.1% in 2020, according to Wikipedia; 40.3% in 2020, according to InternetWorldStats). Whatever the exact figure, there is no question that current levels are a sharp increase in a short period of time – doubling…Continue readingA ‘Weekly Package’
Web scraping is the enormously helpful ability to run a program that will automatically extract data from web pages for you and provide them to you in a structured file for use in analysis or elsewhere. The off-the-shelf web scraper so helpfully named Webscraper is easy to install and relatively easy to use, with many…Continue readingScraping the library
Drawing tendentious distinctions between ‘fields’ or ‘disciplines’ or ‘approaches’ or ‘methods’ of thinking is at least as old as Socrates, who (at least as Plato presents him to us) very desperately wanted to distinguish ‘philosophy’ from ‘rhetoric’ (or ‘sophistry’) and ‘poetry’. These days, one almost expects to see new ‘fields’ proclaimed weekly. Which then requires…Continue readingThoughts on ‘What is DH?’
Academics love to dispute. I mean, there is nothing that humans like better than disagreeing with one other, preferably with the goal of justifying violence against one another. But academics take it to another level entirely. The typical academic dispute looks like this: On the one side you have the quadrists, who vehemently insist that…Continue readingOn academic dispute
For this history, I chose to look at reggiochildren.it, the website of Reggio Children S.r.l., the entity created by the municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy, for promoting and protecting the Reggio Emilia Approach® to early childhood education. I think it fair to consider a pedagogy to be a cultural product, as a general statement, while…Continue readingA History of reggiochildren.it