Technique for Interview Transcription

Posted by Danny on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 11:50 am

Of course interviewing people in Second Life is easy: copy chat log, paste, code, profit!  Unless your subjects prefer conversing with voice rather than chat.

I deserve no sympathy, as this is the first time I’ve ever really had to transcribe audio, and even now, my workload is pretty gentle (Liz reminds me I could be transcribing focus-group recordings, which entail keeping track of multiple conversants, interruptions and overlays, figuring out who’s chanting “Jerry… Jerry…”).  But, my workflow started out terrible, and now is much more pleasant, so maybe someone can make use of this.

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Inky Doodles

Posted by Danny on Sunday, February 12, 2012 at 7:56 pm

After two years of flaccidly trying to get a poetry group together (and now that I’m daily trying to figure out what to spend my hour-long writing sessions on), I’ve decided to work through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled by myself.  But, the exercises don’t start for a while, and I’m bloody-mindedly reading it from the beginning (for the fourth time), so I got twitchy.  I did a couple of mad doodles, starting with this.

Stand, deliver up thy blows,
Weak in heart and long in nose,
Cyrano, before the sun:
Silhouetted, underdone.

I have no idea what it means.  If I’m very lucky, some scholar will devote her dissertation to excavating my genius while I’m still alive, and my curiosity will eventually be satisfied.  For now, I’ll assume it’s nonsense.

I like the metre, though.  It’s called (or was taught to me as) “chant metre,” but can be thought of as trochaic tetrameter with its terminating toes lopped off.  A trochee (“troh-key”) is a metrical foot comprised of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: “Tum-tee.”  Tetrametre means “four measures,” so trochaic tetrameter goes

Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee

Aren’t you happy now you’re reading?
“No,” you say, “my eyes are bleeding!”

To make this into chant metre, you drop the last -tee of the last Tum-tee.

Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum-tee Tum
(Tribal rhythms, beating drums)

or,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

and

Something wicked this way comes.

This is a great metre to doodle in when you’re (I’m) impatient because every finished line seems to be self-contained, satisfying, and shouting.

(Even if you use enjambment
In your verse, it stays quite plangent.)

So, after my inscrutable triumph over French drama, I turned my incisive word-munching apparatus to the ink I was using in my pen at the time.

Diamine Majestic Blue:
Deeper, far, than should be true,
Thus, betrayed by pigments shed
Shines an opalescent red.

(In retrospect the ink uses dyes, not pigments, but it’s true that it’s so saturated it’ll leave a shiny red film wherever you write.)  This got me thinking that I’ve finally found a way to repay the ink review community on Fountain Pen Network for all the productive hours from which they’ve shielded me over the years.  My next ink was also a Diamine: my current favourite and “signature colour.”  (OooOOooh.)

Malty, velvet, Chocolate Brown
Rides my tines to rich renown
(Quickly I discharge on sheaf
What I’d liefer guzzle down).

Later, I noticed how cool it is that “chocolate” accommodates the metre it’s plunked into, especially if the preceding words hint at how many syllables I expect the reader to spend on it.

Malty, velvet, Choc’late Brown

To test this, I tried to translate the doodle into a metre with feet that have three syllables.  I guess this is a sort of “chant metre” with dactyls, but I don’t know if there’s a name for it.[1]  Or, if there’s a name for words that display this sort of flexibility in terms of syllable-count.

Tum-tee-tee Tum-tee-tee Tum-tee-tee Tum

Sensual, succulent, Chocolate Brown
Rideth my tines unto wealth and renown
(Fly my converter!  Swift paper, now wick
Ink I might soon sooner lick than lay down).

Anyway, if you like Stephen Fry, check out The Ode Less Travelled.  It should make you enjoy poetry, which is an incredible accomplishment on Fry’s part (and a worthy goal for your neurons, if I say so myself).

Unwonted Productivity

Posted by Danny on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:17 pm

(This post starts with lots of tedious, whining context.  If you’d like to skip to the good stuff, please click here.)

Since fourth-year of my undergrad, my academic life has been a losing struggle for productivity.  Procrastination no longer tested the edge of my due-dates, but the patience of my professors.  By the first couple of years at OISE, I actually got fatalistic about it, and felt often as if I was watching my own self-destruction from a safe distance with idle, morbid fascination.  Sometimes, I could muster misery; often I dallied with shame and self-loathing (publically, even, to the grief and probable boredom of friends and family).  My rationalizations for the consistently missed deadlines, and the undeniable fact that my peers were marching past me academically and socially, were always based in some sort of reality but they became increasingly byzantine and hollow.  I incorporated my sense of futility into my identity and wondered that I had ever respected myself.  It’s likely that I was clinically depressed, but consistently, I didn’t face it.

My desperation to be done with my thesis eventually grew strong enough to break through my apathy, and I started actively working on strategies to get work done.  Brian and I had some productivity dates around the time I was working at Indigo, the semi-successful engine of which was simulated peer pressure (since neither of us would ever have dreamed of chewing the other out for flakiness).  Scheduling and proximity were a problem, though, and made these meetings inconsistent.  When I moved up north after Gideon got his job in La Loche, the distance was an issue and meetings eventually stopped altogether.  There’ve been less distractions up here, and I’d become marginally more productive than I was in Toronto, but progress remained agonizing.

Over the last five days, I have (tentatively, but optimistically) turned myself around.  As with anything like this, consistency is more important than initial, favourable results, and therefore the bubbly remains on ice.  But, I’m chronicling how it happened here so that

1. If I lose my way, I can come back here and try to reboot;
2. If it turns out that this changed my life, I’ve got a record of my personality on the cusp, when I was happy and hopeful, but before I got all arrogant and preachy;
3. Maybe a variant of this approach can eventually be useful to someone else.

What I’m trying came out of a few places.  First, Byron mentioned during New Year’s that he’d had a lot of luck with doing daily schedules—having something to tell him what he should be doing at any given time (including when he was allowed to not be doing anything in particular) helped motivate him to work on his programming project after work, instead of immediately vegging out.  I had resisted this sort of technique in the past, figuring that while I tended to get lots done working to someone else’s timetable, I’d inevitably rationalize out of following one I’d imposed on myself (on grounds of arbitrariness and lack of consequences, etc.).

Next, I’d read a piece on Life Hacker about the motivational power of keeping track of streaks—basically, if you accomplish what you want to become a regular task a few times in a row, your knowledge of the fact accrues a kind of momentum: it becomes more and more of a shame to break the streak as it gets longer and longer, making counterproductive impulses less appealing.  This is something I’d definitely noticed independently over the last year when I started eating carefully and (again, with Gid’s help) exercising regularly.  The crucial thing, here, is to keep your streak constantly in mind—Life Hacker recommends a full-year calendar in an obvious place, marked off after each success so that your accomplishments will be repeatedly reinforced at a glance.

Consistency seems to promote habits and eventually dispositions.  Byron said that his regular schedule-writing became less important as he replaced the habit of getting home and vegging with the habit of getting home, programming for an hour, and then vegging.  This plugged neatly into Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, which Joel sent me five days ago: active habits could be intentionally engineered, as Byron demonstrated (and as I’ve been pleased to find, myself)—so too, argues Achor (with encouraging evidence), can mental habits, or dispositions.  Something about all of this pushed me to build the following daily checklist immediately after watch the TED, but (crucially) also to see it as an experiment in self-modification, rather than an arbitrary, self-imposed strategy I could self-destruct by failing.

It started with this table:

I incorporated into the Disposition-Hacker elements I was most interested in from Achor’s concluding list (about 11:00 in the video), and then, for fun, added a few things I’ve regularly wished I was doing with my life but couldn’t do because I was procrastinating school work with stuff I didn’t even want to do (obsessive videogaming and mainlining episodes of 30 Rock, it turns out): reading for pleasure had become a wretched escapism, and I haven’t been patient enough to sit and just listen to music for years.  These were habits I wanted to develop, and putting them in the list meant I’d need to schedule them, which meant, presumably, I’d get to do them without feeling guilty.  And writing.  Being good at writing, and writing enough to empty ink bottles, had been the core of my identity when I’d been at my very happiest—second- and third- year undergrad—but my desire to do it at all has been awfully low for a long time.  My vocabulary has withered and my self-confidence is as doot with respect to what I produce when I do write (sporadic blog posts are, at least a little bit, a consequence of that).  I miss the rush of obsessive poem-writing and the pride of sharing my creative stuff (foisting, even—who cares?  It was awesome!).  If I’m actively shaping my habits to reflect an ideal identity, I’ma fucking write, yeah.

(And, I figured, in case this actually works, I’ll chuck flossing in there too.)

Here’s a sample of my schedule, written without fancy, geegaw-festooned applications, in Wordpad and stored in my main Dropbox folder, at Byron’s recommendation.

When I lose myself in video games (at least lately), it starts with me thinking, “Well, I’m not doing anything right now.  Of the things I could be doing, [game on the go] would be easy to do.  And when I’m done doing that, it won’t be an option anymore, so then I’ll probably pick something more important and valuable to do.  It’s three in the morning.”  Always knowing what I wanted myself to be doing at any given time, and having the information at my fingertips, has been a very effective way of avoiding that mindset.  When I recognized this, I started listing projects and ideas in the same document in case, faced with the vagueness of “writing” or “thesis,” I get the urge to mull over my options again while doing something more immediately comforting and appealing.  (I copy the projects to each new schedule and then delete the entries I’ve accomplished, which helps me prime topics for Achor’s journaling recommendation.)

I’m tracking my streaks in the excel chart, and my “best streak” for each item to help motivate me if I lose a streak and get sad.  Also, initially out of interest and increasingly out of compulsive data collection, I’ve been recording the amount of time I spend on each habit.  At the moment, I’ve been doing much more than my allotted requirements for a number of them (this may also even benefit from the streak phenomenon—who knows?).  Concordantly, I’ve decided that keeping rigidly to my schedule is less important than keeping to the daily goals: if I’m on a roll with my thesis, I won’t force myself to break for lunch (and, when I’m back in Toronto with social obligations, I can still reasonably hold myself to the minimum requirements of list).

Again, I’ll see how this goes.  But, for now at least, it’s pretty great to be productive and happy.

On Consumption

Posted by Danny on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 7:27 pm

1. Eating Video

I’ve been spoiled by several years of always-on Internet connectivity, during which I’ve (mostly) unintentionally honed a skill set for locating and mining veins of delicious information, as I suspect is true of most of you.  Through this process, I’ve become accustomed to a particular, arbitrary signature for the sort of content I consume: if it exists, it is instantly to be had (or at least, the automated process for downloading it can be started by me whenever I wish, and I’m limited only by practical concerns of bandwidth and production time, rather than arbitrary release schedules or regional encoding); it is narrowly tuned to my cognitive capacity; it is “gainful”—meaning it challenges or augments my understanding of a topic I care about; I can have it for free (plus the cost of the connection and my computer).  My ability to readily find content that satisfies these criteria makes me a compulsive sharer (I’m grateful for the networks of people like me who took the time to share links, recommendations, and data I find tasty; how could I not pay it forward?), makes me jealous of my time and picky about the content I spend it on, and therefore makes me completely uninterested in television.

This preamble is here hopefully to extricate myself from the ethos of intellectual snobbery that characterizes people who say things like, “oh, we don’t watch television,” with the implication that such content is qualitatively inferior to that from other media.  There is superb content built for and financed by television (and directly by the people who watch television, occasionally), which I consume regularly and with gusto.  The impatience that drives me away has to do with the pace of delivery and the regimented imposition of choice.  In keeping with gustatory imagery (and charitably forgetting that I talked about mining delicious veins earlier), spending my time on the Internet, at its most satisfying and efficient, combines the thrills of exploration and mastery that (I imagine) describe the experience of hunting food.  I was about to liken watching television to grazing, but even this overstates the viewer’s opportunity to forage independently: watching television is instead like being seated at a conveyor belt of food, and given the option (for a premium) of having other conveyor belts that you can move your chair to.  (This can be extended somewhat to account for PVR services, but my point is already tedious.)  I am spoiled by being able to hunt for exactly the sort of intellectual nourishment I desire, at a pace that befits my hunger and my ability to chew.  Anything that threatens this, like the erosion of net neutrality or SOPA/PIPA’s fumbling, clumsy forays onto my hunting grounds that would damage the ecosystem and biodiversity (the metaphor is slipping; shit!  Hold on—), feels like the threat of starvation, or at best, the imposition of domestication.

2. Quick, quick!  Hoppityhoppityhoppitygo!

Early in our friendship, I tried to share my beloved audiobook, comedy, and lecture collection with Stian, and learned (very gently) that he tended not to be interested in this sort of stuff because it moved too slowly (I think he used a bandwidth metaphor; to remain consistent, I would say he’s staggeringly more efficient than me at mastication).  It made me feel a bit sad and dull at the time, but I recognize I’ve probably done the same thing to people who try to share with me their love of CBC radio, and I fear inflicting the same sense of inferiority when I express my opinions about David Attenborough’s more recent series.  With content like this, the problem isn’t that the matter isn’t delicious or nourishing enough, but that it comes to me at such a slow pace that I become irritated and lose my appetite.  (The counter-image of gorging vs. careful sampling now comes to mind, and wasn’t what I initially planned to talk about, but let’s go with it.)

I first noticed I liked quick material when I discovered Zero Punctuation.  It broke the rules of slow, careful delivery that had been encouraged at all levels of my formal education and was (in my mind, at least, but not inconsistent with Crowshaw’s persona) contemptuous of the lowest common denominator in terms of uptake.  It offered me the opportunity to distinguish myself from those hypothetical, slow-thinking trogs by working up to and achieving total comprehension on the first go of any particular video—an experience that was gratifying, if potentially delusional.

This unspoken conflation of intelligence and pace of delivery was borne out even better in more explicitly intellectual content: I have a brain crush on Vi Hart, whose rapid development of visuals compliments beautifully the flow of her ideas and explanations.  (I’ve started two or three long posts with the intent of featuring her, but none have made it to the website yet, so I’ll content myself with this call-out for now.  There’s nothing about her I don’t like.)  (For a similar experience of flow if not speed, with more polish (for better or worse), see also videos in the RSAnimate series, by folks at the RSA.)

Along similar lines are the VlogBrothers, who recently started doing a pair of lecture series under the title Crash Courses.[1]  Here’re the first of each:

World History, by John Green

Biology, by Hank Green

Their videos (as well as much of their non-Crash-Course content) feature a technique where pauses—as between paragraphs and sentences, but also where a reflective ellipsis might normally live—are sharply and demonstrably omitted.  This creates a sort of hyper-flow, since the information expressed by those pauses remains (you’re just forced to read those rapid shifts in posture or focus the way you would caesura), but the whole is greatly compressed.  Again, this can feel like a challenge to my cognitive capacity, the meeting of which is invigorating; I can even applaud myself that I’m being highly efficient with my time (notwithstanding that I’m invariably procrastinating while I watch these videos).  And, even failing to keep up with the delivery, the technological affordance of a manipulable timeline means I can review a section, or the whole, at no cost, until I do get it.  Both Hank Green in his lecture (above) and Salman Khan in his TED Talk about Khan Academy (below) rightly laud this feature—Green goes so far as to justify his pace by using it.  Cool: a pedagogically defensible manoeuvre around teaching to the lowest common denominator I’m happy to get behind.

3. Gluttony

So, here come my itchy niggles.  First, Green starts out by describing the biology course to follow as “the most revolutionary course in biology of all time.”  I read that grandiloquence as being there solely for the sake of comedy, but even if he doesn’t buy into it completely or at all, this is the sort of language I’m used to hearing around MIT’s OpenCourseWare and similar free, video-based lectures which, while exciting, are still at their cores old-fashioned transmission-based content.

Great: I love lectures and will fight hard to defend their pedagogical validity, but it’s silly (and misleading) to claim they’re revolutionary.  More troubling is that the user-controlled timeline, which is so handy for tailoring the material to one’s pace, depends on one’s isolation while viewing (and presumably, in this context, learning).  Even if my peers are tremendously forgiving, encouraging, patient, or apathetic, I’ll hesitate before pausing and rewinding a video that other people are also watching—I’m inconveniencing my peers and I’m declaring a failure to keep up with material that no one else is having any trouble with, as far as I know.  This is not an educational medium optimized for concurrent group discussion.[2]

More insidiously, learning from fast-paced material is open to all kinds of sabotage and abuse.  For instance, my intellectual insecurity could rationalize fatalism and giving in to frustration—“I must not be smart enough to keep up with this, so I’ll go where I’m more comfortable”—or be used to justify laziness—“I guess I sort of understood; if I rewind now, it means admitting that I didn’t, and anyway, the lecturer has already moved on…”  The most horrible abuse would be someone else leveraging that insecurity against me to mask shortcomings in the content itself.  But, even in the absence of a cynical rhetorician, it’s still a dangerous game to play, pitting my cognitive identity against taking extra time to think critically through the material.[3]

Where does this leave me?  Definitely less gushy about the resources I had in mind to share when I started writing, but less cynical than I probably sound.  I think my efforts to “get up to speed” with this method of transmission have been mostly honest, and that I can think clearly, faster, as a result.  I love the concordance of quick delivery with comedy and I love the concordance of comedy with teaching.

You probably don’t need to be reminded to learn thoughtfully if you’ve come this far through my bull-toots, anyway, so most importantly, enjoy.

Notes from the Field

Posted by Danny on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:40 am

I’ve been spending more and more time in Second Life as I prepare to do my fieldwork for my thesis, and I’m enjoying it much more than I expected.  A few days ago I stumbled onto a community called Thothica, full of folks with academic and casual interests in philosophy, science, literature, and education—this is much more readily appealing to me than the live music, bars, and shopping I’ve mainly seen.  When I arrived at the community’s parcel of space, I joined in listening to a live reading from the last chapter of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; the reader, Elaine Lorefield, does public readings in the space twice a week—she’s read Stranger to members of the community from start to just about finish over the last few months (the unabridged version, even!) and weekly reads thought-provoking short stories with discussion to follow.  Tonight, we heard “Ephemera” by Steve Rasnic Tem, and then had a two-hour conversation that ranged from curacy to e-reading to open access. All the stuff I love.

What thrills me about this is how readily the experience became wholly legitimate and embodied—how there was almost no distracting contemplation about the “inauthenticity” of the “virtual experience.”  Practically speaking, Elaine and the rest of us were sitting at our computers (dotted in this case across Canada and the US, as far as I know) while she read into a headset from her Kindle.  It may as well have been a conference call.  But, “in-world,” we’d assembled at the community’s library in Thothica at the scheduled time, took seats in the circle of couches and armchairs by the fire (in a configuration damned reminiscent of an actual gathering of this sort, with clustering around the reader and avoidance of text-chatting to other members or walking in front of her, even though these things in no way had an impact on the content delivery), and we listened for about an hour and a half.  It was a cultural event rather than an audiobook.  Understand, when I say the following, that I’ve been a long-time player of multiplayer games, including socially rich MMOs like Ultima Online in its heyday; I know that this sounds worrisome to people both with gaming experience and on the outside looking in, but I honestly concluded the evening feeling as if I’d spent a night out.

I know the experience is more transparent for me than others because of my fluency with the interface and my fast typing speed, but I really, really see this as a viable educational environment.  Before today, I would have been much more cynical when one of the founding Thothica members described the space to me as a sort of campus pub.  (Maybe active drinkers could disagree more reasonably.)  Second Life is the earliest example I know of as a mainstream “free-to-play” game, so if anyone wants to give it a shot (and see if I’m just bonkers), let me know, and you can join me in the field.  There’s a sonnet writing and discussion group on Sunday…