Mary-Helen, I am one of those rare birds thoroughly trained in both qualitative and quantitative Research Methodology. I started out with degrees in philosophy and literature and was drawn into the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special Education by an interest in Transpersonal Psychology. I was told once admitted that I would have to take at least four courses in Statistics and Research Methodology to become a doctor and was a damn fool if I did not take every course offered by the department in number crunching. Qualitative Research Methodology was not mentioned during this conversation or, at the time, in the catalog of courses. The folks over in Psychology looked down on the folks over in the education school but granted us the left-handed compliment of being better statisticians than they were and better trained in Psychology than the average math nerd. I had never taken Algebra. I took business math with Coach Vickers in high school and then majored in Philosophy at a small, liberal arts college which cross-listed logic courses as both PHIL and MATH. So, you can imagine how splendidly self-confident I felt as I stood in Dr. Donald Arys office explaining to him that I would be taking his Educational Statistics 1 next term because I really had no choice. I had dropped by to apologize in advance for the ineptitude I was sure I would display and, perhaps, to convince him that I was, when allowed to speak English rather than being forced to express myself through numbers, at least slightly brighter than a turnip. I enjoyed Dr. Arys course tremendously and took every course offered by the department in number crunching for the pure joy of it. I realized at some point that much number crunching is done for the pure joy of it and developed a bit of a habit in that direction myself. I spent so long finishing the degree I started while doing another simultaneously that I passed comps and became officially ABD the same term the departments first semiotican was hired. I did a quantitative dissertation but probably would not have if the semiotican had burst upon the scene a year earlier. Upon graduation, I began teaching Psychology for a community college. My greatest success came teaching Psychology 2317 (Basic Statistics) both online and in the traditional classroom. I never got a single math nerd in that class in all the times I taught it. My classes closed shortly after opening every term after the first, filling up quickly with would-be nurses told by the State of Texas that 3 hours of statistics were required for licensure. These nurses genuinely loved my Education School approach to teaching statistics, an approach that involved dealing with statistics at the level of concept rather than getting bogged down with all those elaborate formulas and tricky computations. You can get away with that if you have them buy SPSS ($80.00) instead of a text-book. Anyway, I now teach English rather than Psychology. I miss my nurses but enjoy working with my composition students even more. I was always a story-teller. My fascination with statistics was an attempt on my part to embrace my opposite. That fascination began during a time in my life when I felt that I was drowning in an ocean of competing stories and desperately needed to feel something solid beneath my feet, something that was there before anyone started interpreting and which refused to be interpreted away. Will that do as a definition of reality? Patterns in numbers that were just numbers standing in abstract relationship without anything being defined except within the web of those relationships felt like solid ground to me. Later, I faced the awful fact that these patterns only come to mean when you turn them into a story by saying that 17i is the length of Jessicas nose which is why Roger and Jessica eloped to Vegas. The truth is out there, as Fox Moulder used to say, but can only be lived in here in the form of a story that must go beyond the information given in order to become a fit place for human beings to live, love and occasionally try to jump out of the story like cat nipped kitties chasing their own lovely tails. I hope I have made all this perfectly clear. My students tell me that my learned discourse holds together at least as well as jazz and that they do profit in some vague way by exposure. Then again, I tell them that their essays will make fascinating reading if they just capture themselves in a net of words. I try to be kind and, perhaps, they do also in return. T. Michael --- Mary-Helen Ward <mhward@usyd.edu.au> wrote:
But why? Why reduce people's words, thoughts and emotional responses to mathematical coding? Why not use qualitative methods to capture/ represent/investigate the interactions? I understand that it's still a reduction; a distillation from the original, but it speaks in clear ways too.
Theory can be developed from life using many methods; maths is only one of them. Maybe when we talk about the 'body of knowledge' we need to think about its blood and guts (the messy stuff) and well as bones and ligaments.
M-H
On 22/12/2006, at 1:15 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
Yes, well, these issues are perplexing, but not insurmountable.
I'm sure the early scientists who wondered why trees burn but (some) rocks don't thought they had a similar problem on their hands ...
Maths can help with anything that can be quantified - strength of relationships, passion of the content, capacity for "leakage" of involvement (the extent to which participants have a choice of fora) even "importance to our lives" can be quantified ... it's a matter of coming up with imaginative and reproduceable metrics, crunching the numbers and seeing whether anything useful emerges.
<snip>
The numbers can tell all sorts of stories if we begin to explore them - we're just blinded by the size of the task and the lack of obvious metrics.
Incidentally, a quick peruse of the groups in Myspace shows a similar pattern to the one you observe in Yahoo! groups and as has been reported concerning blog activity. Very Long Tail, all of them ... but wait - that's a mathematical relationship!
Cheers, Hughie
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward@usyd.edu.au> To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:01 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
I realise that email lists seem a bit 'old hat', but I think that there is a lot to be learned from them about how communities form, fail or are sustained online.
I've been a member of one online community (email list only) for ten years. It's shrunk a bit over the years - some members have died and some have lost interest - but it's still going and we still have a few postings most weeks. We are down to 29 members, but we all agree on the list's importance to our lives. I don't see any way that maths could help predict this kind of success. Many of the members aren't able to get out much; some are enormously busy working lives. We are a mad mix of people who just happen to get on and value each other's presence. Just like any friendship group really, except that we are on three continents.
Another quite different international community that I have been in for about 8 years is extremely successful in another way. It has a much more mixed, lively and mobile membership; presently just under 200 with a core of about 50 regular posters. It also has a website with photographs of members and their projects (it is craft-based), lists of members' webpages and blogs etc, which is maintained regularly. Again, the list is very important to the people who subscribe to it.
Neither of these groups is based at Yahoo, but a scan of the email groups that are based at there will show how many never get off the ground, but there are a few that do and remain hugely successfully, with many regular postings, pretty much indefinitely. I wonder if they have anything in common?
M-H
On 22/12/2006, at 11:22 AM, Hugemusic wrote:
Sorry, guys but I just don't agree.
Sure, there's no hard and fast number that will indicate a critical mass for all, but there has to be some statistical indicator of probable sustainability - we're just not exploring the relationships deeply enough yet.
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