[Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?

[Dr. T. Michael Roberts]

Mary-Helen,
I am one of those rare birds thoroughly trained in
both qualitative and quantitative Research
Methodology. I started out with degrees in philosophy
and literature and was drawn into the Department of
Educational Psychology, Counseling and Special
Education by an interest in Transpersonal Psychology.
I was told once admitted that I would have to take at
least four courses in Statistics and Research
Methodology to become a doctor and was a damn fool if
I did not take every course offered by the department
in number crunching. Qualitative Research Methodology
was not mentioned during this conversation or, at the
time, in the catalog of courses. The folks over in
Psychology looked down on the folks over in the
education school but granted us the left-handed
compliment of being better statisticians than they
were and better trained in Psychology than the average
math nerd. 

I had never taken Algebra. I took business math with
Coach Vickers in high school and then majored in
Philosophy at a small, liberal arts college which
cross-listed logic courses as both PHIL and MATH. So,
you can imagine how splendidly self-confident I felt
as I stood in Dr. Donald Ary’s office explaining to
him that I would be taking his Educational Statistics
1 next term because I really had no choice. I had
dropped by to apologize in advance for the ineptitude
I was sure I would display and, perhaps, to convince
him that I was, when allowed to speak English rather
than being forced to express myself through numbers,
at least slightly brighter than a turnip.

I enjoyed Dr. Ary’s course tremendously and took every
course offered by the department in number crunching
for the pure joy of it. I realized at some point that
much number crunching is done for the pure joy of it
and developed a bit of a habit in that direction
myself. I spent so long finishing the degree I started
while doing another simultaneously that I passed comps
and became officially ABD the same term the
department’s first semiotican was hired. I did a
quantitative dissertation but probably would not have
if the semiotican had burst upon the scene a year
earlier. 

Upon graduation, I began teaching Psychology for a
community college. My greatest success came teaching
Psychology 2317 (Basic Statistics) both online and in
the traditional classroom. I never got a single math
nerd in that class in all the times I taught it. My
classes closed shortly after opening every term after
the first, filling up quickly with would-be nurses
told by the State of Texas that 3 hours of statistics
were required for licensure. These nurses genuinely
loved my Education School approach to teaching
statistics, an approach that involved dealing with
statistics at the level of concept rather than getting
bogged down with all those elaborate formulas and
tricky computations. You can get away with that if you
have them buy SPSS ($80.00) instead of a text-book. 

Anyway, I now teach English rather than Psychology. I
miss my nurses but enjoy working with my composition
students even more. I was always a story-teller. My
fascination with statistics was an attempt on my part
to embrace my opposite. That fascination began during
a time in my life when I felt that I was drowning in
an ocean of competing stories and desperately needed
to feel something solid beneath my feet, something
that was there before anyone started interpreting and
which refused to be interpreted away.  Will that do as
a definition of reality? Patterns in numbers that were
just numbers standing in abstract relationship without
anything being defined except within the web of those
relationships felt like solid ground to me. 

Later, I faced the awful fact that these patterns only
come to mean when you turn them into a story by saying
that 17i is the length of Jessica’s nose which is why
Roger and Jessica eloped to Vegas. The truth is “out
there”, as Fox Moulder used to say, but can only be
lived “in here” in the form of a story that must go
beyond the information given in order to become a fit
place for human beings to live, love and occasionally
try to jump out of the story like cat nipped kitties
chasing their own lovely tails. 



I hope I have made all this perfectly clear. My
students tell me that my learned discourse holds
together at least as well as jazz and that they do
profit in some vague way by exposure. Then again, I
tell them that their essays will make fascinating
reading if they just capture themselves in a net of
words. I try to be kind and, perhaps, they do also in
return.
T. Michael 

--- Mary-Helen Ward <mhward at usyd.edu.au> wrote:

> But why? Why reduce people's words, thoughts and
> emotional responses  
> to mathematical coding? Why not use qualitative
> methods to capture/ 
> represent/investigate the interactions? I understand
> that it's still  
> a reduction; a distillation from the original, but
> it speaks in clear  
> ways too.
> 
> Theory can be developed from life using many
> methods; maths is only  
> one of them. Maybe when we talk about the 'body of
> knowledge' we need  
> to think about its blood and guts (the messy stuff)
> and well as bones  
> and ligaments.
> 
> M-H
> 
> 
> On 22/12/2006, at 1:15 PM, Hugemusic wrote:
> 
> > Yes, well, these issues are perplexing, but not
> insurmountable.
> >
> > I'm sure the early scientists who wondered why
> trees burn but  
> > (some) rocks
> > don't thought they had a similar problem on their
> hands ...
> >
> > Maths can help with anything that can be
> quantified - strength of
> > relationships, passion of the content, capacity
> for "leakage" of  
> > involvement
> > (the extent to which participants have a choice of
> fora) even  
> > "importance to
> > our lives" can be quantified ... it's a matter of
> coming up with  
> > imaginative
> > and reproduceable metrics, crunching the numbers
> and seeing whether  
> > anything
> > useful emerges.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > The numbers can tell all sorts of stories if we
> begin to explore  
> > them -
> > we're just blinded by the size of the task and the
> lack of obvious  
> > metrics.
> >
> > Incidentally, a quick peruse of the groups in
> Myspace shows a similar
> > pattern to the one you observe in Yahoo! groups
> and as has been  
> > reported
> > concerning blog activity.  Very Long Tail, all of
> them ... but wait  
> > - that's
> > a mathematical relationship!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Hughie
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward at usyd.edu.au>
> > To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic at ozemail.com.au>
> > Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:01 AM
> > Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
> >
> >
> >> I realise that email lists seem a bit 'old hat',
> but I think that   
> >> there is
> >> a lot to be learned from them about how
> communities form,  fail or  
> >> are
> >> sustained online.
> >>
> >> I've been a member of one online community (email
> list only) for ten
> >> years. It's shrunk a bit over the years - some
> members have died  
> >> and  some
> >> have lost interest - but it's still going and we
> still have a  few
> >> postings most weeks. We are down to 29 members,
> but we all agree   
> >> on the
> >> list's importance to our lives. I don't see any
> way that maths   
> >> could help
> >> predict this kind of success. Many of the members
> aren't  able to  
> >> get out
> >> much; some are enormously busy working lives. We
> are  a mad mix of  
> >> people
> >> who just happen to get on and value each other's 
> presence. Just  
> >> like any
> >> friendship group really, except that we are  on
> three continents.
> >>
> >> Another quite different international community
> that I have been  
> >> in  for
> >> about 8 years is extremely successful in another
> way. It has a   
> >> much more
> >> mixed, lively and mobile membership; presently
> just under  200  
> >> with a core
> >> of about 50 regular posters. It also has a
> website  with  
> >> photographs of
> >> members and their projects (it is craft-based), 
> lists of members'
> >> webpages and blogs etc, which is maintained 
> regularly. Again, the  
> >> list is
> >> very important to the people who  subscribe to
> it.
> >>
> >> Neither of these groups is based at Yahoo, but a
> scan of the  
> >> email  groups
> >> that are based at there will show how many never
> get off the   
> >> ground, but
> >> there are a few that do and remain hugely
> successfully,  with many  
> >> regular
> >> postings, pretty much indefinitely. I wonder if 
> they have  
> >> anything in
> >> common?
> >>
> >> M-H
> >>
> >> On 22/12/2006, at 11:22 AM, Hugemusic wrote:
> >>
> >>> Sorry, guys but I just don't agree.
> >>>
> >>> Sure, there's no hard and fast number that will
> indicate a  
> >>> critical  mass
> >>> for
> >>> all, but there has to be some statistical
> indicator of probable
> >>> sustainability - we're just not exploring the
> relationships deeply
> >>> enough
> >>> yet.
> >>
> >
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“In so far as literature turns back on itself and examines parodies or treats ironically its own signifying procedures, it becomes the most complex account of signification we possess.” – John Deely

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