POPREBEL Ethnography Team Call Notes

[amelia]

Team Call 23 October 2020

Whole @rebelethno team present!

First, we discussed the new ethnographer outreach positions. We are accepting applications for all 3 platforms, and will be running initially for 3 months. Disseminate the call far and wide! Closes on the 5th of November and we will discuss candidates on the 6th of November.

Second, we did code review (thanks @SZdenek for the detailed review). @Wojt will resolve the far/extreme/radical right typology and @Jan will create a typology for forms of action/activism/direct action, which we can then co-code with political alignments, ideologies, topics etc like feminism, LGBT rights, economic reform, etc. This also means that we have emotions like apathy or emotional investment that we can co-code with political alignments/ideologies and forms of action to paint a more nuanced picture of the situation and maintain rigorous coding categories.

We will also have the Graphryder meeting to discuss:

1. Representation of hierarchies
2. Creating visualisations of different subforums (@alberto, on Tulip perhaps, we would love this as soon as possible to compare each subforum ssna to the connected co-occurrence network).
3. Teaching everyone to update Graphryder.

Thanks everyone for a great meeting!

[alberto]

@amelia

Creating visualisations of different subforums (@alberto, on Tulip perhaps, we would love this as soon as possible to compare each subforum ssna to the connected co-occurrence network).

Sure. Let’s talk early next week, so we can prepare a description of what you exactly want.

[Jan]

@alberto @amelia As I explained to the team today, the next three weeks will be busy for me, as the annual (online) convention of ASEEES (The Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies) is scheduled for November 5-8 and 14-15 and I have a great fortune to be the president for this year… But I will do my best to participate in that meeting on Graphryder. I also would like to schedule a meeting with you, just to review where we are and discuss some ideas. Here I want to signal: (1) I created a continuous reporting spreadsheet to keep an eye on everybody’s progress. Edgeryders look good, but please have a look: Sign in to your account. (2) Please think how you would like to present Edgeryders’s contribution to POPREBEL at a conference we will have with the two other consortia in February 2021. (3) And you may want to have a look at a preliminary report @Wojt prepared with a bit of my input. We have a way better view of what is going on in the Polish community (all threads are now coded). Ciao.

[amelia]

Agenda for Team Call Friday 6 November:

1. Review of ethnographer applications and interview schedule.
2. Update on code review process.
3. Generate requests for @alberto re Tulip visualisations.

Call Notes Friday 6 November:

@rebelethno present (minus @Jirka_Kocian)

@alberto showed us some awesome visualisations of the subforum graphs. Now we are going to learn how to use them using Tulip! Link here:

We are going to schedule a meeting for a Tulip tutorial. Here’s the doodle poll, please fill it out!

Expired Group Poll - Create a New Poll or Contact the Owner

For next meeting, we are all going to do code review. Navigate to the backend (edgeryders.eu/annotator), click on “Codes” in the sidebar, and change the drop down menu from “Tree” to “Translate” (make sure you also select “Any Creator” rather than your own name in the top bar. I recommend sorting by “Newest”

In the Translate view, add an asterisk to any codes that you think need reviewing or changing.

Add a note in the code description saying why you think it needs attention.

Then press “Save” on the right and a “Saved!” will appear in green text to show you it has saved.

When you’re done with review, make sure to also review the codes that have been asterisked by other ethnographers in case you need to edit or change them. You can do this by searching for the * in the search box.

Thanks all!

[amelia]

Hi @rebelethno ,

As most of you know, I’m currently recovering from COVID. I think we should still have a meeting tomorrow to check in.

Also, only @Richard and @SZdenek filled out the doodle to schedule the Tulip tutorial with @alberto, so we were unable to schedule that. Please make an effort to fill these things out. @alberto, if you’re free tomorrow during our bi-weekly, we could dedicate the time to the tutorial. Otherwise, we’ll do another doodle.

Agenda for tomorrow is either:

Tulip tutorial/workshop

or

1. Update on interviews / @Wojt and @Jan update with the call I hope they’ve had with Mania, as discussed at the last meeting and in follow-up.
2. Planning milestones and targets for the new ethnographer hires.
3. Code review.

Thanks all!

Call Notes:

Code Review

1. We will address and resolve all asterisked codes in the next 2 weeks.
2. Once finished, make a post in the POPREBEL Coding Memos thread with the codes you want to discuss in the meeting.
3. In the next bi-weekly, we will discuss all remaining asterisked codes mentioned in the memos.
4. Especially mark any codes that are too big (eg “politics”) – we will break them up by each going through the annotations associated with them and either recoding or deleting.

Interviews

1. @Wojt and @Jan to meet with Mania asap.
2. We will continue to interview for Czech and German ethnographers.
3. New start date likely Jan 1st.

Tulip tutorial
I will send out a doodle for the first week of December that everyone will fill out (if @alberto confirms that he can teach us at some point that week – is that a good week for you?)

[amelia]

Team Call Notes 15 Jan 2020

Present: @rebelethno

We mostly discussed @Wojt and @Jan’s analysis framework:

@Wojt

Jan: first draft 11 January 2021
Discussed with Wojt on a few occasions.

1. 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)
2. 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).
3. 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).
4. Ideologies are fully-fledged (“thick”) or partial (“thin”). Thick ideologies provide comprehensive answers to all four questions. Populism is a thin ideology.
5. 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):

1. 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.”
2. Ideology . Let’s code – as much as it is possible – specific ideologies (liberalism, socialism, etc.).
3. 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?
4. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Next steps from this meeting:

1. For next meeting, bring a paragraph of text that you want to analyse with the group that is illustrative of any coding decisions that you are struggling with/ that is representative of the kind of analysis you want to do.
2. We’ll decide what categories of codes we want to solidify based on this (e.g. ideology, emotions, institutions, organisations, actions, actors).
3. Keep narrowing down the list of codes we primarily use and merging together codes that have the same or very similar meaning.

Explore abductive reasoning as an analytical frame for the analysis that we do (@Jan can post reading homework).

Discussion

Coding Categories:

Institutions – the set of rules of the game. E.g. healthcare system.

• Things can be more or less institutionalised. Or well-institutionalised (the rules work) vs badly institutionalised (lots of breakdown).
• a social movement may work well but be less institutionalised. A healthcare system can be highly institutionalised but poorly institutionalised (has a lot of rules but it doesn’t work very well).

Organisations – places that have rules, when you walk in you have to follow them (e.g. hospital).

• institutionalised group of actions (social movement theory)

• usually has more resources

• (What is the state?)

• Border

  • not a group of people (so NOT an org), but something highly institutionalised
  • guard, and rules of engagement that if you breach things will go very badly

Actors (human) - e.g. doctors, administrators. What actors make up the organisation?
Actors (non-human) - objects that have meaning, like medicine
Scale - level of affective identifications (do I primarily see myself as a global citizen or as a Polish person, or as someone from the countryside?)

Place/location- as contextual information

–
Goal: break down into a smaller list of codes used more frequently that should be shared. Based upon:

• what came before (first pass coding)
• theoretical interests as narrowed down

Abductive Reasoning

• Peirce
• Read: Abductive Analysis: Theorising Qualitative Research (@alberto)
• Collingwood: the key is the question and how you frame it

Culture both names and evaluates things

• semiotic (meaning)
• axiomatic (value)

–
Discussion about value and how to capture it:

• via SSNA descriptive codes and what they are in a web of associations with, contextual. It’s about the story (e.g. words like fear, uncertainty, dissatisfaction co-occurring with the above categories).
• or impose sentiment analysis layer? hot debate here.

evaluation may be implicit

• key word: “want”

emotional “valence”

• sliding scale colours superimposed upon codes
• to show in forum what is mostly positive and what is mostly negative
• sentiment analysis layer
• how to avoid "anti "+ “not happy” codes

• make a list of emotion codes
• add valence to those codes (add a positive or negative value)
• colour what it touches in the SSNA
  (but lots of disagreement here!)

[Jirka_Kocian]

@rebelethno Dear all, as we planned the call today, I would like to tell you all that our son was born a little bit ahead of plan, yesterday, early in the morning and because of this, I cannot contribute with anything new to the discussion today…I will see if I can join the call for a sec as well as about my efficiency in the weeks to come:)

However, I would also like to invite you all to our annual conference of the Malach Center for Visual History on Monday 25, which might be of some interest. Link to ZOOM and the program are here.

Cheers:)

[Richard]

Congratulations! That’s great news. Have you decided on a Czech-Chilean name yet?

[Jirka_Kocian]

Leonardo Antonio Kocián Davis

[Richard]

Do we need a link for today’s call?

https://ucl.zoom.us/j/4149496930

[Wojt]

I’m sorry guys, I couldn’t and thus didn’t make it to today’s meeting. Family matters.
Are there any minutes from it?

[Wojt]

Congratulations!!!

[noemi]

<3 Congraaaattssss, very happy for you!

[Jirka_Kocian]

Thank you so much!

[Wojt]

Hi @rebelethno !
Since we now have been OKed to introduce hierarchies into our backend we would like to suggest a meeting this Friday (February 5th) to go through our spreadheet, compress and refine what we can, and introduce the hierarchies we agree on into the backend.
What say you?

If you can make it, please make sure to go through the document and read the comments so that we don’t have to do all this when we meet, ok?

[Jirka_Kocian]

Hello, unfortunately, I am still off my usual tempo, I could not make any contribution for tomorrow - I will catch up next week and do what is due

[amelia]

I can’t make it today (I’m doing a mock viva!) but I support your efforts and look forward to contributing at our bi weekly next week

[Jan]

@SZdenek @Wojt looks like it is just the three of us:Launch Meeting - Zoom

[SZdenek]

I apologise. I have been already at the airport,in the plane to Doha. Will be back on Friday in two weeks.

[Richard]

@rebelethno

Do we have a link for today’s meeting?
If not, we can use this: Launch Meeting - Zoom
See you all at 9.00 US / 14.00 UK / 15.00 EU.