"Digital humanities" must refer to things like this.
Humanities are just the way for society to prepare enough double blind samples to test their new anti-depressants on. Alternate jobs are an integral part of that approach.
It just seems so graceless and clumsy
And artless, awkward and inelegant.
Can the authors be unaware that, say, journalist and librarian jobs tend to go to people who get degrees in journalism and library science? Graduate degrees in the humanities provide nice resume padding for that kind of thing, but still. And: "work on your yo-yo"? I can only hope that that's a metaphor, or at least a euphemism.
I also kept laughing at the idea that humanities grad students are going to be the future of digital anything. They are, IME, not the most technologically savvy bunch.
FWIW, I work in 'digital humanities', but I'm a humanities person who came to graduate study off the back of years working in the IT industry. Looking around at the various people I work with there's a mixture of people with humanities and engineering/comp sci backgrounds. I'm not sure someone would get in the door with just a pure humanities background, though. There wouldn't be any requirement that one have a formal education in some techy area, but you'd definitely need to have some experience working on tech savvy projects, even if your primary job experience wasn't at the sharp end of the technological side of stuff.
re: point 2, beloved colleagues are distinguished practitioners of a wide range of academic disciplines, but painful experience demonstrates that only about a quarter of beloved colleagues will have read anything that hasn't been sent them several times with APPROPRIATE EMPHASIS ON THE IMPORTANT BITS, and ideally also discussed in person and with some sort of poster campaign. Emphasis isn't for the benefit of people who are too dim or unsophisticated to understand the whole text, but also for those in a hurry or distracted.
A humanities degree would be tough to get you in the door of IT as a software developer, but the world needs decent business analysts, and thats a job that requires an understanding of abstraction that I which humanities people (humanitarians?) would be good at.
It goes on to acknowledge that "graduate schools are not yet very good at preparing you" for such positions. I find it a stumper why a department of religious studies (e.g.) should ever become even moderately good at preparing its Ph.D. students for jobs as administrators, software developers, journalists, or librarians.
Medical schools aren't very good at preparing people to organize and design clinical trials, but M.D.s are the people who get hired to do it.
Similarly, PhD programs don't prepare you to teach college courses. Or to teach anything.
I'm unprepared for nearly anything.
re: 7
Yes, we have people running projects and acting as analysts of a sort, who aren't really 'technical' people. They can understand the techie stuff enough to talk to the pure tech staff, but they're not really programmers or developers as such. I'm probably more geared that way myself: I do most of the tech stuff that I'm involved with (rather than passing it on to full-time programmers), because I'm essentially a team of one, but the things I'm best at are less to do with pure programming ability -- which I don't really have in spades -- and more to do with being able to talk tech to the techy people, and academic language to the academics.
I'm discovering how unprepared I am to teach logic. I never had a course in logic or really bothered to look at it before, and now I'm teaching a Discrete Math course for CS majors. So far this seems like a tedious topic.
Yet still employed with benefits because I'm a literate white guy with basic math skills. Yea privilege.
14: just wait until you teach a class called "Logic" that a bunch of philosophy majors show up for.
Or Vulcans. They know them some logic.
re: 16
"Look, just learn the truth tables, dammit."
The biggest problem is that I'm really inarticulate. Like, I get very stumbly trying to find the right grammar to use around propositions (like the "implies" propositions) without inadvertently modifying the proposition.
I'm taking an online course in ethical approaches to clinical and behavioral research right now. As far as I can tell, it's preparing me to have taken an online course in ethical approaches to clinical behavioral research. On the other hand, did you know that coercing people into receiving harmful medical procedures (like the Nazis did) is bad? True!
Based on my experience, you have to be hyper articulate or inarticulate to teach math or philosophy.
I've never taught logic, but I can see how it'd be an exercise in frustration, as a lot of the things people are instinctively likely to want to ask aren't usually covered in introductory and/or intermediate logic courses [but hived off into philosophical logic, or philosophy of language, or mathematical logic courses, or set theory, or etc etc etc ... ].
20: I have to take one of those every year. It is better than the one I have to take to remind me that I shouldn't open attachments from addresses like pr0n.spam@virus.com.
Someone should make an on-line course on on-line courses with test questions, with this test question - "Were you, at any time during this course, bored?" You will only receive a mark in picking that multiple choice answer that reproduces literally the spelling mistake in one of the course slides.
20: The best thing you can do is use the course evaluation to make the course administrator feel your pain. When they ask you what you have learned, complain that if the Nazis are wrong for giving people unwanted procedures and the Tuskegee Study for not giving people enough treatment, how can they expect doctors to find the middle ground? Then rant about socialists wanting to nationalize health care, flouride in the water, and the Trilateral Commission.
I feel like an asshole for thinking this but the research ethics on human subjects courses sort of make me feel like I did when I was learning about some branches of feminism.
When you encounter patients, remember that they most likely cannot understand the point of your research no matter how well you explain it or how many forms you give them, so they can't really give consent in any real terms. Really you just have to convince them that you mean well. So just do the best you can and, you know, be ethical. Likewise, women can never give consent on free and equal terms because they know you can physically overpower them. So just be aware of your unfairly privileged position.
Likewise, women can never give consent on free and equal terms because they know you can physically overpower them.
Megan should come and kick your ass.
And then you'll know she's capable of consenting to sexual activity. Really, you should welcome the ass-kicking.
Anyway, I think medical research participants can give meaningful consent, but the new consent for rules make it much harder because a bunch of lawyers smacked the forms with their own particular brand of language abuse.
re: 25
That's a pretty fucked up definition of consent. So, I can only consent to something if I'm in a position to be invulnerable to coercion? I mean fine, I'm carved out of solid muscle, nearly 8ft tall, and shoot laser beams out of my eyes, but surely other people can consent to stuff?
Basically everyone seemed to get the point that you can never know if the subjects *feel* coerced or not. So...what do we do? Try to establish trust.
30: you have to balance the chance of coercion, the possibility of harm, the personal benefit of the study, and the greater social benefit of the study. Also, are you a Nazi? Because then you really need to look at your methodology.
26: I've been reading this book, which covers consent in all realms, including medicine, sex, and contract law. It is fascinating. One of the first things you learn, though, is that consent has gray areas along several dimensions. Also, standards of consent in one area of life will clash completely with standards in another. Placing a bet, for instance, means consenting to pay money in certain circumstances. And yet, you cannot go to a casino and demand your money back on the grounds that you were drunk, so your consent doesn't count.
One general lesson I have taken away, however, is that all regimes of asking for consent should should include mechanisms improve the quality of consent over time. Procedures for getting consent for medical research should not only work to educate patients, but to create a culture of educated patients out there who are able to more meaningfully participate in treatment decisions.
Similarly for sex. I would never go so far as some of the feminists you discuss do and say that consent under the patriarchy is meaningless. But it is definitely the case that the way we approach consent (to sex, or whatever) should build in ways to improve the quality of consent long term. To do otherwise is to think that patriarchy is an inevitability.
shoot laser beams out of my eyes
Admittedly, that was very entertaining at the July meetup.
One general lesson I have taken away, however, is that all regimes of asking for consent should should include mechanisms improve the quality of consent over time.
That would mean more having to control for history effects, which is a pain in the ass.
35: You mean, like, you know have to control for the fact that the patient better understands the possible benefits of the experimental treatment you are performing? I think the inconvenience here is a fair price to pay.
I think he means that data obtained from such research would be less useful and more prone to error.
Luckily, none of my interaction with this has anything to do with anybody ever letting me do any research that could possibly be construed as harmful.
38: Or you'd need more cases to compensate for loss of power.
40: THIS HURTS MY FEELINGS.
That's not research. It's practice.
I'm teaching a Discrete Math course for CS majors. So far this seems like a tedious topic.
No way, discrete math is super interesting.
There are no jobs as librarians or journalists right now. So people who can't get academic jobs can feel the joy of not getting library or newspaper jobs, too.
Anyway, the use of the word "#alt-ac" in the article is actually the first time I've seen the hashtag used like that, just to convey some sort of vague techness to the word. Exactly like "alt-ac.com" ten years ago. Or maybe even "alt.ac.careers.alt-ac".
Coming this fall, Jethro Tull's new album, #JethroTull
I'm teaching a Discrete Math course for CS majors. So far this seems like a tedious topic.
Why?
"I know the humanities job market makes it tough to find steady, remunerative work. Have you considered documentary filmmaking?" goes the joke around our household.
44,47: Because you guys are cherry-picking the comment you quoted. I said that logic seems like a tedious topic, which is the part I've never taught before. I've taught Discrete before. It's fun.
27, 28: It's like he doesn't even read my comments. I've done some of my most prolific trashtalking here, and yet. Maybe I should bold the important parts for emphasis.
50: in fairness, the most recent referent for "this" was "Discrete Math for CS Majors". I read your comment the same way that they did.
33: That looks really interesting! Do you know if it covers adoption issues at all? I swear that's not my only obsession, but it's at the forefront of my mind these days.
There are no jobs as librarians or journalists right now
But if you're lucky enough to have one already, you can pull down a six-figure income*!
*decimal points included.
28: The tricky masochist sees an opening.
55: 3 x $500, plus 3 x $700? Not far off.
52: I don't have my copy with me, but I don't remember anything about adoption issues. Are you thinking about issues of consent from a minor? I haven't read the detailed stuff competence to consent yet. So far I've just looked at the very general stuff (is consent a communicative act or a mental state?) and the stuff on sex.
58: I'm interested in the issues of consent in general, but sure, for minors I'm interested. In the kind of adoption we're doing, the law is fairly clear about what kind of input children get to have based on their ages (and cognitive states? I dunno!) but there's definitely coercion involved too. In infant adoption, the issue of birthparent consent is a huge discussion and that's more the sort of thing I'd have expected to see. I was just curious, though, and it does sound like a book I'd enjoy in general.
14: You should offer Discreet Math, too, but you'd have to call it Intermediate Polish or something or the gig would be up.
Can the authors be unaware that, say, journalist and librarian jobs tend to go to people who get degrees in journalism and library science? Graduate degrees in the humanities provide nice resume padding for that kind of thing, but still.
Not in my experience. There are many more journos at my workplace with graduate degrees in either humanities or economics than there are with graduate degrees in journalism. And journalism degrees are more or less useless apart from as a means to get your foot in the door. This may be different in the US, though, where the idea of journalism as a profession seems to be much more prevalent.
"Intermediate Polish" is a contradiction in terms.
InterPol is a contraction in terms.
What about Indiscreet Math? That might be interesting.
What do you mean, logic is tedious!? It defines the intelligible structure of reality!
65: I thought it was taking a while for anyone to respond with that particular indignance.
I missed it earlier, because I was teaching logic.
It is one of CA's favorite things to teach, too. He and a friend are theoretically writing a textbook.
Maybe it gets better. Right now it just seems like "Really? Wouldn't it take a fucking year to write out a fairly straightforward proof in formal logic propositions?" I suppose you could demonstrate the equivalence of two proofs, or of a class of proofs, or something.
Really? Wouldn't it take a fucking year to write out a fairly straightforward proof in formal logic propositions?"
From no premises, prove that ¬(p ∨ q) → ¬p ∧ ¬q.
subproof: Suppose that ¬(p ∨ q). (1)
subproof: Suppose that p. (2)
p ∨ q (3; disjunction introduction w/ 2)
⊥ (4; contradiction introduction w/ 1 and 3)
end subproof
¬p (5; negation introduction w/ 2–4)
subproof: Suppose that q. (6)
p ∨ q (7; disjuction introduction w/ 6)
⊥ (8; contradiction introduction w/ 1 and 7)
end subproof
¬q (9; negation introduction w/ 6–8)
¬p ∧ ¬q (10; conjunction introduction with 5 and 9)
end subproof
¬(p ∨ q) → ¬p ∧ ¬q (11; conditional introduction w/ 1–10)
QED!
69: It is an explanation, not an argument.
70: I use this free, open access textbook for logic, but I am modifying it a bit. I'm making it a personal mission to encourage everyone to put their textbooks online for free.
Wouldn't it take a fucking year to write out a fairly straightforward proof in formal logic propositions?"
For instance, it might take you 379 pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2.
74: Exactly. Thus squandering an otherwise perfectly good mathematical career.
But, you know, without PM, no Gödel.
74: I was thinking of that because I read Logicomix not that long ago. It has an important message -- taking logic seriously will drive you insane.
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I have to revise all my syllabuses and now include my course objectives, which are to reflect my department's learning outcomes for students. We already have to include gobbledy-gook about how our course addresses Institutional Graduate Goals.
So the person who flagged my 4 syllabuses also sent me a sample syllabus, belonging to the chair of my department. His course objective: "To learn the concepts and develop problem-solving skills in the areas described in the catalog description."
Ah, red tape.
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@62: Only because even basic Polish is super hard. The intermediate level nearly killed me!
78: I should have said Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. I didn't mean to imply that the man himself was created from the Principia Mathematica.
79: we are specifically asked to translate the bureaucratic language into something the students understand before we put it on the syllabus, which is a small mercy we afford the students.
79: "To learn the concepts and develop problem-solving skills in the areas described in the catalog description."
Yours: "To pro-actively and deeply learn the fundamental concepts and develop lifetime problem-solving skills in all of the areas described in the course catalog description as published."
@62: Only because even basic Polish is super hard
Nope!
Formal logic is so fucking tedious. I guess it's useful for someone, somewhere? To me it feels more like those idiotic two-column proofs they make you write in high school geometry and then you take a real math class and it's like "oh hai we write in complete sentences here".
76: ?? Gödel born 1906.
Did you think that rob meant that PM was causally responsible for Gödel's existence?
Oh, I see. What I did in 72, for instance.
Maybe Gödel's parents were reading PM, and then they were like "fuck this boring shit, there must be something more fun we can do", and one thing led to another and thus was Gödel conceived?
87: It was the only logical conclusion to draw from 76.
Maybe Gödel's parents were reading PM after going back in time and then they were like "fuck this boring shit, there must be something more fun we can do" so they went and killed Hitler?
92: I might consider watching that movie.
87: Did you think that rob meant that PM was causally responsible for Gödel's existence?
Should I have bolded the important parts of my comment?
Have you considered documentary filmmaking
To fill in a bit more of the joke, this was an actual career possibility suggested to a friend of mine (PhD candidate in French lit) at a workshop for exploring careers outside of academia, put on by the Office of Career Services.
(Yeah yeah, I know. But no one comments over at Standpipe's.)
Only because even basic Polish is super hard. The intermediate level nearly killed me!
Is it more difficult to learn than Russian, which plenty of Americans used to do?
And this reminds me of the big NYT Mag article last weekend language and thought. The main example they use is on how some languages rely on cardinal directions, which seemed quite interesting. However, towards the end they talk about some Peruvian language where it didn't seem like a big deal:
For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, "An animal passed here." You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such.
That is, the first thing I thought of was aspect and the complexity of Slav verbs of motion, which is a pain in the ass to learn, offers amusing errors (you walked to California for the holidays, multiple times?), but in the end is just about rules, not ways of thought and seeing the world.
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I now have Office 2007 on my computer. HOLY FUCKING FUCK YOU AUTO-FORMAT. Who decided to escalate autoformat by a factor of a million?
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97: The move from 2003 was one I fought long and hard (and eventually I lost).
IT People: "We must stay current!"
Me: "No, actually, this version works perfectly well for me, thank you."
97,98: my work computers, too, and I DO NOT LIKE IT.
Ew, Office. I've been learning TikZ, which makes me even happier with LaTeX. Everything looks beautiful with minimal effort.
I held out until just last month I switched to Windows 7 and Office 2007. However, I have a valid reason (documented) that required I keep Word 2003.
There's a group of "digital humanities" types at my University, and also a group in my discipline. They seem very nice, but for a lot of them the whole business seems to involve asserting, via Twitter, the revolutionary pedagogical effects of Twitter and possibly iPads.
Meanwhile, when it comes to software, most of the "digital natives" and "Millennials" I encounter are able to fluently use Facebook, Word, and ... well, that's about it.
well, that's about it
Hey, now. I can also embed a blockquote if you give me a few cracks at it.
I spent today trying to build a PivotTable via a giant SQL query. Haha, fuck you Microsoft!
102: CA has a colleague who was really talking up the pedagogical breakthrough of having students text their responses to in-class "polls."
I have no choice but to go along with their nefarious plots. This is the problem with being a civil servant. I can't even go grab and plug in a new mouse when mine dies. And what I wouldn't do for python or god just about any scripting capability.
able to fluently use Facebook, Word
I end up working on a lot of "rescue" projects that we take over from other CROs, which generally involves migrating tons of study documents from their info/templates to ours, and let me just say that the number of people who are actually fluent in Word wouldn't fill an Applebee's.
107: you're right, of course. Hardly anyone uses styles & all that stuff properly. They just manually adjust anything that looks wrong, and later when they're copying & pasting stuff it comes back and bites them.
I used to be able to use styles fluently, a couple of versions ago, but now I'm lost again.
Is this the Word-skillz-bragging thread? About as fancy as I get beyond styles is tweaking different macro-enabled .dot (template) files.
it comes back and bites them
Mostly, it comes back and bites me instead.
107: If you are fluent in Word and in an Applebee's, you should have a big drink and reflect on life until you find a new plan.
The only Word-related bragging I can do is to say that I haven't had to use it for ages, thank God. I had to use Excel a couple of years ago, and was reminded why an Office-free life is a better life.
I think they damaged Styles in some recent rev; the default ones in Word seem to be defined for Ppt, to start with.
The temp job *at Microsoft* that got me the real job at Microsoft that got me enough savings to fritter away in grad school was correcting the styles in Word documents (tens, hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation) so that we could convert them through rtf to a real structured markup language and actually do something with them. With those 'computers on every desk'.
Grr, arrgh.
correcting the styles in Word documents (tens, hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation) so that we could convert them through rtf to a real structured markup language and actually do something with them. With those 'computers on every desk'.
TPSRML
Naah, philaty will get you nowhere.
92: Any sufficiently powerful formal system cannot be both consistent and Hitler.
118: The tragedy of a great pun slain by an ugly typo.
I want: a word processor based on html/css, with a button like the WordPerfect REVEAL CODES one. Then I'd never have to untangle somebody else's copy-and-paste guck again. And neither would anyone else.