Why do academics cite? And what can the Open Data teach us?

I like thinking and I like my thoughts. I learn by debating and discussing, especially with people who disagree or who approach a topic from a radically different perspective. I want to be able to order and lay out my thoughts to encourage further debate.

I don’t want to cite experts to justify my thinking, as if my thoughts have no value because I am not eminent. I do not want to hide behind experts in an attempt to abdicate personal responsibility for what I’ve written.

I do have to be careful in case the above is an excuse for trying to avoid citing because I find it difficult to develop the discipline of knowing where ideas have come from. I’m pretty eclectic and I’m getting old. I usually couldn’t tell you where I picked up an idea – it might have been a newspaper article, tweet, book I read in 1983, something overheard at a conference, a conversation, a lecture or something I scan-read when looking to see what others have read. And I’m not just eclectic, I also struggle to separate my immediate interaction with someone’s words and the words themselves.

But I digress. Whatever my beliefs and (limited) capability for citing, my thoughts are not my thoughts. They are a constantly evolving product of interaction with other thinkers. I need to keep notes so I can cite others in order to:

•  give credit to those co-creators (at all stages of research)
•  provide pointers to how my thinking evolved (when I get to the point of fixing my thinking in a thesis)
•  signpost people to things I think worth reading (at all stages of research)

We have an established academic route for citation when we interact with texts, with rules for how to cite within our writing and how to reference that citation in the bibliography. That’s fine if the knowing or unknowing co-creators of your thinking are written, disembodied texts. And it will be fine once I’ve learned the discipline of keeping accurate records…

There are newer rules for citing television programmes, videos, websites – almost anything can be cited as long as what we are citing could be accessed by others in the same way that we accessed it.

But what do we do when our co-creators are encountered not as written texts but as conversations, debates, email exchanges, tweets? My reasons for wishing to cite are as valid now as for any encounter I have with a written text.

Back in the 1980s when I wrote a science dissertation, it was permitted to cite the very occasional 'pers comm' if it came from a respected authority. One needed a strong argument for including a personal communication as, although it credited the person and directed you to someone of interest, it did not let other people reflect independently on that communication. In other words, how could others access the information, the data, that was being cited?

It’s at this point that my thoughts moved to the concept and language of Open Data. After all, what is a citation but a way to access data? And in Open Data Institute terms (http://theodi.org/blog/closed-shared-open-data-whats-in-a-name), data come as open, shared and closed. My data are 'things needing citation'

• Open is available to all on the same basis.
•  Shared is available to some (like publications behind a pay wall or personal communications).
•  Closed is private communication so shouldn’t be cited at all.

Some within the Open Data world argue that as much data as possible should be shifted to ‘open’ or ‘closed’, because ‘shared’ is where privileged is maintained through controlled access to information. (As I said, I’ve been ill-disciplined in documenting where I hear things; all I can say is my belief this is true comes from articles I’ve clicked through to from Twitter written by proponents of Open Data, and conversations over dinner before a Gov Camp with someone from an Open Data Institute. If anyone reading this wants to direct me to something I can cite, that would be amazing)

If the language of Open Data applies to things a researcher might want to cite, does Open Data thinking show us a way to move personal communications out of ‘shared’ and into ‘open’? Possibly. One route would be to shorten the time between finding something out or developing a new idea, and publishing about it. It might be fun if academics had a ‘please publish’ button on their blogs to help work out which blogs must urgently need refining from a work-in-progress into a publication. Or perhaps we need to revisit the status and purpose of blogs, but that would be the subject of a different blog.

Maybe, in this world of DOI (Digital Object Identifier; a code that means your information can be found even if the web address changes), there is scope for preparing a mutually acceptable version of any 'pers comm' and deliberately moving it out of the shadows into the ‘open’ by uploading it digitally in a way that complies with guidance on what makes ‘good open data’ (http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data).

This might make both parties think twice about how transparent they wish their communication to be. But if transparency is a problem, the communication probably needs to be shifted to the ‘closed’ category and therefore not cited at all.

I have no desire to undermine the status of peer reviewed published literature. When I write my thesis, they will take pride of place. But to fulfill my three purposes for citation, I will also need to cite beyond that, and that means I will need 

• a way to cite people and not just their texts
• a strategy for making sure anything I wish to cite complies with the principle of others being able to access what I've cited.

Discuss! 

What's in a word?

A reflection on Dave Snowden's public lecture title: 'Nudge not yank' and subsequent facebook conversation with James, Jules and the man himself

We use language to communicate. Sometimes words aren't enough, and pictures can do a better job. Sometimes we need metaphors or similes. 

Nudge and yank speak to me of movement. Movement and journeys are a common metaphor in behaviour change, and a common metaphor in everyday life too. So I've chosen to go with the 'journey' metaphor.

Quick note: Sometimes, before we can make sense of a detailed map, we need to get a rough idea of where we are heading. This blog is very much an attempt to sketch a 'map of Wales' level of detail. Once we've worked out roughly where we are heading, then we can dig out the detailed maps and StreetView to help us plan our journey.

So here's my go at defining nudge, yank (and couple more).

• I am at A and I want to be at B but it's hard. Please make it easier. Facilitate

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. So you try to stand in my shoes and work out how to gently push me to B. I may know that's what you are doing and allow myself to be budged (ethical) or be unaware (manipulation so not ethical). Nudge

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. It's a fair distance, so you try to stand in my shoes and push me hard in the direction of B. Shove.

• I'm at A and you want me to be at B. You are already at B and don't try to think what it is like to be at A. You try to pull me towards B in one sudden move. Yank. 

Doing anything about the A to B journey assumes we know what A looks like, what B looks like, the distance between them and what the terrain is like in between A and B. My guess is that this is what SenseMaker is designed to do.

And then we have the issue that most nudge thinking is about changing the behaviour of a population, not an individual. Each person's A will be different (subtly or radically) from every other person's A.

Assuming we manage to understand A, B and the journey between them, our next task is to think of more reliable ways for people to get from A to B and, perhaps most importantly, decide whether it's any of our business.

Emacipatory research. Who is it for?

Barod volunteered to review a book edited by David Bolt, called 'Changing Social Attitudes Towards Disability'. The review has just been published by the journal Disability & Society  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2016.1167362 (if you can't get to it on the first link, try this one: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/hnpqssth8Pkh7eq29M69/full).

I hadn't reflected on what I had written for a while. What struck me re-reading it today is the strength of my feeling that accounts of emancipatory research are often inaccessible to those outside academic life, and that this is problematic.

In part, this is a problem shared with all critical qualitative social research. We want our research to create change, or we wouldn't be doing it. But we want our research to be validated as research, so we need to conform to the rules of the game. We end up needing to publish different accounts for different audiences, if we want our research to create change and be validated as research.

Is there evidence of this conundrum in emancipatory research? Yes, I think so.
How fundamental is the issue? I'm not sure.

For emancipatory research, it would be an issue if you only publish an academic account of your research and your research findings, unless the research is about/for emancipating academics.
Equally, it would be an issue if you publish something that could be earth-shattering but in a format that means it is never found (or, if found, misunderstood or dismissed) by those academics who could have wrestled with your ideas and the finding, and could have taken your work forward.

I'm not in the 'camp' that think 'academicese' (aka academic jargon) is bad. Learning 'academicese' can be valuable. Sometimes it is important to categorise and distinguish 50 different types of snow - in which case it is advisable to learn the vocabulary from a culture where types of snow are sufficiently important that they have developed the language needed to identify with precision each type of snow. Similarly in sociology and social research, it can be important to categorise and define far more precisely than in everyday life. Without technical language, it is very challenging to do this, and even more challenging to communicate your thoughts to others.

Bottom line is that we need to develop bilingualism between everyday types of speech and 'academicese'. We need to build a bilingual community, and to build translation/interpretation skills so that monoglots can participate in a bilingual environment.

All I can dream is that we learn how to be a strong academic/non-academic emancipatory community that holds together bilinguals and monoglots within one community. From my experience of living in Wales as a Welsh learner I am all too aware that this is an almost impossible challenge.

Talking to the GP

I've never tried talking to a GP about mental health before. 

There are many reasons, mostly because my work and life mean I've listened to GPs and other health professionals talking about people with mental health problems, and I've listened to people with mental health problems talking about GPs and other health professionals. Neither set of listenings have inspired confidence to even try talking to anyone in the NHS.

There's also my embarrassment, shame and sense of inadequacy that I've not self-managed my health adequately so need expert intervention. That's not specifically about mental health. I get the same feelings if I need to call on an expert for my asthma or eczema or a sports injury if I feel it's because of poor self-management. 

The fear factor for me was unique to mental health. It's one thing going to a GP and saying your asthma is uncontrolled. It's a different thing going to a GP and saying your anxiety (and voices) have exceeded your self-management skills. I was terrified that he'd hear the word 'voices' and hit the panic button.

But I went, taking my husband as my advocate. I went because I needed to get signed off work because I wasn't really safe to be there (for work read 'full time PhD student'). What being signed off also gives me is space where I don't need to do anything except focus on all the self-care things I need to do in order to get back to self-management. 

And for the first time, I accepted that I needed to bite the bullet and ask for some short term pharmaceutical help.

The appointment went well. I gave a three-point summary: my mental ill-health has exceeded my ability to self-manage; I need a medical note to give me a two month suspension of studies (which has already been agreed with the university), and I need something to take the edge off anxiety when it gets to the point I feel unsafe. 

And that excellent GP didn't miss a beat, didn't change his tone of voice, didn't even change his facial expression. He treated it just like my asthma or eczema had gone out of control. He asked a few relevant questions without sounding like he was reading from a script. He clearly knew about good self-management techniques (cos he checked I knew of them and was using the ones that worked for me!). He accepted my assessment of the situation (and my husband's filling in of details). He gave quick 'yes' answers to my two key points, ie there was no issue with the medical note and he had no problem with giving me a very small quantity of diazepam for short term use if/as needed. Then he talked with me a bit more about the longer term. And we agreed I would go to see him in two weeks so we could agree whether I'd got back to self-managing or, if not, for him to explain the longer term options.. 

I don't know how he came to be so excellent (I almost wonder if he has personal relevant experience), but three cheers for an excellent GP. By treating my illness as something as mundane as out-of-control asthma, he's helping me treat it that way too.

Intersectionality and privilege

I'd never be told to ‘check my privilege’ before. It was an eye opener.

 

It came about because I was challenged to think about intersectionality.

 

Inter-what?? Intersectionality has several meanings, all of which include a sense that ‘just because we are all X, it doesn’t mean we experience being X the same way’. Most meanings of intersectionality also talk of stigma and oppression, and how the totality of who we are will affect how we experience oppression in relation to any characteristic. For example, most writing about Black oppression is written from a man’s perspective, but Black oppression may be experienced very differently by a woman. Most writing about oppression of women is written from a White perspective, but oppression for being a woman may be experienced very differently if you are Black. Most writing about being disabled is written from a White man’s perspective and that’s not terribly helpful if you are a disabled Black woman.

 

You see, I have a number of stigmatising characteristics.

• I'm fat.
• I'm a woman (and to make that more stigmatising, I don't even behave like one - I don't wear make up or do my hair or nails).
• I have a long term mental health condition (entertainingly my other selves reject the ‘mental health condition’ label - we rather enjoy being a collective).
• I have a number of physical health problems that interfere with everyday life.
• I don't have a career or a proper job.
• I’m over 50

But despite those stigmas, I don't seem to experience the oppression that many people with one or more of those characteristics experience.

 

It's possible I've internalised oppression (so don't see oppression for what it is). And it's possible that I am in denial or that I subconsciously use avoidance tactics to make sure in never in a situation where those characteristics are relevant.

 

But I genuinely think I have avoided being oppressed (even though I have definitely come across people/circumstances that would have oppressed me - if I'd let them).

 

Pause, think:  If I'd let them….

 

And that's why I need to check my privilege. How privileged am I if I can avoid being oppressed?

 

I have a number of non-stigmatised characteristics, some of which confer privileges in contemporary Welsh culture.

• I'm white 
• I'm middle class  
• I’m well-educated 
• I speak (some) Welsh 
• I may be a woman, but I went to a majority boys independent school where I was never encouraged to see myself as different from the boys  
• I have a comfortable income (courtesy of husband) - oh, yes, there's another, I'm married to a man. 
• I'm not a carer of young children or older or disabled family members. 
• Oh, and I'm Christian – although based on how people react when I say that, I'm not sure whether that's stigmatising or privileging these days!

 

I think three features of my life stand out as privileged characteristics that over-ride the potential oppression of my stigmatising characteristics and allow me to refuse to let others oppress me:

• I went to Oxford University.  
• I do not rely on the benefits system. 
• I face life shoulder-to-shoulder with an amazing other half.

 

The Oxford University thing is so many privileges rolled into one.

 

The one-to-one tutorial system means I was taught to think, evaluate, critique, argue and stand up for my opinion.

 

The majority male environment continued the pattern set at secondary school of seeing myself as one of the crowd rather than ‘a girl’.

 

I knocked about with people who took power and privilege for granted, and who opened doors for me to see inside the powerful elite world of the very rich and very influential. Some of that confidence and assumption that you are worthy of respect rubbed off on me.

 

While I did not consider going to Oxford made me better than others, it was a very useful status symbol to bring out casually when needed. I tried to use it very sparingly. But it meant I got to talk to a senior government official in Hong Kong to sort a problem when a friend (a Filipina maid) told me about an issue affecting her and most of her friends.

 

Not relying on benefits. That is a huge privilege for anyone with long term mental ill health.

 

[my committee are likely to shoot me if I keep saying that – we would say: ‘for anyone who is neurodiverse’ because that’s the narrative that makes sense to us. It allows us to be powerful in being different, not powerful despite being different].

 

Back to the “not relying on benefits”. Having income (albeit mostly from being married to someone with a good income) means no debilitating fights with officialdom. No need to focus on what I’m not able to do, and why I’m ‘broken’ so I can fill in interminable forms. No constant fear of something going wrong with the system and being left destitute. No media portraying me as a charity case at best, and a work-shy, cheating, scrounging, fraudster at worst. I can’t imagine the day in, day out grind of negative messages about people who rely on benefits. It was bad enough when I was a part-time wheelchair user. I confess there were times I stayed sat in my chair in public because I couldn’t face another round of explanations, stares and tuts if I stood up to reach the can of beans on the top shelf in the supermarket.

 

Facing life shoulder-to-shoulder.

 

I don’t think it actually matters that my amazing other half is a man and that we are married. I think that what matters is that I am facing life with someone by my side. We have committed to each other, and we have honoured that commitment to each other for over 25 years. That level of commitment reduces the fear. It means in the self-doubting moments (of which there are many), I am reassured by someone I trust of the wonderfulness of being who I am. 

 

Thank you to the writer on intersectionality who reminded me to ‘check my privilege’.

 

Stopping to check has made me cringe to think of the times I have glibly told other women who share my ‘committee-in-our-head’ way of life that they just need to re-frame how they see themselves (ie think in terms of neurodiversity) and their oppression and stigma will start to recede as people interact with them differently. That might work if you have my privileges. But a new narrative won’t overcome the soul-destroying weight of relying on benefits and facing life alone. I have some apologies to make.

 

As I go into the future, I will be more aware of my privilege and my responsibility to use my privileges wisely. Privileges doesn’t mean I’m better. But it certainly means I get more doors opened for me.  My task is to get my foot in that door then hold the door open for anyone else who wants to get inside.  I wonder how the PhD can help with that.

 

Stop putting me at the centre!

Stop “putting people at the centre”!

 

I know you mean well, but can you please just stop it!

 

Everywhere I look, public services (especially health and social care) want to “put you at the centre” and “give you a voice”. It's part of the “new relationships” between users and providers of public services.

 

Well, there are two ways to be at the centre. You can be the spider controlling the web. Or you can be the object that the rest of the kids in the playground are circled around.

 

I lack the power to be at the centre of a social care web, pulling strings, making things happen. Would I want that kind of relationship with the social care workforce? Possibly, but that’s based on a history of not trusting public services and, while I understand my control-freak tendencies, I’m not proud of them. I need to learn to trust - but first I need evidence that it is safe and responsible to start trusting.

 

And I cringe at the idea of being the kid in the centre of the playground circle. Even if the kids who’ve put in the centre are benign, even if they are helpful, even if they have no intention of misusing their power – they are clearly on the outside staring at me, objectifying me, evaluating me, sizing me up.  

 

As far as I can tell, the playground circle is what is happening in social care. Those on the outside (the social care workforce) retain the power of controlling on what terms I can work with them. And they treat me as something qualitatively different from them for all the talk of partnership. As we meet in the roles of 'user' and 'provider', we become 'Other' to each other. Because, yes, I am guilty of treating social care workers as 'them', just as they are guilty of treating me as 'Other'.

The imagery of "putting people at the centre" just reinforces the fundamental inequality and Othering that Wales is trying to escape.

 

I certainly don’t think this is what the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act is supposed to be doing. But from what I read of briefings for the social care workforce, I fear the “putting people at the centre” approach is becoming engrained. In many ways I AM at the centre. I am the centre of my own life. No-one can put me there. I just am there. But when I need to relate with other people and work with other people, the imagery of being in the centre loses its power.

 

So PLEASE stop talking about putting me at the centre.  Maybe talk about you and I standing shoulder to shoulder. There’s a sense of equality and respect in being shoulder-to-shoulder.

'Giving voice'

I’ve been struggling with the concept of a PhD. So I decided to go back to basics and re-lay some foundations.

In the process I found I really helpful chart to match purpose for doing research with a research strategy (original from Martyn Denscombe’s The Good Research Guide), which I played around with slightly (based on John Hughes'. and Michael Crotty’s work):

Do I want a strategy to:

• Understand the complex relationship between factors in a particular social setting? – case study
• Describe cultural practices, and interpret social interaction within a culture? – ethnography
• Understand things through someone else’s eyes; describe the essence of a personal experience? Phenomenology
• Clarify concepts or produce new theories – grounded theory
• Explore a new topic and provide new insights – grounded theory
• Solve a practical problem – action research
• Produce guidelines for best practice – action research
• Give voice to individuals’ lives and their stories - narrative research

I was contemplating which was the right approach for me (personally) and which was the right approach for the research question (which would need to change if it didn’t lead to an approach that was right for me!!).

It got me thinking about the whole area of ‘giving voice”’. 

• Yes, I want people to have their voices, and have their voices heard.
• But do I want to be someone with the responsibility to ‘give voice’?
• Who am I to be giving people what is already theirs by right?

[There’s also the small philosophical issue of how anyone can ‘give voice’ accurately to someone else’s story, even when the stories are told by them using their own words and transcribed from an audio recording – but that’s for another blog]

And that got me thinking about disability and ‘inspiration porn’, and the ‘poverty porn’ that is little more than voyeurism under the cloak of being caring and compassionate.  That is often done with the intention of 'giving voice' to people, but is just telling stories about them.

If you aren’t sure what I mean by inspiration and poverty porn, it’s the kind of stories and research you see that objectifies people (hence the ‘porn’) while holding them up as objects of pity or inspiration. It makes the people who aren’t being objectified feel good about themselves, without calling for any change to an oppressive status quo.

Well, I’ve come to at least one decision from going back to basics.

I've done enough ‘giving voice’ to people who tell their stories, spill their guts, expose raw places, all in the hope that something will change for others (or themselves) as a result. I’ve done for almost 25 years as part of policy consultation work. I’ve done it on and off as part of social research. And I’ve read other people’s social research and consultation reports.  And I can count on one hand the times that people’s hopes of change have been realised.

So 2016 is the year I stop ‘giving voice’ to people. I refuse to be complicit in a game where people spill their guts to me in the usually fruitless hope of change.

2016 will be the year I work my socks off to find ways people can find and use their own voices, directly and effectively, have influence, create change and generally unsettle institutions that need unsettling.

I’m not sure that solves the problem of what strategy to use for my PhD research, but it has helped me work out what I don't want to do - and that's a good start.

It could be an interesting 2016.