Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

Exit, Voice, and Presidential Elections, Part II

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Back in February, I wrote: If elections don’t go the way we like, it shouldn’t be cause to flee, but rather a call to action: our voices would be needed more than ever.

I feel its important to repeat this as comments about leaving the country become more common. Indeed, the Canadian immigration website crashed as election results came in Tuesday night.

Albert O. Hirschman argues that in any interaction, an individual has there options: exit, voice, or loyalty.

Given the rhetoric which came out of the Trump campaign, there are many with good reason to fear for their safety and who may view exit as the only reasonable option. But for a lot of people – for me, for example – I am relatively privileged enough that in practical terms a Trump presidency will mean little more than a few years of disgust coupled with good Alec Baldwin bits.

For me, I think, exit is not a reasonable option – I have a civic duty to stay and fight, to exercise voice in shaping the future of American.

Of course, how one should exercise voice is a different conversation all together.

Should we try for unity or resist from the beginning? Should we wait until there are specific egregious actions we need to oppose, or should we fight now, chanting ‘not my president’ and urging the electoral college to vote differently?

Personally, the later approaches make me uncomfortable – I was distraught by anti-Obama protests which questioned the legitimacy of his presidency and it feels hypocritical to express similar sentiments for someone else. But I’m glad to see these questions being asked and to hear these conversations taking place within the progressive community as we all try to make sense of the world we have found ourselves in.

I have also been thinking a lot about how to be a better ally in the years ahead.  I write a lot about building bridges across our differences and listening to – and trying to understand – people with different perspective from us.

I do think that work is critically important, but it can’t be overlooked that there are fundamental inequities in those opportunities: it’s hard to have a conversation across difference when the person you’re talking to espouses hate for everything you are.

I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they feel like they woke up yesterday as strangers in their own country. It’s a feeling that many of us remember from the election of 2000. And it’s a feeling I heard echoed by conservatives in 2008.

But it’s also a feeling I heard from many people of color when Mike Brown was murdered, or when the Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray were acquitted, or following any of the many, many incident which seemed to say clearly: your life doesn’t matter and this country is not built for you.

And that’s just an insane reality to live in. The idea that at any given time large portions of the country feel disempowered, discounted, and disenfranchised; that some large group of people will always feel like strangers in their own land.

Months ago, a Trump supporter told me that she was miserable under Obama and that it was the Republican party’s “turn.” I may want to find that a questionable sentiment, but I also can’t deny I felt something similar after the George W. Bush presidency. Republicans had a go, and now it was our turn.

In the moment, these emotions and perspectives are reasonable and valid…but this is no way to run a country. There are no “turns.” We can’t just continue to tug-o-war the country, growing more and more polarized as we go.

We need to find ways to work together.

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The Road From Here

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I think and write a lot about the public work we all must engage in to collaboratively co-create the world around us. I often like to end those posts with a simple maxim: there is so much work to be done.

Never has that call felt more urgent.

Politics isn’t just about elections; it’s about living every day in a pluralistic society full of people with different values, needs, and experiences and it’s about engaging every day in the hard work of equitably creating that society together.

John Dewey argued that democracy is a way of life, that it’s a way of living in the world.

The work goes on.

I cannot pretend that I am not personally devastated by the results of last night’s election; that my heart does not break for all those who wake up with very real reasons to fear for the safety and security of their future. I am sad and scared and confused.

But more than ever I feel the gaping divide between Americans. I feel the growing partisan rift across which we fundamentally can’t seem to communicate.

On Monday, when the polls pointed to a Clinton victory, I wrote that regardless of who won the divisiveness of this election indicated that we all needed to learn to show a little more love; that we needed to find ways to listen.

I stand by that sentiment and I hope people across the political spectrum will join me in expressing it.

For many of us today, the world seems dark. This reality seems untenable. But I still firmly believe that love trumps hate; that the arc of the moral universe – while long – bends towards justice.

All across this great country we disagree deeply on many things. But together we stand by those most fundamental of American values: that all people are created equal and endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Regardless of political party, regardless of who you voted for, we must find room in our hearts for each other. We must find ways of living together and working together to build a just world we all want to live in.

This is not a small task and it is not an easy task, but this is the noble, hard, everyday work of democracy.

And there is so much work to be done.

 

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The Day After Tomorrow

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People keep asking me how I feel about tomorrow’s election.

I’m not quite sure how to answer that question.

I feel relieved that the endless cycle of repeating political ads will be finally be broken. I feel excited at the prospect that a woman may be elected president for the first time; 240 years after this country’s founding.

But mostly, I feel an impending sense of doom.

Not so much about the election itself, but about the day after the election – about how we move on after this nasty, divisive campaign season in an increasingly polarized country.

I don’t mean to glorify the past, here – politics has always been messy, scandalous, and far less ideal than we might hope or pretend. But with my limited life time of experience, it seems like things have gotten particularly bad.

In All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, political journalist Matt Bai tracks the fall of Gary Hart. The dashing young Democrat who in was on the road to becoming his party’s Presidential nominee until a sex scandal took him down in 1987.

Today, that story seems unremarkable – what politician hasn’t been taken down by a sex scandal? But Hart’s story is remarkable because it was the first. As Bai argues, the Gary Hart affair marked a turning point in American political journalism, a moment when public life ceased to allow a private life.

And perhaps this is being over dramatic, but it feels like we are hitting another tide right now. A point where we’re all accustomed to being entrenched in our own point of view, where the line between fact and opinion has become irreparably blurred.

In the field of Civic Studies we don’t just complain about the many failings of civic society, but rather we ask “what should we do?”

As I ponder the future on this election-eve, my best answer to that question is to first get out and vote, but to then get out and talk – to your friends, to neighbors, and to strangers. Or perhaps, I should say: next, get out and listen.

No matter who wins this election, the hardest work – the work of reuniting folks across this great land and the work of finding space in our hearts to respect everyone in it – that work will fall to us.

Tomorrow, we perform a small civic duty and vote. The day after that the real work begins.

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Humanistic Data Visualization

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Yesterday, I participated in “Visualizing Text as Data,” the inaugural discussion series from Northeastern’s NULab for Text, Maps, and Networks. We discussed Data Visualization in Sociology, by Kieran Healy and James Moody and Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, by Johanna Drucker, though most of the conversation focused on the piece by Drucker.

Drucker writes:

…Graphical tools are a kind of intellectual Trojan horse, a vehicle through which assumptions about what constitutes information swarm with potent force. These assumptions are cloaked in a rhetoric taken wholesale from the techniques of the empirical sciences that conceals their epistemological biases under a guise of familiarity. So naturalized are the Google maps and bar charts of generated from spread sheets that they pass as unquestioned representations of “what it.”

Data visualizations – just like statical techniques – are an interpretation of the data, not a realization of the data. In the statistical world, there are known problematic techniques such as p-hacking where you find something significant only because you tried so many thing something (randomly) had to be significant. This is part of the art of data analysis – data fundamentally needs to be interpreted, but we should always be clear on what we’re interpreting, what assumptions we’re making in that interpretation, and what biases go into that interpretation.

Using a humanist lens, Drucker seems to apply a similar argument to visualizations. We are too accustomed to taking a visual representation of data as a ground Truth of what that data can tell us and to unaccustomed to thinking of visualization as a interpretation.

That’s not to say that visualization has no purpose, or that the fact that visualizations are interpretation is irreparably problematic.

There’s a great classic example of from Francis Anscombe – Anscombe’s quartet, as it’s appropriately called. Four data sets which appear comparable from their basic statistical properties, but which are obviously different when visualized.

But I don’t think that Drucker wants to throw visualization out all together. I read her article as a provocation – a reminder that visualizations, too, are interpretations of data.

Arguably, this reminder is even more important when were talking about visualizations rather than narrative or statistical descriptions. Those later modes almost inherently force a user to engage – to think about what they’re reading and what it means. Though there’s still plenty of misleading interpretation in the statistical world.

The real concern – and the one Drucker highlights so poignantly – is that we accept visualizations without question – we don’t spend enough time thinking about what boundaries a visualization should push.

In many ways this makes sense – we expect a visualization to be quickly and easily interpretable.  But we are at risk of letting our biases run wild if we don’t question this. It may be easy for someone to interpret gender in a visualization if colors indicate pink for women and blue for men.

But please, please, don’t use this color scheme to encode gender. It may be interpretable, but it carries with it too much baggage of social norms. Far better to shake things up a bit.

Drucker pushes this argument to the extreme. Changing the gender color scheme is a relatively minor act of subversion, what happens if you take this questioning further? Make the user really work to understand the data?

This argument reminds me of the work of Elizabeth Peabody – who created intricate mural charts which could only be understood with a significant amount of time and energy. These visualizations were not “user friendly,” but at a time when women had few rights, they pushed the boundary of who gets to create knowledge.

This also reminds me of the arguments of Bent Flyvjerg, who argues that social science should stop trying so hard to be computational and should instead focus on phronesis – emphasizing a humanities, rather than computational, approach.

I’m not sure the two approaches are as mutually exclusive as Flyvbjerg fears, but his argument, like Drucker’s, raises a crucial point: it is not enough to ask “what is,” it is not enough to take computation as ground truth and – in terms of visualization – to take what is easy as what is good.

Regardless of field, we should be hesitant to put humanistic concerns aside, to think that facts can stand isolated from values. Values matter. Our assumptions and interpretations matter, and it may not always be most appropriate to try to bury our biases and try to pretend that they don’t exist.

Rather, we should bring them to the fore and examine them critically. Instead of asking “do I have any biases?” perhaps we’d do better ask ourselves, “do I have Good biases?”

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Facts, Bias, and Horse-Race Journalism

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I’ve been thinking a lot this election season about an argument from Peter Levine’s We Are the One’s We’ve Been Waiting For.

What if, instead of horse-race journalism where pundits try to predict who will win, our media environment was governed by “public journalism” or “civic journalism” – with reporters asking who should win?

This question seems to fly in the face of common understandings of “good” journalism. Good journalism should be neutral, non-biased, and fact based. By tackling an inherently biased question such as “who should win,” a journalist cannot possibly meet appropriate ethical standards.

Yet, that’s not an entirely accurate take on the situation.

I love quoting Bent Flyvbjerg’s modified proverb: “power is knowledge” – that is, as Flyvbjerg argues, those with power define what counts as knowledge and fundamentally shape reality with their power.

In Rationality and Power, Flyvbjerg meticulously documents how power shapes knowledge throughout the planning process for a new transit hub in Aalborg. The initial list of proposed sites indicates one as most promising, numerous studies confirm the promise of that site and the problems with other sites. Yet – that “promising” site was, in fact, pre-selected by elites and all the research in which that option naturally rises to the top as the best choice is carefully, artfully curated to ensure that decision.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa similarly argues that power shapes reality – as people in power get to choose not only what issues are addressed, but also what issues are raised.

Both Flyvbjerg and Gaventa warn about the invisibility of this power – in the most insidious, entrenched power structures, this subtle shaping of what does and does not count as knowledge goes largely unnoticed. It’s just taken as a giving that the issues talked about, and the framing given to them, are the factual, non-biased ways to address them.

And this is what is so dangerous about horse-race politics. It’s presented as neutral, but in fact, it’s not neutral at all. Every decision about what does or does not become part of the conversation shapes the electoral atmosphere. There is no neutral coverage.

Levine provides an example of an alternative approach: in the early 1900s, the Charlotte Observer dispensed with “horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draft questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.”

In this way, political coverage responds to the interests and priorities of “the people” writ large, without devolving into a mess where no knowledge is taken fact leaving only “mere opinion.”

They may be other, and possibility better, approaches as well.

All I know is that now – one week away from the end of the 2016 Presidential Election – after all the coverage, all the ads, all the sound and fury that has gone on for months…I find myself wishing we’d spent just a little more time not asking who will win, but really examining: who should win?

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Checking-in at Standing Rock

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For weeks I’ve seen little news snippets about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter pipeline that would connect North Dakota to Illinois. While the project’s official website touts that construction will create jobs and “enable domestically produced light sweet crude oil from North Dakota to reach major refining markets in a more direct, cost-effective, safer and environmentally responsible manner,” DAPL comes with a lot of problems, too.

The underground pipeline – which “quietly received full regulatory permission” from Congress back in August – would pass through the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The tribe, along with environmental groups, have been protesting the pipeline since April. Their concerns are numerous and serious.

As the Atlantic reports, DAPL could threaten the tribe’s sole water source and “the pipeline will pass through and likely destroy Native burial sites and sacred places.” And if those concerns weren’t significant enough, the tribe didn’t have a voice in the process leading up to the pipeline’s approval.

Furthermore, federal and state attempts to break the protest have been reminiscent – at least to me – of the bad old days of of union busting. Reports of police with military equipment raiding camps and wounding civilian protestors have become common. Whether you agree with the protestors or not – military force is probably not the best way to resolve things.

And this brings me to what motivated me to write this post today.

As a busy grad student only vaguely aware of the world around me, I’d heard about DAPL but in all honesty, hadn’t really paid that much attention to it. I’d seen a few stories here and there – mostly complains about how the mainstream media wasn’t covering this story sufficiently.

Then yesterday, I saw an explosion of interest. Suddenly everyone was checking in to Standing Rock in solidarity with the DAPL protestors. The reasoning for this struck me as a little Mark-Zuckerberg-wants-to-steal-your-data-ish:

The Morton County Sherriff’s Department has been using Facebook check-ins to find out who is at Standing Rock in order to target them in attempts to disrupt the prayer camps. So, Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them. This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes.

Hence all the check-ins.

Now, here’s the interesting thing: Snopes, the source of all knowledge when it comes to these things, reached out both to the Morton County Sherriff’s Department and to the protestors, ultimately listing the meme as “unproven.”

For it’s part, the Sherriff’s department strongly denied using Facebook check-ins as a tool for anything.

Meanwhile, protestors at Sacred Stone Camp said they did not originate the message, but that “there is no doubt that law enforcement comb social media for incriminating material and monitor communications.”

Finally, they added, “we support the tactic, and think it is a great way to express solidarity.”

It seems unlikely that the fake check-ins would actually serve the stated purpose – as Snopes points out, check-ins are voluntary and “if police were using geolocation tools based on mobile devices, remote check-ins would not confuse or overwhelm them” – but the message of solidarity has been loud.

I heard more about DAPL yesterday and from more people then I have the entire time the protest has been going on. The Facebook mention even got a quick mention on the morning news.

Whether or not the Sheriff’s department is using check-ins for targeting, they have been targeting protestors, a reality the possibly erroneous Facebook meme has brought to the fore.

We all know those fake messages about Facebook removing their privacy settings just won’t go away and however this Standing Rock check-in meme originated – it strikes me as a brilliant organizing move perfect suited for today’s digital environment.

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A Lesson from the West Area Computers

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I really want to read Hidden Figures, the new book by Margot Lee Shetterly which chronicles “the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race.” If you aren’t as excited about this book as I am, it highlights the work and experiences of the West Area Computers – a group of black, female mathematicians who worked at NASA Langley from 1943 through 1958.

I haven’t gotten a chance to yet, but I was particularly struck by one incident I heard on the podcast Science Friday and which I found recounted in the Smithsonian Magazine:

But life at Langley wasn’t just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. “That was incredible courage,” says Shetterly. “This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes.”

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

I love this story.

Not because it has a hopeful message about how determination always wins – but because it serves as a reminder of the effort and risk people of color face every day just in interacting with their environment.

The West Computers were tremendously good at their jobs and were respected by their white, male, colleagues. I imagine many of these colleagues considered themselves open-minded, even radical for the day, for valuing the talent of their black colleagues.

When I hear the story about how Mann removed the “Colored Computers” sign every day, I don’t just hear a story of the valiant strength of one woman.

I hear a story of white silence.

I hear a story about how other people didn’t complain about the sign. I imagine they barely even noticed the sign. It didn’t effect them and never weighed upon their world.

John Glenn reportedly refused to fly unless West Area Computer Katherine Johnson verified the calculations first – such respect he had for her work.

And yet it never crossed anyone’s mind that a “Colored Computers” sign might not be appropriate.

That’s just the way the world was then.

And that makes me wonder – what don’t I see?

To me, this story is a reminder that people of color experience the world differently than I do – because people like me constructed the world I experience. There must be so many things every day that just slip passed my notice, no matter how open minded or progressive I’d like to be.

It’s easy too look back at the 1940’s and see that a “Colored” sign is racist. What’s hard is to look at the world today and to see that sign’s modern day equivalent.

 

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Election Modeling

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I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on a class assignment in which we are asked to model the U.S. presidential election. The model is by necessity fairly rudimentary – I’m afraid I won’t be giving Nate Silver a run for his money any time soon – but it’s nonetheless been very interesting to think through the various steps and factors which influence how election results play out.

The basic approach is borrowed from the compartmental models of epidemiology. Essentially, you treat all people as statically equivalent and allow for transitions between discrete compartments of behavior.

Consider a simple model with the flu: you start with a large pool of susceptible people and a few infectious people. With some probability, a susceptible person will come in contact with an infectious person and become infected. At some average rate, and infectious person will recover. Thus, you can separate people into compartments, Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered, and with average transition rates can estimate the number of people in each compartment at each time step.

Of course, sophisticated epidemic models can be much more complicated then this, and trying to interpret the complexity of an electoral system through such a simple model has proven to be challenging.

First there’s the question of how to transfer this metaphor to electoral politics – what does it mean to be ‘susceptible’, ‘infectious’, or ‘recovered’ in this context?

But perhaps the piece I have found most interesting is trying to understand the system’s “initial conditions.” I am not an epidemiologist, but a simplified model of disease spreading where some people start susceptible and a few people start infected makes intuitive sense to me. We even worked out mathematically how moving people from “susceptible” to “recovered” via vaccination helps prevent a serious outbreak of a disease. (PSA: get your flu shot.)

But I’ve had a much harder time wrapping my head around what initial compartment a voter might belong in.

There’s an idealized version of politics in which all eligible voters start with a completely open mind – a clean slate ready to be filled with thoughtful judgements and reflections on the merits of each candidate’s policies.

But that’s not really how electoral politics works.

I, for example, have always been a staunch partisan, and while it perhaps would be better if I entered an election season as a clean slate – I always enter with a whole host of biases and preconceptions. The debates and TV ads were never going to change my mind.

So what has been most striking in the process is how little movement actually takes place – especially considering just how long this election has gone on.

When you take the partisan leaning of Independents into account, Pew estimates the current population of registered voters as 44% Republican/lean Republican, 48% Democrat/lean Democrat, and 8% no leaning/other party.

FiveThiryEight‘s weighted average of national polls shows some fluctuations over the last six months, but currently puts Clinton at 45.8%, Trump at 39.4%, and Johnson at 5.8%. That’s not a direct correlation to the raw partisan leaning, but it’s close enough to show that – in the epistemological framework – relatively few transitions are happening.

In fact, the earliest FiveThiryEight numbers, from June 8 of this year put Clinton at 42%, Trump at 38%, and Johnson just shy of 8%. So I guess this makes me wonder:

…Couldn’t we have held this election back in June and saved ourselves the trouble?

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Epistemic Networks and Idea Exchange

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Earlier this week, I gave a brief lightning talk as part of the fall welcome event for Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group and NULab for Texts, Maps, and Data. In my talk, I gave a high-level introduction to the motivation and concept behind a research project I’m in the early stages of formulating with my advisor Nick Beauchamp and my Tufts colleague Peter Levine.

I didn’t write out my remarks and my slides don’t contain much text, but I thought it would be helpful to try to recreate those remarks here:

I am interested broadly in the topic of political dialogue and deliberation. When I use the term “political” here, I’m not referring exclusively to debate between elected officials. Indeed, I am much more interested politics as associated living; I am interested in the conversations between every-day people just trying to figure out how we live in this world together. These conversations may be structured or unstructured.

With this group of participants in mind, the next question is to explore how ideas spread. There is a great model borrowed from epistemology that looks at spreading on networks. Considering social networks, for example, you can imagine tracking the spread of a meme across Facebook as people share it with their friends, who then share it with friend of friends, and so on.

This model is not ideal in the context of dialogue. Take the interaction between two people, for example. If my friend shares a meme, there’s some probability that I will see it in my feed and there is some probability that I won’t see it in my feed. But those are basically the only two options: either I see it or I don’t see it.

With dialogue, I may understand you, I may not understanding you, I may think I understand you…etc. Furthermore, dialogue is a back and forth process. And while a meme is either shared or not shared, in the back and forth of dialogue, there is no certainty that an idea is actually exchanged to that a comment had a predictable effect.

This raises the challenging question of how to model dialogue as a process at the local level. This initial work considers an individual’s epistemic network – a network of ideas and beliefs which models an given individual’s reasoning process. The act of dialogue then, is no longer an exchange between two (or more) individuals, it is an exchange between two (or more) epistemic networks.

There are, of course, a lot of methodological challenges and questions to this approach. Most fundamentally, how do you model a person’s epistemic network? There are multiple, divergent way to do this from which you can imagine getting very different – but equally valid results.

The first method – which has been piloted several times by Peter Levine – is a guided reflection process in which individuals respond to a series of prompts in order to self-identify the nodes and links of their epistemic network. The second method involves the automatic extraction of a semantic network from a written reflection or discussion transcript.

I am interested in exploring both of these methods – ideally with the same people, in order to compare both construction models. Additionally, once epistemic networks are constructed, through either approach, you can evaluate and compare their change over time.

There are a number of other research questions I am interested in exploring, such as what network topology is conducive to “good” dialogue and what interactions and conditions lead to opinion change.

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