Beyond Seven Review No. 64

Posted on Wed 24 February 2021 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

Counterantidisintermediation 🌔

Scholarly communication 🦓


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Beyond Seven Review No. 63

Posted on Wed 10 February 2021 in Beyond Seven Review

Book and publishing history 🚟

  • Effects of Copyrights on Science - Evidence from the US Book Republication Program
    "Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of World War II to examine the effects of copyrights on science. In 1943, the US Book Republication Program (BRP) granted US publishers temporary licenses to republish the exact content of German-owned science books. Using new data on citations, we find that this program triggered a large increase in citations to German-owned science books. This increase was driven by a significant reduction in access costs: Each 10 percent decline in the price of BRP book was associated with a 43 percent increase in citations. To investigate the mechanism by which lower book prices influence science, we collect data on library holdings across the United States. We find that lower prices helped to distribute BRP books across US libraries, including less affluent institutions. Analyses of the locations of citing authors further indicate that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. Results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output: new PhDs and US patents that use knowledge in BRP books."

Counterantidisintermediation 🌔

Data analysis and Bayesian statistics ⚽

  • https://dimewiki.worldbank.org/wiki/List_Experiments
    "A list experiment is a questionnaire design technique used to mitigate respondent social desirability bias when eliciting information about sensitive topics. With a large enough sample size, list experiments can be used to estimate the proportion of people for whom a sensitive statement is true."

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺

  • 'Ideology' or 'Situation Sense'? An Experimental Investigation of Motivated Reasoning and Professional Judgment
    "This paper reports the results of a study on whether political predispositions influence judicial decisionmaking. The study was designed to overcome the two principal limitations on existing empirical studies that purport to find such an influence: the use of nonexperimental methods to assess the decisions of actual judges; and the failure to use actual judges in ideologically-biased-reasoning experiments. The study involved a sample of sitting judges (n = 253), who, like members of a general public sample (n = 800), were culturally polarized on climate change, marijuana legalization and other contested issues. When the study subjects were assigned to analyze statutory interpretation problems, however, only the responses of the general-public subjects and not those of the judges varied in patterns that reflected the subjects’ cultural values. The responses of a sample of lawyers (n = 217) were also uninfluenced by their cultural values; the responses of a sample of law students (n = 284), in contrast, displayed a level of cultural bias only modestly less pronounced than that observed in the general-public sample. Among the competing hypotheses tested in the study, the results most supported the position that professional judgment imparted by legal training and experience confers resistance to identity-protective cognition — a dynamic associated with politically biased information processing generally — but only for decisions that involve legal reasoning. The scholarly and practical implications of the findings are discussed."

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Beyond Seven Review No. 62

Posted on Wed 27 January 2021 in Beyond Seven Review

Counterantidisintermediation 🌔

Data analysis and Bayesian statistics ⚽

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺

  • Work of the past, work of the future
    Column by David Autor. "Labour markets in US cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were 50 years ago, but urban non-college workers now perform much less skilled work than they did. This column shows that automation and international trade have eliminated many of the mid-skilled non-college jobs that were disproportionately based in cities. This has contributed to a secular fall in real non-college wages."
  • Do Things Matter?
    Arresting essay by Sarah Miller. Somewhat US-specific. "Last week a 23-year-old woman asked me if she should get an MFA. I asked her if she would have to pay for it. She said no, because she wouldn’t go if she didn’t get funded. I said if she didn’t have to pay for it, sure, she could go, but she could also not go, and that would also be fine. ..."

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Beyond Seven Review No. 61

Posted on Wed 13 January 2021 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

  • Professuren für Digital Humanities
    List of Digital Humanities Professors in Germany. (Each would typically have PhD students.) No better illustration of how different the fate of digital humanities/computational humanities is in Europe (vs. North America).

Data analysis and Bayesian statistics ⚽

  • IDEA – nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions
    Cartoons of merge sort, etc.
  • HaTS: Large-scale In-product Measurement of User Attitudes & Experiences with Happiness Tracking Surveys – Google Research
    Helpful list of best practices in survey design. "With the rise of Web-based applications, it is both important and feasible for human-computer interaction practitioners to measure a product’s user experience. While quantifying user attitudes at a small scale has been heavily studied, in this industry case study, we detail best Happiness Tracking Surveys (HaTS) for collecting attitudinal data at a large scale directly in the product and over time. This method was developed at Google to track attitudes and open-ended feedback over time, and to characterize products’ user bases. This case study of HaTS goes beyond the design of the questionnaire to also suggest best practices for appropriate sampling, invitation techniques, and its data analysis. HaTS has been deployed successfully across dozens of Google’s products to measure progress towards product goals and to inform product decisions; its sensitivity to product changes has been demonstrated widely. We are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to embrace HaTS as well, and, if necessary, adapt it for their unique needs."

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺

  • Computer People for Peace.
    "Recently The Outline published a piece on Computer People for Peace, a 1960s-1970s activist group originating in New York but with numerous chapters nationally. Some folks from the Tech Workers’ Coalition were looking for someone near one of the libraries which hold copies of the CPP’s newsletter Interrupt to scan them, and as the Tamiment at NYU is one of those libraries, I spent last Friday afternoon there."

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Beyond Seven Review No. 60

Posted on Wed 30 December 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

  • Procedurally modifying spelling
    Wonderful post. "Some examples: Maybe the elves in the west write the K S sound with the letters ks. For example the word tax would be written taks."

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺

  • TAPAS Project
    Hosting provider for TEI. "TAPAS is the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service hosted by Northeastern University Library's Digital Scholarship Group."

Scholarly communication 🦓

  • Radical Philosophy: Editorial
    From 2018. Radical Philosophy finally goes open access. Not exactly a radical move at this point.
  • bjoern.brembs.blog » How publishers keep fooling academics
    "Time and time again, academic publishers have managed to create the impression that publishing incurs a lot of costs which justify the outrageous prices they charge, be that US$11M p.a. for an Elsevier Big Deal subscription or an article processing charge (APC) of US$5,200 for a Nature Communications article."

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Beyond Seven Review No. 59

Posted on Wed 16 December 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

  • Awareness Reduces Racial Bias
    Preprint: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19765 "Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study’s original sample but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage, though, the bias disappeared. Several potential mechanisms may have produced this result, including voluntary behavior changes by individual referees, adjustments by players to new information, and changes in referee behavior due to institutional pressure. These results suggest a new kind of Hawthorne effect in which greater scrutiny of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change."

Counterantidisintermediation 🌔

Data analysis and Bayesian statistics ⚽

  • Thinking about “Abandon statistical significance,” p-values, etc.
    "We had some good discussion the other day following up on the article, “Retire Statistical Significance,” by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, and Blake McShane. I have a lot to say, and it’s hard to put it all together, in part because my collaborators and I have said much of it already, in various forms. For now I thought I’d start by listing my different thoughts in a short post while I figure out how best to organize all of this."

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺


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Beyond Seven Review No. 58

Posted on Wed 02 December 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) literary history and sociology of literature 🦉

  • Quantitative Methods in Literary Studies and the Humanities: Systematic and Historical Perspectives
    Open-access book published in 2018. Overview: "Starting from the early 19th century, quantitative methods have been applied to describe, analyze, and interpret texts in literary studies and the humanities. With the emergence of the "digital humanities," such approaches have gained in importance. The volume aims to historically contextualize and examine quantifying procedures in relation to theory and to assess the value of quantitative data in the humanities."

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺


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Beyond Seven Review No. 57

Posted on Wed 18 November 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺


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Beyond Seven Review No. 56

Posted on Wed 04 November 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

Book and publishing history 🚟

  • Market Structure: Theory and Evidence
    Starts with questions I'm interested in (in the context of the text industry): "Why are some industries dominated worldwide by a handful of firms? Why is the size distribution of firms within most industries highly skewed?"

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺


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Beyond Seven Review No. 55

Posted on Wed 21 October 2020 in Beyond Seven Review

(Quantitative) cultural studies 🚣

Data analysis and Bayesian statistics ⚽

  • Discussion on overfitting in cluster analysis
    Gelman on (not) using BIC for estimating number of clusters in a mixture model. "I think BIC is fundamentally different from AIC, WAIC, LOO, etc, in that all those other things are estimates of out-of-sample prediction error, while BIC is some weird thing that under certain ridiculous special cases corresponds to an approximation to the log marginal probability."

Free/libre and open-source software 🌺

  • HATEOAS
    A section from PayPal's API style guide. Useful examples.

Information and Geisteswissenschaften 🏺

  • On Weaponised Design
    On UX in an era of surveillance capitalism. "User Experience Design has blossomed from a niche industry in the halls of Silicon Valley’s early startup darlings to a force that architects our digital lives. Today, user experience design is wholly responsible for modelling human expression and self identity, and enabling interaction and participation online. Design today shares as much in common with information security research as it does with behavioural science or aesthetics. By failing to criticise common design practices or form cooperative relationships with other technology fields, user experience designers are effectively refusing to recognise and respond to traumatic cases of its own work being used to harm users."

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