[Air-l] Technical competence

[Eszter Hargittai]

Elizabeth, great question.  I have thought about this often, especially
when people post UNIX-based solutions to questions on this list. Someone
mentioned that it may depend on your research questions and types of
methodological approaches to your questions, I think this is likely
correct in most cases.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that social scientists will have
all sorts of technical skills nor must they depending on their research. 
For a group (ours here) that is supposedly in tune with inequalities and
differences in access and use of IT, it's often interesting to observe how
some people ignore the fact that differences in abilities are likely
present among our members as well.

And let's not simply blame the students (or profs).  These issues are
often structural. After all, most graduate programs are not equipped to
train people well in both the social sciences and computer science. I'll
take this opportunity to make a pitch for our interdisciplinary PhD
program in the School of Communication at Northwestern. In our PhD program
on Media, Technology and Society (especially the Technology and Social
Behavior track) we offer training in both.  In traditional social science
PhD programs a student will usually not get course credit for taking a
course in a CS dept nor will s/he know where to go (e.g. with which course
to start) to get some such training. We approach this differently.

A few years ago when I was running the computer orientation session for
the  incoming cohort in a Sociology dept almost none of the students had
ever logged on to UNIX.  So while it may seem like a joke to run a
computer orientation program these days, it's not depending on what you
cover and what may be helpful for students. I suspect this lack of
experience with UNIX is quite representative of other cohorts in social
science programs nowadays. So to tell such people to go use wget or perl
is not going to be very helpful.   Numerous universities don't even
support UNIX access to general users anymore and you have to jump through
hoops to get such an account.  But how to get such an account when you
don't even really know what it is?  So I think it would be helpful if
people were sensitive to these differences when suggesting solutions to
questions. I think it's great that people suggest all sorts of approaches,
but this "Mine is better than yours" approach based on operating systems
doesn't necessarily seem productive or helpful to the person posing the
query yet hopefully the goal (or at least one goal) of responding to
questions on the list is to help out the person asking the question.

And by the way, there is no reason to have to switch away from Windows
even if you do use UNIX to some extent.  If you do have a UNIX account,
you can easily access it using a program such as SSH Secure Shell.

Eszter

PS. In case you're curious, I'm a former Mac user, currently on Windows,
still using Pine for some email (a comment that will be meaningful to
other Pine users and pretty meaningless to others, I realize), and running
some programs in UNIX including some scripts I wrote - with help from
others - in perl.