Posts Tagged Jason Heppler

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Jun14

Professional Jobs and Graduate Degrees

by tdaxp on June 14, 2013 at 5:41 am
Posted In: Academia

In earlier posts, I dissed the humanities ghetto and wrote this in particular about International Relations:

The obvious answer is that International Relations does not teach actually useful methods for the disciplined extraction of data. It does not teach critical thinking or logical reasoning. It teaches something that apes these skills, a rhetorical ability that impresses old scholars and does not help society.

International Relations is a non-progressive field where, by and large, it sucks to be young.

Because professors are driven by power, influence, and money, they harvest the few good job openings for those without useful skills into patronage networks, and push others aside.

Stephen J. Mexal, who Jason Heppler pointed me towards, apparently agrees:

SO SHOULD YOU GO to graduate school in the humanities? Yeah, sure, if you really want to. Why not? Just don’t expect it to have a predictable professional outcome. You cannot go to graduate school in the humanities and be placed into a job as a professor, a financial analyst, or as anything else. But graduate school in the humanities has always been this way.

So if you decide to go to grad school, remember that it’s not a place to escape the larger marketplace. You may think you are uninterested in capitalism, but capitalism is interested in you. The years that most students spend in graduate school are also prime years for building a career, and the opportunity costs of graduate school—the resources that could be spent pursuing other things—are steep, and must be taken into consideration.

Graduate school is a lot of fun. I have a PhD. I have many friends with advanced degrees in numerous fields.

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But protect yourself. Get useful skills that you enjoy using. And get paid for using them.

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Jan19

The Progress of the Humanities

by tdaxp on January 19, 2013 at 2:06 am and modified on February 24, 2013. at 11:29 am
Posted In: Political Theory, Science

Over on Facebook, my friend Adam Elkus linked me to an article by David Lake, titled “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations. [pdf]” The piece is extremely strong, and describes International Relations split into two camps: one engaged in normal science capable of progress, and the other a tiresome collection of “Great Debates” that are never answered.

There’s a lot to love in Lake’s paper — it really is very high quality — but the most evocative image from it is the threat that International Relations will split into two fields that do not even study the same phenomenon. What if the scientists focus on experiments (and quasi-experiments) that can be conducted in the here and now, while the Great Debaters retreat into history and just-so stories?

To me, the best hope to save International Relations from such a fate lies in the “digital humanities.” The digital humanities are not just a method for those interested in the past to escape the “humanities ghetto of low employment and low wages
– rather, the “Digital Humanities” use Big Data techniques to understand our common past, in the same way that companies like Facebook use many of the same techniques to understand many private pasts. (Some more information on the digital humanities is available on the personal site of Jason Heppler of Stanford University.)

As an example, take Lake’s discussion of Zara Steiner‘s Triumph of the Dark, a narrative history of the outbreak of the Second World War. Lake notes the rigor of the book, but sadly states such a work can generate no hypotheses or tests. But a digital humanities approach — say working from the massive newspaper, magazine, book, and census corpora at our disposal, is not so limited. It is easy to imagine hypotheses that explain the reason for the motives of leaders with that amount of data to work with. Perhaps the degree to which “Hitler wanted war” can be tracked by measuring the day-to-day bellicosity of the written works of those he met with? Or might the locations that we knew Neville Chamberlain spent certain parts of his life be linked to pro-peace inflections in the lives of others?

International Relations is the science dedicated to predicting, controlling, and improving the behavior of States. This should be done through hypotheses testing, modeling building, and including the methods of the digital humanities. There are many ways to advance science.

In the chaos of old boy networks – in stagnant fields with no progress – it sucks to be young. But in all those areas where science and technology march hand-in-hand toward progress, it is a joy to be young!

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Jan08

Escaping the Humanities Ghetto: Definitions and Paradigms

by tdaxp on January 8, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Posted In: History, Science

In both Political Science and the Humanities, the old boys network which prevented progress is collapsing, though it is hard for those who have lived in a field without progress to describe this.

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Earlier I criticized, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer for saying that International Relations work capable of progress is “non-paradigmatic”

Indeed, some senior IR scholars now rail against the field’s grand theories. In his 2010 ISA presidential address, for example, David Lake described the “isms” as “sects” and “pathologies” that divert attention away from “studying things that matter” (Lake 2011: 471). Thus, it is not surprising that “the percentage of non- paradigmatic research has steadily increased from 30% in 1980 to 50% in 2006” (Maliniak et al 2011: 439). Of course, one could advocate for middle range theories while disparaging grand theories, and indeed Lake does just that. The field is not moving in that direction, however. Nor is it paying more attention to formal or mathematically oriented theories (Bennett et al 2003: 373-74). Instead, it is paying less attention to theories of all kinds and moving toward simplistic hypothesis testing.

But if I am fair, I need to also mention that my friend Jason Heppler of Stanford University made a similar claim, about the Digital Humanities:

Those doing digital humanities tend to agonize over how we define the field (or is it a methodology?). Matt Gold’s edited volume Debates in Digital Humanities nicely sums up many of the ways people have tried to define digital humanities and what we mean when we say we do digital humanities. Certainly there are some common characteristics within the broad range of approaches, but the work itself is broad: it’s interpretation, coding, building, archives, theorizing.

Why define digital humanities? The enterprise is somewhat pointless. The promise and excitement of digital humanities lies with what we can do with it, not how it’s defined. But the queston is inescapable.

I don’t believe that the new International Relations work is apardigmatic, or that Digital Humanities is undefined. Rather, like other useful areas, these fields are defined by their tools and methods, not by ancient theoretical battles that can never be won. Chemistry is not the science of phlogiston, it is the science of titration and fission. Likewise, International Relations and Digital Humanities are increasingly defined by the tools they use to make progress, not connections in an old boys network.

This is a good change. Yesterday I mentioned the ghetto of the humanities, those fields whose graduates (a) can’t do math, (b) can’t conduct useful research, (c) can’t stay employed, and (d) can’t get paid.

wages_employment_majors_humanities_ghetto_md

The adoption of useful tools and progressive science is the best way to turn this around. The emerging paradigms of International Relation are embedded within statistics and modeling. The emerging definitions of Digital Humanities are embedded within text mining, semantic networks, and big data. What do these have in common? Useful tools designed to provide answers and enable progress.

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