Dear all, thank you for doing all of this, as I told Zdenek I am ready to meet. @SZdenek could you maybe generate a meeting link and post it here?
Hello all,
my Zoom is available, the question is whether @Richard and @Jan are ok with meeting one or two hours earlier (13:00 or 14:00 CET), or we keep the scheduled 15:00 CET.
Zdeněk Sloboda’s Personal Meeting Room -
Meeting ID: 457 123 1537
I can do either of those times. @Wojt, did you hear back from Jan? 13:00 CET is 7:00 in New Jersey, which might be too early for him.
@rebelethno … OK. I am going to be online on my zoom (above) at 14:00 CET, 13:00 UK, 8:00 NJ time. And we will see, who comes. 
Some brief notes on the last @rebelethno meeting before Christmas, Friday 18.12.:
- the collaborative procedure for working with the spreadsheet created by @Wojt will follow his recommendations stated above, until mid-January, the team will:
a) respond to and add comments to the pre-existing hierarchies exported to the individual sheets
b) distribute the codes listed in the first sheet across the hierarchies, adding comments throughout the process; creation of new hierarchies is possible, the tabs are sorted in alphabetical order from left to right
c) use the colour codes based on @Jan’s project grammar to tag the individual codes - @Jan agreed to provide a working definition/delimitation of the analytical categories, add them to the wiki dedicated to this topic, the team will implement them and discuss those definitions further
- code discussion (systematic):
a) antagonistic codes (eg. communism and anti-communism) will be kept in the codebook as a “pair”, on the same hierarchical level
b) coexistence or hierarchization of country/national codes clusters such as Russia, Russians, ‘Russians’, will be subjected to further discussion after the next round of coding - @Jirka_Kocian will elaborate a brief reflection on the differences between the coding models applied in the POPREBEL and DEMOS projects until mid-February; results and working paper of the DEMOS coding can be found here
The team will meet up again on January 15, 2021, the usual time. Pleasant Holidays and happy new year to everyone!
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Hi, @rebelethno !
Notes for organizing our thoughts and codes for our meeting tomorr…err…today.
Jan: first draft 11 January 2021
Discussed with Wojt on a few occasions.
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Culture is a massive (and internally incoherent with occasional contradictions) regulatory system (vide: Russian semiotics, Lotman, Uspenskiy et al). It is thus also an information system, providing answers to four questions. Such answers are often provided in the form of more or less coherent stories/narratives. The questions they answer are:
1.1. What is it? (meaning)
1.2. Is it good or bad? (value)
1.3. How should I feel about it? (emotional cue)
1.4. What should I do? (script or norm) -
Types of stories:
2.1. Everyday stories: close to praxis, common sense, habits (often unreflectively accepted, fragmented, embedded in proverbs, everyday figures of speech, etc.)
2.2. Myths and ideologies: explicit and elaborate, comprehensive, more coherent and explicitly structured than common sense (that does constitute its own cultural system, as per Clifford Geertz). -
Ideology: definitions:
3.1. Basic positions (after Paul Ricoeur):
3.1.1. Marx: ideology as distortion (for Marx ideological “delusion” is the reason that people do not fight)
3.1.2. Weber: ideology as legitimation
3.1.3. Geertz: ideology as integration
3.2. Ideologies (in political science) are usefully defined as stories (systems of ideas or configurations of political concepts) that: (1) strive to develop explicit, elaborate, comprehensive, and coherent depictions of the world, (2) justify a specific configuration of power, and (3) provide blueprints (scripts, norms) for sustaining or changing the political system and/or changing the world.
3.3. For example: M. Freeden (tradition of British analytical philosophy, thus focus on language): “ideologies are configurations of political concepts such as liberty, democracy, justice, and nationhood in which particular interpretations of each constituent concept have been selected out of an indeterminate range of meanings they may signify” (1998:749). -
Ideologies are fully-fledged (“thick”) or partial (“thin”). Thick ideologies provide comprehensive answers to all four questions. Populism is a thin ideology.
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Typologies of ideologies: a triangle versus a line (liberal conservative, prevalent in the US):
5.1. Liberalism (dominant value: liberty)
5.2. Socialism or social-democracy (equality)
5.3. Conservatism (tradition, community, hierarchy)
So, for coding (my proposals):
- Values. Let’s not use this term in the following sense: “Peace is a value.” Instead, “peace,” that needs to be first defined (meaning), becomes a value in the following sentence: “Peace is a good thing we need to strive for.” In other words, something becomes a value through the process of (explicit and positive or negative) (e)valuation. In this approach, if someone says: “They have peace over there,” we cannot say/code that for them “peace” is a value. If, however, they say “I want peace” it is a value, however implicitly declared. Why? Because it is hard to imagine that some “wants” something that they consider to be “bad.”
- Ideology. Let’s code – as much as it is possible – specific ideologies (liberalism, socialism, etc.).
- Emotions. Let’s use, as much as we can, the typology of emotions proposed by Plutchik (see my note from July 3, 2020), but let’s try to reduce it several simple and basic types. Perhaps 5?
- Institutions. Let’s follow the definitional tradition that seems to be dominant in today’s social science. Institutions are rules of the game, usually supported by some sanctions. Let me quote myself:
Concrete coding ideas:
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We may want to distinguish “actors” and “institutions,” simply because some actors are institutionalized, and some are not. For example, “government” (institutionalized) and “demonstrators” or “movement” (not). The point is to catch separately institutionalize and non-institutionalized dimension of politics.
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Ideally, we would have a coding system in which a post (let’s assume for now that this is a unit of coding; below we introduce the term “thematic unit”) that contains a statement (sentence, several sentences, paragraph) on a specific “object” (say, “hospital”), as well as an evaluation (value) of that object (“bad hospital”) and an emotion (“I am angry because this hospital is so bad,” would be coded three times, with overlapping codes on INSTITUTION (or perhaps ORGANIZATION, given the comment above), VALUE, and EMOTION.
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We need a decision on how to code emotions. As suggested above, we may want to have a typology of basic emotions, say, 5-10, or simply go for a dichotomy: positive and negative. This should be discussed, and we need a consensus decision soon.
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The second issue, discussed already in the past months, and which we may want to “close” once and for all, is concerns the difference between “post” and what we will call a “thematic unit.” Imagine, please the following situation. A post is composed of two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, the author writes about a hospital and expresses negative evaluation as well as anger (emotion). In the second paragraph they write about railroads and they evaluate them positively and express happiness. As a result, our coding of the post as a whole generates:
4.1. Two objects (coded as “institutions”): “hospital” and “railroad.”
4.2. Both positive and negative value (evaluation).
4.3. Two emotions: anger and happiness. -
As much as we understand, there are two ways of dealing with this undesirable situation:
5.1. The system knows that codes superimposed on each other need to be treated differently than codes appearing in different parts of the post.
5.2. The post is broken down into two “thematic units” and this operation two, separate coding clusters that make perfect sense. -
We may need to go over our coding completed so far and: (1) separate some posts into “thematic units” and (2) (possibly) recode. Given the number of posts already coded, this may be a prohibitively complex and time-consuming exercise. We may want to start, at least, with examining and splitting only those posts which deal with important topics. Below we are beginning to develop a list of such topics. They are chosen due to their centrality in the whole project.
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Central concepts for which we propose to create “thematic units:”
7.1. Actors
7.1.1. Churches
7.1.2. Movements
7.1.3. Governments
7.1.4. Authorities (local, regional, central)
7.1.5. The EU
7.2. Ideology
7.2.1. Populism
7.2.2. Conservatism
7.2.3. Neo-liberalism
7.2.4. Liberalism
7.2.5. Feminism
7.2.6. Anti-communism
7.2.7. Communism
7.2.8. Anarchism
7.2.9. Environemtalism
7.3. Emotions
7.3.1. Fear
7.3.2. Anger
7.3.3. Distrust
7.3.4. Unhappiness
7.3.5. Worry
The rest is currently being discussed and your input is more than welcome.
We suggest that we go through the comments on the codes in the sandbox document, try to resolve what we can.
If we have enough time, which is doubtful, we can talk about some conceptual nuances and technical issues.
What say you?
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That’s what I call a massive contribution to the discussion:), let’s go with your flow, if @Amelia has a chance to pop by we should maybe also update her on where do we stand right now.
I really like this typology and I think the values explanation is nuanced and excellent. I would add just one category: we also need something along the lines of actions/interventions (the verbs, what people are DOING – e.g. “seeking new experiences” or “organising demonstrations”). I think adding that we will have good core set for coding.
Thanks so much for this great work! I’m looking forward to discussing the terms at the top (culture, stories, ideology) and the coding ideas today! I propose we use this as our agenda, agreeing with Jiri. I’d love it if first we go through this typology to make sure we are on the same page, then go through the codes in sandbox.
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What time are we meeting today?
We planned for 15 CET/14 GMT
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We can use my Zoom today:
Hi @alberto, it’s Jitka here, I am the new Czech ethnographer. During our first meeting, @Jirka_Kocian and @SZdenek mentioned you might be able to generate a visualisation of the key Czech topics (codes?) collected over the past months. Do you think I could ask you to send them to me, whenever you have some free time? Thank you (I hope this makes sense:)
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Hello Jitka, so your visualizations are ready.
This is the whole of the Czech forum. Nodes represent codes. Edges represent co-occurrence between two codes. Redder edges mean more co-occurrences the two codes connected by the edge appear more often together: minimum is 2, maximum is 44. I excluded edges that represent one single co-occurrence, because that simplifies the graph a lot while still preserving recurring co-occurrences, which are likely to encode inter-subjectivity.
Larger nodes means more occurrences: the code appears more often. Minimum is 2, maximum is 146. The graph has 273 nodes and 1,274 edges.
Below you find a more reduced version. In this case, I have only included the edges that encode co-occurrences made by at least two different participants on the forum. The purpose of this is to exclude associations between codes that are only validated by one single participant in the forum. This graph has 93 nodes and 231 edges.
But honestly I do not know what you can do with static visualizations. In order to explore it, you will need to download the file, called a Tulip perspective. I put it on our GitHub here: https://github.com/edgeryders/network-viz-for-ssna/blob/master/code/special%20cases/poprebel_cz_forum.tlpx. But, in order to open it, you will need to install Tulip – get it here.
That can be a bit daunting, depending on your background and how comfortable you are with datasci/compsci. Happy to help, just let me know if you need a one-on-one session.
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Thank you so much Alberto. Only just saw this.
@rebelethno, we have some awesome new OE updates thanks to @matthias:
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You can now sort by number of annotations (so we can see the codes that occur most frequently at the top!)
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On the side of any post, you can now see what codes were used to code that post.
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The bulk editing mode is now possible in tandem with the search function, and is visible now immediately in the tree view.
A present for @Wojt 
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noice:)
Great news!
Dear All: our meeting today (March 26, Friday):
Jan Kubik is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: POPREBEL coding
Time: Mar 26, 2021 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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92424676142@zoomcrc.com
Meeting ID: 924 2467 6142
Password: 124586
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