Dimensionality Reduction

Dimensionality reduction is something I deal with in math, statistics, and engineering. It comes up in my research. The idea is that when data is complicated, because there are a lot of different kinds of information in it, we can make our lives easier by considering fewer variables. Sometimes we pick from the variables that are already there. Sometimes we smush several variables together and create new ones out of the results, then pick from those. Either way, it can be useful to reduce the number of variables, the number of dimensions, that we need to deal with in a complicated pile of data.

However, we lose information when we do so. Like everything else engineers need to do, there are trade-offs involved, and we need to recognize that. Dimensionality reduction means simplification, which can make large amounts of information easier to deal with. But over-simplification makes information less useful.

Using disability and access needs as an example:

I use a much more complicated thought process to decide what I can and can't do on any given day than people who know me might use to guess what I might and might not be able to do. This includes deciding when I'm just done for the day.

My major professor works with me in an environment (our lab) where my losing speech is most likely due to sensory triggers. If I lose speech due to sensory triggers, I'm leaving the environment where it happened. She knows that if I can't talk I'm probably going home. This is an appropriate simplification for the context.

However, when I was a graduate student in math, I most frequently lost speech in classes where I was a student because I'd already taught that day and I'd essentially run out of mouth-words. Nothing bad was happening, and nothing bad was going to happen because I stuck around and kept doing math without speech. My classmates and professors knew that if I couldn't talk, I was probably going to grab a whiteboard marker and start writing on the board instead. This was an appropriate simplification for the context.

Those are both examples of appropriate dimensionality reduction. In the lab, "can speak" vs. "arrived non-speaking" vs. "lost speech in the lab" was a 3-possibility variable that made a decent proxy for how I was feeling and how well I could work. In the math classroom, whether or not I can speak wasn't an important variable. 

Ignoring the variable of whether or not I can speak in the lab would mean ignoring useful information. Using the variable of whether or not I can speak in the math classroom might mislead people into finding patterns that aren't really there. So it's important to choose the right variables to focus on!



And yes, this applies to functioning levels. In addition to being ableist and grading against a neurotypical standard (which is its own, major issue), functioning levels attempt to reduce all the complex information about a persons abilities and needs over time and across a variety of contexts down to one dimension. That's always going to be inappropriate dimensionality reduction, simplifying what we know to the point that it's useless. Talking about low, medium, or high support needs isn't going to fix this problem. Neither will talking about low vs. high masking as if either of those means a single thing. Those still use a single dimension, and you can't shove enough information about what those support needs actually are, or what the specific effects of masking are into a single dimension for it to ever work.

Please, autism researchers, study these.

Quite a bit of autism research is what I would call, to put it delicately (as in, I am neither screaming nor swearing at it), abled nonsense. I definitely needed to know that my asexuality as an autistic AFAB is a testosterone-related disorder. I also needed to know that I only think I'm trans (nonbinary to be specific) because autism is an extreme male brain. And it is of the utmost importance that I know I am incapable of humor in any form, but especially sarcasm. Autistic satire is definitely not a thing, right?

Oh, wait. All of that is abled nonsense. So is the idea that the optimal outcome is a loss of diagnosis, by the way. I'm most able to do the stuff I care about when I am visibly autistic rather than spending energy on not being so. Dani briefly achieved so-called indistinguishability, an older "optimal outcome" and it was not worth it. (Also I'm the friend.)

I would like to see research that is not abled nonsense. I especially would like to see more of this research being done by autistic people, because no, I don't think we need neurotypical people interpreting the results in order for them to be valid. I'm with Nick Walker here: when we depend on less-marginalized researchers to "discover" our hard-earned truths, we're reinforcing the idea that the knowledge we've figured out for ourselves as a community isn't valid. Which communities get to have valid knowledge?

That said, there are things I'd like to see researched more. Not necessarily in the current structure (because let me tell you, I expect someone like, oh, nearly any non-autistic autism researcher who presented at the Coalition on Autism and Sign Language where I threw myself into a wall repeatedly, to make a complete mess of the topic.) And preferably by autistic people with experiences relevant to the topic.

1. Inconsistent speech and AAC support for autistic adults.
   
   I'm an adult. I can speak (usually.) When I can't speak, I use AAC. AAC research seems to be focused on two groups: adults with neurodegenerative disabilities, and young children. Autistic adults who can sometimes speak and sometimes not are neither of those categories, but there's a lot of us. This might be more common than "always has speech" is, among autistic adults, but thanks to behaviorist approaches and the assumption that "can sometimes" is identical to "can consistently" given a sufficiently strong motivator, professional types tend not to get this. I would like to see research on what supports, including AAC, tend to make communication easier/more effective for us.
   
2.  Employment supports that are neither sheltered workshops nor "we think they're all good at technology" start-ups that might pay well but are still pretty segregated.
   
   Sheltered workshops can (and often do) pay below minimum wage. Autistic people, like all disabled people, are more likely to live in poverty than abled people. Are these facts connected? You bet! Programs like Specialisterne, on the other hand, are founded by (usually parents) based on a stereotypical idea of "autistic strengths" that usually means technology work. Or Microsoft has a program to hire autistic workers now. These can be useful, if you're an autistic person who wants to be working in technology. I worked an IT job for a while. It was a good experience in many ways. I also never want to do that again. I like writing. I like teaching. I like art. I've earned money on all these things (mostly teaching) and would happily continue to. These are not the specific jobs you're going to come up with if you're a non-autistic person trying to provide employment support for autistic people.
   
   So maybe, just maybe, we need to take a look at employment supports that are not limited to a specific kind of job. (Or, you know, look at more kinds of jobs? Because the needed supports will vary based on what kind of job it is.)
   
3. Burnout.
   
   After reaching some ideal of indistinguishability and hanging out there for a little bit, or just after the demands get to be too much even if we were never indistinguishable, we can hit a breaking point. Then everything is way harder, we have way less energy, and our abilities shift. Sensory overload might be more of an issue. What can we do to make this less likely to happen? What supports would help a person going through this? People dealing with this have written about it, both during and after. Getting some idea of what tends to help us vs. what tends to make things worse would be great for anyone who deals with this in the future. Even better if we can help people not have this happen. Burnout is not fun.

Legal protections and shaky ground

I have, I think, finally figured out why I felt less safe, not more, after turning in a formal accommodations letter for the first time this past summer. (That was nowhere near the first time I've had those same access needs I've got the letter for met at university. It was just the first time I had to turn in the letter.)

It's a pattern. When I just turned the letter in, without asking first if the professor cared about the letter, I didn't feel less safe after turning it in. (Note to self: Maybe stop asking, since some will care.) When I turned the letter in with a comment of "don't know if you need this or not, but here it is anyways" and I got a response in the area of "thanks but yeah, don't need it," I felt more safe than I had before turning the letter in. But it was the same amount of more safe that I've felt the times the answer has been that the professor doesn't care about the letter.

Which makes me suspect that the letter itself is less than relevant. My having the paperwork to prove I am entitled to "accommodations," as they like to call it when my access needs are met, that's not the issue. (Seriously, y'all aren't changing anything about the class structure when I use AAC, it's important and it's apparently unusual but I don't want to talk about my typing as something that you're accommodating me specially to allow.) My turning in said paperwork is also not the issue.

Depending on an often inaccessible, bureaucratic process that requires a probably-abled "expert" document that I really qualify for the diagnosis I'm claiming accommodations under in order to access my education and my work, on the other hand? That's an issue. Having said process done so it can back me up on the off chance I need it is useful. I'm glad those legal protections exist. They're important. They're good to have as backup. But I don't like relying on the backup any more than the next person. And I'd much rather have access happen because it's what should happen than because some paperwork says it legally has to happen. Or that some part of it legally has to happen -- my paperwork says I get text-to-speech, and that's actually my least-used AAC solution. 

"Blind imagination" neuroscience press release

For anyone new to the aphantasia discussions: It's a fancy word for not visualizing, or as I've tended to describe it, not having a mind's eye. I don't picture characters or scenes when I read books, for example.

As a rhetoric person and disability studies person, I looked at how we talk about aphantasia, in three parts. (Part one, part two, part three). As a neuroscience student, I wrote about one of the articles (Zeman et al, 2010, the case study) in terms of significance. And yes, some of the results are things I could totally have told you myself. Like the fact that "mental imagery" tests such as rotation (check if two block structures with angles are the same or not) can be done in ways other than rotating an image of the object. I know that because I don't view such images in my head and I'm good at the task. Testing everything is how science works, and trying to figure out what someone is doing rather than just what they aren't doing is still handy. So here it is!

A research team in the UK has shown the potential for dissociation between the experience of visual imagery and performance in tasks typically associated with visual imagery and visual memory in a case study. The patient, a 65 year old retired surveyor referred to as MX, reported the sudden loss of his ability to visualize. However, he retained the ability to complete tasks typically associated with visual imagery and visual memory, including mental rotation tasks.

The authors did a series of tests both on MX and on a group of controls of similar age, IQ, and professional backgrounds. These tests included assessments of general intelligence, memory, executive function, visual perception, subjective vividness of visual imagery, and imagery abilities. MX scored significantly lower than controls on subjective assessments of visual imagery. However, his scores in the other tests were not significantly different from that of controls. In the fMRI experiments, MX showed similar areas of activation to the control participants while viewing images. However, MX showed significantly different activation patterns when asked to generate faces. Rather than activating the posterior visual network, MX showed prefrontal activation in areas associated with many executive tasks.

Further behavioral testing was conducted to test if MX was using alternative cognitive strategies. The researchers gave MX variants of Brook's matrix and verbal tasks, along with mental rotation tasks. Here, MX's performance differed from typical patterns. While typical controls consistently perform better on the spatial Brooks task than on the verbal one, MX performed better on the verbal task. When asked to perform the typically visuo-spatial version of the task with verbal or visuo-spatial interference, MX showed no significant difference in performance between no distractor and visuo-spatial interference. However, his performance was significantly lower with the verbal distractor, again in reverse of the typical performance pattern. On mental rotation tasks, MX showed no impairment in correct performance. However, he consistently required more time than controls and showed a different relationship between angle of rotation and time required from the controls.

Both the behavioral and fMRI testing indicate the use of alternative cognitive strategies in order to perform tasks typically associated with visual imagery. On most tasks, these alternative strategies yield similar levels of accuracy to controls with typical visual imagery abilities. The case of MX provides insight into alternative ways of completing typically visual tasks. His performance indicates that mental imagery is not essential to tasks typically associated with it, making it less clear that mental imagery is the subject of mental imagery tests. It also indicates that reliance on the mind's eye in decision-making as suggested by Kosslyn is not universal. In addition, this case study may provide insight into the cognitive functioning of a small but significant subset of the population who report no mental imagery. Surveys dating back to 1880¹ show a group that report never having experienced mental imagery, alongside documentation of prior cases where imagery is lost. Further study could determine if similar strategies are used by this population, and what cognitive differences, if any, this is associated with.²

1  Galton, Francis. "I.—Statistics of mental imagery." Mind 19 (1880): 301-318.

Also relevant is: Faw, Bill. "Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from mental imaging research." Journal of Consciousness Studies 16.4 (2009): 45-68.

2 Spoiler alert! This happened to some extent in Zeman, Adam, Michaela Dewar, and Sergio Della Sala. "Lives without imagery–Congenital aphantasia." Cortex 3 (2015). This case study got written up in Discover, then some people who have never had subjective mental imagery [like me!]  contacted the authors. Then people saw the follow up, some of whom also contacted the authors. The 2015 letter was actually the first one I found, followed by the two commentaries on it. [They wonder if there may be a connection with faceblindness, or prosopagnosia, which I also have. My brain. It is multiply interesting.]

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No Boundary Thinking Seminar Reflection 1

This semester, I'm took a seminar on no-boundary thinking. Which sounds like a fancy word for what I often try to do as a vaguely disability studies like person: focusing on defining an issue and addressing it from any methods that work and not worrying about (often not knowing) what fields those definitions or methods come from. (To my professor from the seminar: Congratulations, you found my blog.)

So here's my first reflection post. Bracketed things were not in the original reflection that I turned in, and have been added since.

[So, at the start, we need to know what no-boundary thinking is. It's kind of what it sounds like: we're going to ignore the lines between disciplines as much as possible.] Huang et. al. (2013) discusses no-boundary thinking as thinking where problems are defined without being limited to a single discipline or group of disciplines, while the knowledge used to define and solve the problem can come from a variety of disciplines. Dr. Brian Dewsbury mentions that no-boundary thinking doesn't necessarily mean bringing more people on to a team just to have them – just because a given discipline has some bearing on a problem, that does not mean we must have a person who specializes in the discipline on the core team. If we did, teams could become overly large and difficult to coordinate, because many disciplines will have information that relates to any given problem. Stakeholders are brought up, and a fellow student says she is reminded of participatory research.

There are connections here: in participatory research, the idea is that affected communities 1) deserve a voice in discussions of problems that affect them, and 2) have useful information related to solving those problems. However, there is a risk of having people just to have them in participatory research – depending on when community members are included the research process, they may have little input in defining research questions, may be left out of data analysis and interpretation, and may generally find themselves used as a sign of community input rather than an actual source of expertise or information. [As opposed to how we should be defining and leading this thing. If anyone's job is "source of expertise for getting the thing done but not really deciding what needs to be done" it should be the outside academics studying the community.]

This problem in participatory research resembles a similar problem in interdisciplinary research, where the input from any given discipline is limited to where the people running the project think that discipline belongs, rather than appearing everywhere it could be helpful throughout the project time line. In both cases, the problem is with boundaries, whether between identities (academic, policy maker, or community member) or between disciplines. The problem is also with the assumption that people fit into exactly one of these boxes – a scholar on fisheries whose family depends on fishing does not fit into precisely one position. When I do research related to disability, I don't either. [I'm Disabled. I'm Autistic. I'm also legitimately a Disability Studies scholar, and I'm starting to be a researcher in assistive technology.] In both participatory and interdisciplinary research, the no boundary idea that we should be defining and approaching problems in ways that are “not limited by disciplines, traditions, vocabularies, or even technologies” (Huang et. al. 2013, p. 2) would be helpful.

Work Cited

Huang, X., Bruce, B., Buchan, A., Congdon, C. B., Cramer, C. L., Jennings, S. F., ... & Moore, J. H. (2013). No-boundary thinking inbioinformatics research. BioData mining, 6(1), 1.

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#Rhetoric and #Aphantasia, 3/3, Zeman et al.

I'm writing some more about aphantasia, or no mind's eye. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. I think this is the last rhetoric discussion about aphantasia for now.

So now, after looking at some modern/mainstream articles and some older stuff – Galton's 1880 paper and a tracing of how people have thought about mentalimagery/the lack thereof by Bill Faw, I'm going to look at how Adam Zeman, those working with him (Michaela Dewar for both the papers where the word aphantasia is used, Sergio Della Sala for all three papers I'm looking at, and Lorna A. Torrens, Viktoria-Eleni Gountouna, David J. McGonigle, and Robert H. Logie for the loss of imagery paper that wound up inspiring the later aphantasia papers), and those reacting to their work in formal academic settings. I think of Zeman as the main person mostly because he tends to be the one to talk to journalists. (Isn't that how it goes?)

I start with the 2010 paper in Neuropsychologia. I did a "press release" report on this one for my neurobiology class this semester, which I may wind up sharing here too. (Note that this was published after Bill Faw makes his hypothesis about imagery-like processes at the subconscious level, so any evidence to the contrary was not available to him when he was writing.) In the introduction, the authors start off using “most people” instead of “people” when describing the ability to “call to mind an image that is less vivid than the original but has a visual 'feel.'” (145) This might seem like a small thing, but it's not. All too often, researchers talk about what all people do and implicitly exclude folks who don't do that from humanity. It's enough of a problem to have led to the paper, “On Not Being Human.” Pitfall #1 avoided.

The authors mention a debate over the importance of (visual) mental imagery in cognition, whether it plays a key role (maybe even a required role) or whether propositional/factual knowledge is sufficient for imagery tasks. As someone who doesn't experience any (visual) mental imagery, I know that there are other ways to do it, but the thing about scholarly discourse is that everything needs to be studied and checked. At least they're asking questions about how folks without mental imagery do the things rather than insisting that if we can do things like recognize rotated objects we must actually have a minds eye. The authors then propose that there are several ways to do imagery tasks at the cognitive level. Hi, cognitive (neuro) diversity, and that multiple ways might be available to “healthy adults.”

(Now what does it mean to be healthy here?) In this case, I think it refers to the fact that the in cases the authors know about where mental imagery is not a thing, it had been a thing before (so they recognized that there was a change instead of it being a normal state like it is for me) and then when it stopped being a thing, it was an event that also led to trouble with the imagery tasks usually used to check if a person can visualize things or not. They were also related to injuries or illnesses. Then MX shows up having lost his ability to visualize (again, not a thing I'd be able to show up with because I'm totally used to not visualizing), and he can still do these tasks. Mostly. There's some difficulty immediately following the loss of visualization ability, and a decrease in these difficulties as time goes by. The study authors interpret this as initial difficulties followed by development of a verbal strategy.) This upsets the theory that visualization is needed, though not necessarily the one that it's related or used for most people. The authors want to know how, which wasn't examined in the cases reported in 1954 where the ability to create certain kinds of mental visualizations went away after injury but the ability to do certain things visualizers would expect to be related weren't affected. (Reading and writing after not being able to visualize recently viewed pages, which wait people visualize pages? Also drawing building plans after not being able to visualize new building plans.) Brain, the author of the 1954 paper, noted that this must mean disconnection between the “visual imagery” related tasks and actual visual imagery was possible.

Despite the focus on understanding what MX does rather than what he doesn't do (the research team even goes into the fMRI part expecting that he's going to show different activation patterns than the neurotypicals do) they do talk about abnormal patterns of activation and healthy controls. That is, there's a definite “normal” mind that the authors are working with for this paper.

Moving on to the 2015 letter to the editor in Cortex where the term “aphantasia” is finally coined, we see a different tone. We're still talking about “imagery generation disorder” for the 65 year old who suddenly stopped having mental imagery, and we're still talking about a “condition”, but there are differences. Rather than assuming visual imagery is an everyone thing, it's now described as a most people thing. They also suggest that this is going to be a variant, comparing it to synaesthesia (not usually pathologized!) and prosopagnosia (kind of pathologized.) Of course, Zeman et. al. are calling both of those things disorders. So. It's a bit of mixed bag. The authors are replacing clearly pathologizing terminology like “defective revisualization.” They're also doing better than most of the journalists at not assuming that their readers all have mind's eyes. Quite a few of the journalists write like they think everyone in their audience can visualize, and that the aphantasiacs are not their audience. Really, 2% of the population is significant and we're probably more likely to be reading an article about aphantasia than the visualizers are. This is a bad assumption, which Zeman et. al. aren't showing.

Then, “Reflections on Aphantasia”, part of a 2016 discussion and again in Cortex, shows a distinct clinical focus, as one would expect in an academic journal focused on the relationship between the nervous system and cognition using neurodivergent people for contrast. (Both acquired and developmental.) The authors point out that calling mental stuff organic or functional doesn't quite work as a divide. (Functional sounds a lot like an academic version “all in your head” to me, in that functional apparently implies reversible? This idea is one of the things the authors are criticizing.) They point out that a range of factors can affect the level of visual imagery, including certain medications, depression, brain injury, and PTSD. They argue that lifelong aphantasia is unlikely to have such a source (and is therefore not pathological? Zeman is pretty insistent that aphantasia is not a disorder when interviewed. Or at least that congenital aphantasia isn't a disorder.) They also say that other psychiatric factors should be taken into account when assessing someone who claims aphantasia. It sounds like they're trying to have their cake and eat it: aphantasia isn't a disorder, they're born this way. But here's all this disordered stuff that could also cause it, and if you experience/complain of aphantasia because of those things, it's a disorder. So maybe it is?

I'm a bit reminded of the “we're not crazy” discourse around asexuality and around being transgender. Some of us do have pathologized stuff going on in addition to being asexual/transgender/aphantasiac. (Hi, I'm Autistic, asexual, nonbinary, and aphantasiac!) That doesn't mean the other states are somehow invalid or pathological, even if they are related to or directly caused by my being Autistic.

At the end of it all, I'm thinking people aren't quite certain how to place aphantasia. Is it a disorder? A disability? A sign of something else that's one of those things? Just a natural variation that we legitimately don't need to pathologize? (Even if it comes with other stuff we tend to pathologize?)

I lean towards variation that we don't need to pathologize, even if it comes with (or is caused by) stuff we tend to pathologize. I also lean towards disability under certain circumstances. In environments that are very specific about wanting visual methods to be used, aphantasia could well be disabling. That doesn't mean other people are talking about it that way. We're currently getting a mix where folks aren't quite sure how to write about it, I think.

Works Examined

Zeman, Adam, Michaela Dewar, and Sergio Della Sala. "Lives without imagery–Congenital aphantasia." Cortex 3 (2015).

Zeman, Adam, Michaela Dewar, and Sergio Della Sala. "Reflections on aphantasia." Cortex 74 (2016): 336-337.

Zeman, Adam, et al. "Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: A case of ‘blind imagination’." Neuropsychologia 48.1 (2010): 145-155.

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Alyssa Reads The US Book

On September 26, my copy of The US Book, by Michael Scott Monje Jr, arrived. I started reading. I know that's the day it arrived because her poetry immediately got me writing, which she says is one of the best compliments her book could get. I was happy, because the writing induced by (starting to) read this book broke through a bit of writers block. After writing a good bit in June (honestly mostly yelling at Uniquely Human, but I was making words) I dropped off a good bit in July, then only managed to write here once each in August and September. (To be fair, there was some other writing happening in August. There was not in September.)

So you can thank The US Book for my presence here again.

Image of a very happy looking Alyssa holding a copy of The US Book

Also, those of you who know my art style might recognize that cover, partially. I did that line art. 

Now to the actual reading bit:

The line that got me writing again was "Speaking is a prison when it's the only thing you're given." As a part time typist who can always, always tell you more typing than speaking, I represent that statement. It was always assumed that speech would work, because it appeared to, but written English is my natural language in a way spoken English isn't. 

I don't know what word to best describe my reaction to the call for psychology, as rhetoric, to make use of neuroscience. Something positive, and with perhaps some pride because neuroscience is the thing I am studying for my doctorate while writing about rhetoric, representation, and neurodivergence on another side. (I can't call one action the center and all others the sides, but I can say that there are many sides to what I do.) I have to agree that neuroscience has a ways to grow, and I'd like to be part of that growing because seriously folks, there are always assumptions and narratives built in to our science and at least I will admit to my neurodivergent ones. 

Face My Morning Face remains as important as it was the day it went up on her blog, if not more so. I'm thinking more so, because of what it's led to since then.

I'm as proud of Look for our communications if you want us to bother with your language. being dedicated to me now as I was the day it went up on her blog, if not more so. (The dedication is on the blog, not in the book. That's OK. I remember, plus it's on the Internet.)

And maybe, just maybe, the taste of those two pieces, which appear in The US Book but which are also still free online for you to read, will whet your appetite for the rest. I know I'm pretty blatantly saying you should read this, if you can, but that's because I think you should. The US Book made me think, laugh, and write. 

And of course, I'm studying neuroscience without leaving behind my knowledge as an Autistic activist and scholar of how we speak and write about things. Or my knowledge as a mathematician, for that matter. That's where I learned to poke holes in arguments, after all. While I work, I need to remember:

• Reading My Own Screams
  
  "Speaking is a prison when it's the only thing you're given." 'Nough said.
  
• Uses of the Knife
  
  I need this to remember about psychology as rhetoric + needing neuroscience. What I am studying is real, and it's important, and it's narrative too. Remember where the narrative comes from, because ... some of it's coming from the same people who hate us (It's time to accept that they hate you.) I don't get to be "apolitical" (as in protecting the status quo or as in not paying attention) without being self-loathing or self-sabotaging.
  
• Look for our communications if you want us to bother with your language.
  
  Communication barriers have more than one side and all too often, the side that's working hardest to translate their communications are also the ones who are called inherently incomprehensible.
  
  When I am tired and anxiety is telling me that nothing matters, I can remember that I have already had an impact. Not one measured in the metrics of academia, but one measured in people and poetry. I know which one matters more to me (and it's the one I've already got. Not gonna lie, though, I'm aiming for both.)
  
• It's time to accept that they hate you.
  
  Put so well, what I fight, why I fight, and remember that I am not alone. I'm not. 

The absent minded professor

It wasn't exactly a secret to me that some professors are autistic. First off ... professors are a subset of humans, and therefore I would expect to meet some autistic professors. Then there's the bit where a really focused interest (in an area you can get a doctorate in) might come in handy for getting a PhD. Plus I'm pretty good at recognizing other autistic adults when I meet them, though they don't always know themselves.

It's even less of a secret (by which I mean it'd be pretty easy to deduce if you think about it, plus you could find out by listening to us) that academia is frequently inaccessible for autistic people. Department politics? UH-OH. Bureaucracy? UH-OH. Networking, and getting jobs in ways that may or may not have much to do with the "official" channels? UH-OH.



And yet.
Hans Asperger described some of us as "little professors." Why did he think we were like professors? Or, perhaps more to my point, why did he think professors were like us?

Neurodiversity in the academy.
We've been there all along. Or, some of us have.

Can you speak, at length, on your topic of interest?
Can you speak at all?
We might have use for you.

Do you look like the person we expect at university?
Enough that we'll deal with the bureaucracy for you?
We might have use for you.

Can you maintain the schedule we expect?
Even the graduate school version? And the adjunct version?
We might have use for you.

But that's not really neurodiversity, is it?
It's just moving the line.

The absent-minded professor may well be autistic. I've met a few who are.
But without solidarity from the ones who were always given a space, this supposed representation is nothing but Aspie elitism.
(I don't pretend that Aspie is a useful category, but elitism based around the idea that it is? For people presumed to fit there? Now, that is very real.)

Remember that the absent-minded professor we are shown is always a man, always white, usually at least middle aged.
The only allusion we get to autism as disability, and not purely (or even primarily) social, is that his wife might take care of him when he forgets to eat. Or he just doesn't take good care of himself.
Sensory processing issues? Who knows.
Executive functioning? I think that's why his wife is feeding him. Or maybe it explains the Rube Goldberg machine that makes a mess of the food but does provide something vaguely edible. Usually.
But it's always a him, and it's always his wife.

What about the autistic people who aren't a "him?"
Women. Nonbinary people.
What about the autistic people who don't have wives?
Who takes care of us, if it turns out that our living alone wasn't such a great idea after all?
Or do we just not get to be academics?

So here's to the ones who were never supposed to make it through.
Here's to the ones who didn't, because they weren't mean to.
The university might be a haven for some of us,
But without solidarity from those who were permitted
For those who never passed for consistently verbal white men who live on their own or found a woman to pick up the slack
Or even for the "close enough" of one difference away,
It's only ever another aspie elitist wrong planet to build a home on.





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Disability in the Graduate Assistants Contract

Two years ago, I suggested to my graduate assistants union that disability and accommodations should be covered in our contracts.

I could understand why it hadn't been there before:

1. It's not the sort of thing most people automatically think of unless they are themselves D/disabled or have a disability.
2. The accommodations/access side is theoretically covered by laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act anyways.

But for a few reasons, I thought it needed to be there:

1. Enforcing the ADA is really hard for most people, because it involves filing a lawsuit with the department of justice. Yes, even the threat of a lawsuit can be effective at times, but it generally needs to be at least a semi-credible threat.
2. If it's in the contract, then violations can also be handled by having the union go to bat, such as by filing a grievance. That's got more force than showing up in an office and complaining alone, but is generally easier to accomplish than filing a lawsuit. This is important because many professors do refuse to ensure access for students, and many departments do actively exclude disabled faculty members.
3. Attitudes: If following relevant disability laws is explicitly stated in the contract, even if it is a bit redundant (and as an engineer, I like certain kinds of redundancy, including this particular kind,) tells people that there's a group on campus that cares about the disability side of things, beyond just disability services (who don't negotiate the graduate assistant contracts.) There being such a group is a whole lot more welcoming for folks who find disability issues relevant than there not being any groups like that is!

And one more reason that occurs to me now but I didn't think of at the time:

•  Graduate assistants are both students and staff. Students handle accommodations through Disability Services for Students. Faculty and staff handle accommodations through Human Resources. Where do graduate assistants go, since we're both? That being unclear would be a barrier for anyone who has issues with bureaucracy. So would an answer of "Do both, haha," because that means dealing with two different offices for one issue.  

Well. The executive board for the union agreed, and none of the union members objected. They pushed to get disability language into the contract, beyond the list of thing they're not supposed to discriminate against us for. (And disability definitely belongs on that list.)

Contract negotiations happened. While the university negotiators tend not to like adding information that's already in other places to the contract or even referencing those other places in the contract, they did add a line about disability accommodations.

4.5 Disability Accommodations– The Administration and GAU shall adhere to Federal and State laws and regulations as they apply to treatment and accommodation of persons with disabilities. Requests for accommodations shall be submitted to the Office of Disabilities for Students.

Am I totally satisfied with that? Not completely. I think it's progress, since there wasn't any information about accommodations before. I know that contracts are all about basic compliance and lagal language. I've still got the same issue with "will follow Federal and State law" here that I do with it on syllabus statements and generally everywhere.

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Theory of Mind Inside Out Note

I am (very slowly, partially because I've got a ton to do and partially because I have trouble with the way most philosophy-type academics write) piecing my way through Daniel Hutto's Folk Psychological Narratives. It's led to my writing thinky thoughts here before.

Well, I just found a paper that I think connects. It did, of course, study just the DMAB folks and is presumably going to be full of pathology language, but it talks about autistic people using more deliberative reasoning where we go through all the steps instead of stuff being instinctive. That paper is here: Reasoning on the Autism Spectrum: A Dual Process Theory Account.

Since Hutto's argument for why he thinks people don't typically reason out why other people acted as they did/attempt to explicitly figure out the mental states of others is that it'd involve more mental effort, and since autistic people tend to describe spending a lot of energy trying to understand the actions of others, I think we get a lot more practice at deliberative reasoning out of social interaction, which is then more tiring, but also since we have more practice at it we might use it more in other domains. 

(Sometimes) Wearing Pride on My Bag

I am fairly open about being Autistic, about using AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) both online and offline. Fairly open. When I am a student in a classroom, the teachers know, and most of my classmates usually know too. As an athlete, my coach knows and my teammates are aware if they remember. As a person on my college campus, people who look at my backpack may well see the buttons -- usually.

Purple backpack with three buttons on it."Our homes not group homes" is obscured by glare, while "disabled & badass" and "I USE AAC" are legible.

As a teacher, my supervisors know. My students don't.

Or at least, I haven't told them. I put some thought into arranging my schedule so that speech is still working while I teach, face-to-face, in the classroom. I don't tell them that speech going kaput on me can happen sometimes, so if it ever does happen, they'll be finding out it's possible right as it happens. I don't tell them I'm autistic. I only tell the ones who are seeking accommodations and seem nervous about it that I'm disabled at all, and the information they get is that I am also registered with disability services. Not that I'm autistic, not that I use a speech generating device part time, not that I can't always speak.

I take the buttons off the back of the backpack before I go teach, and I put them back on after class.

I know full well that my department would back me up if some of my students found out that I'm disabled and decided to take issue with it, and I suspect that most of my students wouldn't take issue, but there are some chances I am not ready to take.

My buttons represent my disabled pride. I remove them to teach because pride is an act of bravery, and I only have the energy to be brave some of the time. Not all of the time. 

Computer Assisted Translation and Cognitive Interpretation

This semester, one of the three classes I'm taking is a programming class meant for scientists, rather than for computer science majors. (I'm only taking three classes! What is this?)
This is pretty cool, because it means I'm with other graduate students, and also everyone realizes that they need more programming skills than they have.

Our final projects are all supposed to relate to our research, if at all possible. As a masters student in math, I don't have official research with my department currently, but I do have research interests through the disability side of things. I'm interested in cognitive interpretation, like what Neurodivergent K is describing here, and in treating disability-related communication barriers as translation problems. (Sign interpreters totally already do this, so this is not a new idea, not on its own.)  In full generality, this would be a huge project and nowhere near appropriate for a semester, but by taking a smaller project, like applying one already existing translation-related technology to communication barriers similar to those I face, I can hopefully get somewhere this semester.

I'll be looking at Computer-assisted Translation (CAT), which already has software to support it. The idea behind computer assisted translation is that sometimes you need to translate a sentence, phrase, or communication similar to one you've needed to translate before. The software that is assisting the translation finds similar phrases that have been translated before, finds what their translations were, and suggests those translations.

Because the translation or interpretation that a cognitive interpreter is doing is between a "standard" dialect and the (non-standardized) communication patterns of a disabled person, we can't really draw on most already existing translation histories. However, relevant translation histories could be created. It may well be possible to give the software some translation history based on the interpretations of a human interpreter, and because certain communication traits are more common among people with particular conditions, it may be possible to create "starter" or "default" translation histories that come with the software. I think that including translations or explanations of common internet language uses would make sense, as one example -- many Autistic people, including myself, are echolalic, an plenty of us tend towards code mixing rather than code switching, which means we may well use internet language in contexts where it won't be understood.

I could also try to bring in comparable corpora, which is something I've been reading about in Comparable Corpora and Computer-assisted Translation. The idea behind comparable corpora is that when people are writing or speaking on a given topic in their own language, this reads and sounds different than translations from other languages do. By using texts on similar topics which were originally in different languages, we can have translations with less "translationese" in them. I think bringing in comparable corpora is unlikely this semester, but that I do want to incorporate it eventually.

Interfaces could also be modified to better match with use by people whose disabilities affect communication and who might not be experienced at translating documents between "standard" languages. (I have some translation experience for personal use, so I do know that this sort of experience is not mutually exclusive with communication disabilities.)

I found one computer assisted translation program, Virtaal, which is free and open source, written in Python, the language we're learning in the programming class. Because Virtaal is a many-file program with a graphical user interface, there's a lot going on in that program that I don't understand yet. My project is going to be based very heavily in learning to understand the code for this already existing program, which I'll then try to make some modifications or additions to over the course of the semester. I'd like to do even more with it later -- I want this software to exist already, and I want it on my laptop, fully functional, now. That's why I'm trying to build it!

In which summer involves doing things

Many things. This post is going to mostly be updates about "I did X, Y, and Z" this summer.

I went to the Computers and Writing annual conference in May, as you might be able to guess from the fact that the last post on here is my notes for one of the sessions. While there, I participated in the digital rhetoric collaboratives wiki quest, and I was one of the winners from that. As such, I got a book! Yay, books! I also reviewed two sessions for the collaborative: D5: Disability and universal access, where I got to watch Sam Harvey be awesome about demolishing the nonsense that is most applications of theory of mind. I've written a little bit about turning the concept inside out, a while back, when I asked if Autistic people might spend more time and effort guessing the mental states of others than neurotypical people do, and Sam seemed to be focusing on the ways the concept and rhetoric around it get applied as an oppressive force. I also got to meet Dani, another autistic academic, who then proceeded to write about me as the "Friend." That was cool too.

The other session I reviewed was F8: Refashioning and reimagining community identities: Performance and online spaces. That was cool because both panelists were members of the communities they were doing research about, and they got to talk about issues related to that, plus they just had really interesting projects to talk about.

I also presented about plainer language in calls for participation as an important thing- the idea of nothing about us without us includes making it so we can understand the questions being asked and therefore know what even to contribute! And then I chaired a panel after that, which was cool. Back to back panels on the last day of the conference for the win!

Shortly thereafter, I went to the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) annual conference. I was on the Digital Access Facilitation Team (DAFT) which was fun and worthwhile but also exhausting. And, just like at Computers and Writing, I was on back to back panels on the last day of the conference (this time immediately followed by tweeting two panels in a row for DAFT.) Here, one panel was on my more scholarly stuff, wanting to create software based around treating disability related language issues as a translation problem rather than something that the disabled person is 100% responsible for "fixing." The other was more on the activisty side of my stuff, talking about some experiences with disclosure on a panel with a pile of other autistic people.

Also at the SDS conference, we got to see Autonomous Press launch. I was at the launch party reminding everyone ever that I did the cover art for Typed Words, Loud Voices. On that note, did I mention that I did said cover art? It's a good book. Since my birthday is coming up, I will say that people who want to do a thing for my birthday are more than welcome to go get a copy for themselves or to donate to a library that will put it on their shelves. Given the funding structure for the upcoming Spoon Knife anthology and my plans to submit to it, this is even a semi-directly self-interested idea for what you can do! (Yeah, if I get a piece into Spoon Knife, I get more for it if more people buy Typed Words. I have a vested interest in people getting it, beyond also honestly wanting more people to read it.)

I wrote an abstract and submitted a piece for the INSPIRe annual virtual conference, entitled "Democratizing Disability Innovation." I plan to edit that piece and send it... somewhere. Not sure where yet, but I think it's worth sending somewhere. I started working on my piece for Spoon Knife. I did some editing on my piece on the translation (or cognitive interpretation, since that's a word that some autistic people use for it when they get a handy dandy friend to do this translation and support for them, see Kassiane's piece,) in the hopes of getting it into a journal. I really need to transcript the presentations I gave at the conferences, but ugh auditory processing issues are a thing. Making transcripts of my own talks, even with good recordings, is not easy, and I suspect that I actually have meh recordings. Oh well, it needs done so I will get it done. And then I'll post about it when it happens, since I'm pretty sure this is where said transcripts are going. At the least, it's one of the places.

In the last few days, Kerima made an important post about appropriation and erasure in activism, with a good bit of the focus on two good friends of mine, Lydia and Kassiane, because they are Autistic people of color, Lydia genderqueer and Kassiane a woman. This is relevant to "what Alyssa did this summer" because Lydia and Kassiane are friends, but also because Kerima linked to a post of mine for documentation and explanation on one of the issues, which means "got linked in an important post" is a literal partial answer to the question.

Computers and Writing Session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access.

I attended the Computers and Writing conference at University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of the panels where I took pretty good notes was session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access. I'm now posting my write-up of the panel and my notes. 

Here's the nicer write-up, which I also added to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Wiki. Maybe someone else will edit it with additional information, so that may not remain the same as what's below.

This panel began with Steven Hammer of Saint Joseph's University presenting on “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions.” Hammer's presentation is concerned with Western art history and multimedia writing's tendency to ignore the perspectives and contributions of disabled people, and with the tendency towards a deficit model. He notes that after a diagnosis, there is a prognosis, which rather than simply describing what life will or could be like, it uses a presumed (and now unavailable) norm as a basis and describes how life will be different from that norm due to the diagnosis.

He suggests, rather than asking about how only certain people with certain diagnoses have bodies which are failing or considering how all bodies will eventually fail, asking “how are you failing right now?” He proposes that we consider the medicines we are taking to keep our bodies running every day.

With this question, however, Hammer mentions the risk that people will presume their experiences of bodily failure is equivalent to that of people with disabilities, who face oppression and marginalization based on their abilities in addition to the primarily practical concerns of keeping their bodyminds running.

Hammer then spoke about projects done together which use open source and glitch-theory methods to increase the accessibility of artistic production. One such project was his work on instruments for Arduino.

Hammer also drew a connection between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

After Hammer's talk, Samuel Harvey from Saint Cloud State University spoke on “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet.” Harvey's talk covered the history of work on identity formation and on theory of mind, including the relations of these issues to autistic people. Noting that work on identity formation presumes that identity formation rests upon social interaction and the ability to understand what others are thinking (Theory of Mind,) and that autism comes with difficulties in social interaction, he asks what this would mean for identity formation in autistic people.

From there, he continues on to enthymemic dehumanization of people, particularly autistic people, where statements about identity formation, humanity, and theory of mind are made which logically lead to (never explicitly stated) denial of identity or humanity to marginalized people. The two primary examples Harvey notes are: 1) If identity formation depends on an understanding of what others think, or a theory of mind, and autistic people lack a theory of mind, then autistic people would be unable to develop an identity, and 2) If theory of mind is innate to humans, and certain groups are found not to have a theory of mind, that members of those groups are not human.

Harvey also notes issues with the current methods of testing theory of mind, primarily the Sally-Anne test, in that passing these tests depends on linguistic ability and upon cultural factors. He finds that rather than being innate to humans, theory of mind is innate to dominant groups, who use it as a tool of oppression to rob people of identity, agency, and personhood.

The third planned speaker for the panel, Annika Konrad of University of Wisconsin-- Madison, did not appear to speak on “Visually Communicating Visual Impairments.”

Liberty Kohn of Winona State University spoke third, on “Sound Pedagogy: Sound Art as Rhetoric, Poetic, and a Voice in the Composition Classroom.” He explored audio assignments, noting that while it is common to assign students to read multiple kinds of media, if students are not also writing multiple kinds of media they are not participating in a fully multimedia experience. He spoke about meta-language, and having students make versions of audio both including and excluding the meta-language in their assignments, and of the rhetoric of these choices.

In addition, he covered the idea of teaching non-musicians to produce audio in the classroom, as audio assignments are currently primarily the domain of people whose areas of study relate directly to audio. 

___________________________________________________________________________

Now for the less polished notes I took during the session:

Session D5: Friday May 29, 2015, 3:00-4:15, Disability and Universal Access themed panel.

Steven Hammer, “The Sounds of Access: Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions”

Diagnosis, puts a thing on us.

Prognosis. Based on knowing that a person has a given thing. “What's life like based on what it could have been before.”

What does “no significant development” mean?

Asks, “How can we get beyond a deficit model?”

Amundon, 2000 “normal/abnormal is the basis of the deficit model.”

“human variation rather than pathology” Reid & Valle, 2004.

“[the] non-neutrality of techno-social artifacts and contexts... they are embedded... theya re not sterile, they're imperfect...” Cates 2014.

“from temporarily able bodies to always-already malfunctioning bodies” is on the presentation and he said it and I think that's original wording to Hammer. Also I like this wording.

Asking “how are you failing right now?” rather than the thought of this as “someday” your body will fail, think about the medicines you're taking.

Of course, we need to make sure people aren't concluding that they belong in disabled people's spaces because they have a headache or some such because that'd be fucked up.

Draws a parallel between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day to day.

The world is built for people who have an identity that is fucking fictional!

Samuel Harvey, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet”

Henderson, Davidson, Hemsworth, and Edwards 504?? Something Sam's citing.

“If identity is formed through communicating with others, and autistic people struggle with communicating with others...” [Ask Sam if I can see his slides after?]

Samuel brings up the possibility of written language as a discourse where autistic people could develop their identities.

Davidson 796. “NT conversations have a very fast-paces rhythym...”

Erikson+Cohen=> identity is formed by having a theory of mind.

First two publications of theory of mind, the titles are Does the X have a “Theory of Mind”?, with Chimpanzee and then Autistic Child. Erm erm erm.

Enthymemic dehumanization, leads to Autistic people not being able to have identities because we lack a theory of mind... yup.

Theory of mind innate in humans, bunch of folks don't, therefore those groups aren't human.

Yeargeau+Heilker state that autistic people have our own rhetoric and language, oh hey, that fucks up our test results in the area of language.

Halle and Tager Flusberg (2003), Lohman and Tomasello (2003) as cited in Miller.

Folks like to claim that language has no impact on the results of the test, which 1) Wrong, and 2) claims the test is arhetorical.

Tons of other factors wind up actually messing with theory of mind results. Whoops. Cultural stuff, socioeconomic stuff, linguistic stuff, and also quite a few kinds of neurodivergence.

Theory of mind is (maybe) innate in dominant groups, used to fuck over the disadvantaged groups.

“Theory of mind is innate in dominant groups, it is a tool of oppression meant to rob people (mostly autistics) of identity, agency, and even personhood.”

Harvey thinks theory of mind is a theory of the minds of dominant group members. That is, the folks who have a theory of mind don't actually have it about members of the groups said to “lack” a theory of mind.

Doing What Works- Academia Edition

Making notecards for research papers seems like a pretty accepted thing. When they taught us how to do research papers in high school, they made us do them (and handwritten, too!) When my friend, a history major, was writing papers for college, he made them. His were handwritten. Quite a few of my friends make them too.

As soon as I wasn't required to anymore, I stopped making physical note cards. It's not because I don't think they're a good idea. I think having note cards is great. The problem is making them. My handwriting is messy enough that handwritten note cards don't actually do me much good, and writing starts to hurt fairly quickly so I'm not inclined to make cards, especially when they won't help much due to the messy handwriting issue.

Instead, I've been typing my notes. This is useful because it's hard to lose a digital copy of my notes. It's also useful because I can read things I typed later. It's easier than handwriting, because typing doesn't make my hands start to hurt. It lets me post my notes publicly, which I do in the hopes that they are useful to someone else. (I've got friends who do academic stuff, and if my notes about a source help them decide if reading it is worth it or not, or if having my notes lets them spend less time going through the source once they have it, this is great! I like it when academics post things publicly and it makes other people's lives easier.)

Because technology exists and can do cool stuff, and because I know printed note card size flash cards exist, I recently looked around for ways to print directly onto index cards. Lo and behold, it can be done! Apparently, as long as you make your paper size right in your document and in the print step, most printers can print to index cards, either 3"x5" or 4"x6".

Now I can get the benefits of both digital notes and legible notecards! It's a bit of a process, but way faster than trying to read my handwriting.

1. Take notes on my laptop, typed, regular letter paper sized document.
   
2. Save as "Notes" for the source.
   
3. Save again, as "Note cards" for the source.
   
4. Change the page size to 4"x6" (big index cards) and the margins to 0.5"
   
5. Copy the citation for the source to my clipboard.
   
6. After each note that I want a note card for, paste the citation and then insert a page break. On my copy of Open Office, ctrl+enter does a page break. (I don't need a physical card for "Also read this source the author cited")
   
7. Load up the index cards in the printer and print!
   
8. Sort the cards by project they relate to. If a card relates to multiple projects, I can print multiple copies of that page so that a card for it goes in every project it relates to.
   

I do have a decent bit of overlap between projects, too. My projects (in varying levels of activity) are below, and purple lines connect projects that currently have at least one shared note card.

Image description: Project titles in boxes connected by lines representing shared note cards between the projects. The listen projects, left to right and then top to bottom, are 

1. "Neurodivergent Philosophy of Science," 
2. "Rethinking Engineering Design and Disability," 
3. "Cognitive Interpreting Application," 
4. "Theory of Mind Inside Out,"
5.  "Disability Studies for Engineers Course Creation," 
6. "Cognitively Accessible Language (Write so the folks you write about can understand)", 
7. "Erasure of Queer Autistic People," 
8. "Queer Because Neurodivergent is STILL QUEER."

Using the numbers as shorthand for the projects, the following pairs are connected:

1 and 2, 1 and 4, 1 and 5, 2 and 3, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, 4 and 6, 4 and 7, 4 and 8, 5 and 6, 7 and 8.

Democratizing Innovation notes

I actually read Democratizing Innovation a while ago, having reviewed it back in 2013. But I realized that I hadn't put my notes up yet (just a review) so here they are. You can get the book for free as a pdf at the authors website.

“I first ask them how satisfied they are with their backpack. Initially, most say, “It's OK.” But after some discussion, a few complaints will slowly begin to surface (slowly, I think, because we all take some dissatisfaction with our products as the unremarkable norm.)”

But there are still a bunch of students who decide to make some sort of change to their backpack to make it at least a little better.

“adding more beta testers... increases the probability that someone's toolkit will be matched to the problem in such a way that the bug is shallow to that person.” (Raymond qtd in von Hippel.)
That is, adding more people who look at a problem increases the chances that the solution will be simple to someone. 

“The assets of some user will then generally be found to be a just-right fit to many innovation development problems.”

parallel between user-innovator and scholar-activist?

Userinnovation.mit.edu

In the early days of computing, it was common to freely share software and modifications to it. Almost as soon as the first firm restricted access to source code, counters including the General Public License started appearing. Some people started calling these “copyleft.”

hacker culture as an anarchist thing?

Conventional economic language talks about producers and consumers, supply and demand, but Weber notes that “the open source process scrambles these categories” (qtd in von Hippel) as users become part of the production process. He also suggests this integration could occur in other areas.

In open source, users are able to make complicated products themselves, like Firefox and Linux. (A user is kind of like a consumer, but it's a word that still works when the user is also the one making the thing.)

Experts in many fields form interest groups and informally help each other, freely revealing information in ways similar to that of open source processes. (von Hippel.)

Amabile, T. M. 1996. Creativity in Context. Westview.

Antelmon, Kristin. 2004. “Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?” College and Research Libraries 65, no 5: 372-382

Christensen, C. M. 1997. The Innovator's Dilemma. Harvard Business School Press.

Morris, A. D. and C. McClurg, eds. 1992. Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. Yale University Press.

Harhoff, D., J. Henkel, and E. von Hippel. 2003. Profiting from Voluntary Information Spillovers: How Users Benefit by Freely Revealing Their Innovations.” Research Policy. 35, no 10:1753-1769.

Mishina, K. 1989. Essays on Technological Evolution. PhD Thesis, Harvard University.

Von Hippel, E. 1976. The Dominant Role of Users in the Scientific Instrument Innovation Process. Research Policy 5, no 3: 212-39

Scholarship in the Digital Age Notes

And yet another "Alyssa reads a thing, here's sier notes." Yes, these are books I've been reading as I work on various chapters and papers and proposals as an academic person. 

Citation for the book, as per usual.

Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007.

And here's my notes!

In the first chapter, Borgman notes that much of the content of the Internet is unverified/unverifiable stuff like blogs and list serv discussions. As more and more academics blog, I question both the unversified nature and the unverifiable nature of these forms of media- blog posts with references exist- I know because I write these.

“Students acquire an insatiable appetite for digital publications, and then find on graduatiion that they can barely sample them without institutional affiliations” (3.) This is a huge, huge problem for independent scholars, especially poor independent scholars. And guess who's more likely to be an independent scholar rather than have affiliations? Exactly the same people who face barriers to participation in academia.

Nevertheless, making content that was created for one audience useful for another is a complex problem. Each field has its own vocabulary, data structures, and research practices. People ask questions in different ways, starting with familiar terminology. (10.)

Basically the quote I just copied in above. This is a big argument in favor of the disciplinary versioning with discipline-nonspecific version approach, though it also raises a question: what is the current intended audience, and should that be the indended audience? In conversations about disability, disabled people need to be part of the main intended audience, not an add on.

“Journal articles are more valuable if one can jump directly from the article to those it cites and to later articles that cite the source article” (10.) Oh hey, the Chinese journal system I used to download a ton of papers when I was in Tianjin can do that. It was useful, except for the part where a lot of papers didn't actually cite anyone...

Wissenschaften is apparently a German word that covers sciences, social sciences, and humanities. That is really cool. Also, cyberwissenschaften for the cyber kind. That's cool, but it's German and that means most USAians won't really know or use it. Sads. Cyberscience: Research in the Age of the Internet by Nentwich apparently talks about this some. Woo linguistics but sads because English.

I think I need to find William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer.

“Notions of scholarship, information, and infrastructure are deeply embedded in technology, policy, and social arrangements” (33.)

“Underlying the technical and policy developments are theories and philosophies about what is socially acceptable and appropriate” (33.)

“Scholars in the twenty-first century continue to use those channels [in person, by phone, and by mail,] while also communicating via e-mail, blogs, and chat” (47.) Ok so blogs are unverfied and unverifiable, but also are a way scholars talk to each other? That makes SO MUCH SENSE. Oh wait, no, it really doesn't.

Oh hey, problems with peer review. Ibby talked about those some in the cognitive accessibity and why we should share piece on the feminist wire, too. Lets see what Borgman's got to say.

“Double-blind reviewing is difficult to maintain, especially in online environments, as authors can be identified by searching for similar work on the topic of the paper.” (61.)

Cronin, B.- interesting author. The Citation Process: The Role and Significance of Citations in Scientific Communication (1984), The Hand of Science: Academic Writing and Its Rewards, (2005.)

Peer review is a social process, with all the problems that can come from social processes.

Open posting and review of papers where anyone may comment brings up the question of who is a peer. The system used to be pretty well closed, with authors and reviewers being the same set of people. (I'm totally in favor of questioning who is a peer, the current system is super elitist. Not sure what Borgman thinks of blowing it open like this, I think she's trying to sound unbiased here?)

“Reviewing can be a conservative process that is more likely to reinforce the norms of a field than to identify significant breakthroughs. Articles that are ultimately highly cited often have difficulty getting published.” (62.) She cites McCook 2006, Meadows 1998, Nature 2006, Shatz 2004, and Weller 2000, 2001 for this. So many citations, here's the full ones below now.

McCook, A. (2006). Is Peer Review Broken? Scientist 20 (2): 26.

Meadows, A. J. (2001). Communicating Research. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate. (2006). Nature. <http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/index.html>

Shatz, D. (2004). Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Weller, A. C. (2000). Editorial peer review for electronic journals: Current issues and emerging models. Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology 51 (14): 1328-1333.

Weller, A. C. (2001). Peer Review: Its Strengths and Weaknesses. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

“New technologies did not result in shifting the balance among stakeholders as radically or as rapidly as some had hoped, largely because social practices are much more enduring than are technologies (65.)

“In a print world, most relationships are bibliographic references to other documents or to data sources. In a digital world, these references can be automated links that will take the reader directly to the source document or even the cited passage within that document.” (70.)

“With active links, readers can follow a trail directly to sources and data, and may be more likely to verify claims” (70.)

Information technologies now enable anyone to be a publisher, in the generic sense that anything “made public” is published. Nevertheless, the supposedly low barriers to entry in computer-based publishing ignore the complex relationships between stakeholders. “Self-publishing” is an oxymoron in the scholarly world. Authors need peer-reviewers; publishers need authors, editors, and reviewers; and libraries need content to collect, organize, make accessible, and preserve. (76.)

Because academic publishing doesn't do the whole self-publishing thing, depending on others reviews before permitting publication, the lowering of technical barriers to publishing is insufficient on its own to make stakeholder voices be heard in academic conversations. The lowered technical barriers to entry mean that a social change of listening to stakeholders and inviting them into conversations are easier to do from a logistics standpoint. That's it.

Changes in online review led to asking “who is a peet?” “When considering the legitimization of digital documents online, the question becomes, “legitimate to whom?” (84.)

“Students, practitioners, scholars with minimal access to the published literature, and the general public usually are happy to read and cite any free version of a document they can find online” (84.)

Posting documents online was considered prior publication as far as journals were concerned for a while. As more and more authors took advantage of the interent to post working copies of papers on repositories and personal websites, the policy changed, and such posting and circulation became an informal communication which no longer prevented journal publication. [Like Melanie Yergeau's blog post that got expanded into an article on Disability Studies Quarterly!]

The ways that people actually read (or decide whether or not to read) scholarly publications aren't perfectly suited to print, with skimming of titles, abstracts, and conclusions more common than reading the entire article linearly. Similar jumping around sections is common for books as well. Electronic publications could take advantage of their increased flexibility, including the lack of requirement for linearity, and design for these actual habits. However, this doesn't usually happen. Online texts typically attempt to be just as linear as print texts.

Scholarly information never will be completely translatable between disciplines any more than languages ever will be perfectly translatable. Some ideas within fields cannot be fully expressed in the language of another field, just as some ideas in French or Chinese cannot be fully expressed in English. We can improve the transmission and translation of ideas through tools and practices, however. (230.)

I think that also ties in with the paradigm stuff that Nick Walker talks about in his essay where he describes the neurodiversity paradigm. Ideas from different paradigms don't really translate well to others, usually. Sometimes a piece of data can be picked up from one and re-interpreted in another, but it's a lot of work.

The lack of perfect translatability between academic fields is both a strength and a weakness of information infrastructure. It is a strength in that fields can express themselves in the full richness of their own languages. It is a weakness in that rich internal structures can create rigid boundaries between fields. Interdisciplinary work depends on the ability to span those boundaries. (231-232.)

Forfeiting the richness of local language is too high a price to pay for interoperability. (232.)

These two bits line up big time with the whole translation thing. Translators are important, both across disciplines and between activists and academics, and all kinds of cultural differences within and outside academia.

And now I go through the references section for stuff I'd read if time were infinite. I probably won't read most of it, though, because time isn't infinite.

Artandi, S. (1973). Information concepts and their utility. Journal for the American Society for Information Science 24 (4): 242-245.

Bailey, C. (2005). Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with e-Prints and Open Access Journals. Washington, D.C: Association of Research Libraries. <http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf> (URL is from 2006, might not still be working.)

Barnett, G. A., Fink, E.L., and Debus, M. B. (1989). A mathematical model of citation age. Communication Research 16 (4): 510-531.

Crane, D. (1972). Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Journal of Documentation- the article cited is way out of date now but the journal sounds cool.

Day, R. E. (2001). The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dillon, A. (1994). Designing Usable Electronic Text. London: Taylor and Francis.

Duguid, P. (2005). “The art of knowing”: Social and tacit dimensions of knowledge and the limits of community of practice. Information Society 21 (2): 109-118.

Gieryn, T. F. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hemlin, S. and Rasmussen, S. B. (2006). The shift in academic quality control. Science, Technology, and Human Values 31 (2): 173-198.

Hughes, T. P. Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kling, R. (2004). The Internet and Unrefereed Scholarly Publishing. In Annual Review of Information Scheice and Technology, ed. B. Cronin, 38: 591-631. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Knorr-Cetina, K. (1999). Epistimic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Camrbridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B., and Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2^nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tenopir, C., and King, D. W. (2002). Reading behaviour and electronic journals. Learned Publishing 15: 259-265.

Tenopir, C., and King, D. W. (2004). Communication Patterns of Engineers. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.