Month: January 2022

Writing tips

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

Social science writing is a set of conventions or styles. These conventions can be used to create distance on the subject, the impression of an objective standpoint, or to get close in and give the reader a sense of what it is really like to be there. You can learn these conventions and use them where suitable in order to strengthen your writing. 

  1. Learn to use paragraphs. A good technique is to look at each paragraph as a whole and divide it into topic – body – tokens – wrap, as described by Patrick Dunleavy in the LSE’s Writing for Research blog https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/writingforresearch/2017/07/17/how-to-write-paragraphs-in-research-texts-articles-books-and-phds. This helps you allocate sentences to the right bits and shorten them, so you wouldn’t have a sentence doing all 4 functions.
  2. Look at two papers/books that describe the same problem in two completely different ways. There’s no single way of writing facts. It appears as if there is because the sources we use (e.g. newspapers, blogs) basically copy each other. Most news reports just write up an Associated Press wire so they all look the same. Not because they’ve all independently arrived at the same framing of the situation. Likewise, the reason a lot of academics write about the same topic in the same way is that we confer and also are a little bit conformist. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but there are times when the first book or article in a field gets to set how it is framed for decades without anyone questioning it.
  3. Read a public document (e.g. from an NGO, government, university strategy etc) and count up the clichés (‘as this report makes abundantly clear’ and such). Note at what points the document ceases to use cliché. Why is that? Is it because those are the parts that matter? Compare the way that document is produced to how we produce research writing.
  4. There are more original things to be said than there are original questions to ask. The four basic questions of science and social science are: what is this? Why is it like that? What effect does it have on others? Can it be different? Say who/what is doing what to whom, and why. What’s real, and what’s not? What matters, and what just appears to?
  5. Don’t homogenise differing points of view
  6. Use the active voice. It’s often said that academic writing uses the passive voice too much but that’s not the problem, the problem is the lack of any subject. Stuff just happens, apparently.
  7. Don’t say what you’re going to say, but do say why you are saying it. This goes against Becker’s advice to map your writing and goes to show there’s no one way of advising people about writing either. If in doubt choose Becker.
  8. Edit other people’s work and let them edit yours. Don’t just ignore comments. One of the biggest frustrations I have is when I give comments on someone’s work and the next version I see there is no evidence of me having said anything about it. If you have addressed it say how. If you haven’t addressed it, say why. Feedback is a dialogue.
  9. Don’t write deferentially e.g. saying ‘I think’ (I do this far too much). It’s the most useless phrase in the language. Of course you thought it when you wrote it. It’s one of a class of phrases that are purely there to cover us if someone takes issue with what we said or wrote. It implies that others are more important in the conversation than you. Do write with due deference to others who have gone before though.
  10. Progress is when writing is more effective, not longer.
  11. Imagine yourself in the world you are writing about. Tell us about it. What’s life like as a drug mule? A border guard? 
  12. Move from the abstract to the concrete and back. For example, ‘flow’ is an abstract metaphor for what is really happening on the ground with global trafficking. To get a handle on it you can look at an actual fentanyl supply chain works. Then look back to the abstract metaphor – does it still work?
  13. Try both complex writing tools (Scrivener, WordPress) and simple ones (emacs, TextEdit). Don’t be satisfied with the tools you are given. You will build your own toolbox for your purpose. You can do amazing things with Excel.

All the world is not a stage and life is not a performance

Angus Bancroft/ / Research

Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash
Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash

Okay, someone writing a crime script analysis should probably not be saying this but here we go.

One of the lightulb moments in teaching sociology is when you introduce Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It tells on us. In a compelling way it shows what we are like when we act in front of an imagined audience. It shows the pose of normality and agreeableness demanded by modern social life. It is immediately tangible because it feels like everyone does it – poses while waiting to meet someone in public, gives off ‘I’m not suspicous’ signals when talking out of a shop past the eletronic detector. It’s why everyone around the Queen tries to sound posher than her.

The language of drama, scripting and front/backstage is very compelling. It is a bit harder to sustain as an exciting revelation when this is not a revelation at all but an explicit feature of the technology of life. I picture a billion Insta users saying ‘well, duh! Filters!’. As with all good sociological ideas it has been generalised to within an inch of its life. There is a tendency to code everything as performance – data, sex, nations, emotions, it is all a performance. There is a constant presence of explicit impression management tools in our social media and validation of impression management in British culture. Be yourself! but the better self, with the nicer complexion y’know. That beguiles us into thinking that these practices are typical and fundamental to social life.

What do contemporary writers mean by performance? They make several implied claims that are not the same and do not in face validate each other. These are:

  1. People act into their socially defined role, beyond what is necessary to fulfil its functions.
  2. A lot of work is put into a kind of ‘demonstration of the self as suitable to this function’
  3. There is a fundamental dramaturgical structure to social life, for example, gender is only ever a performance with no ground floor in biological sex. Yes I know Judith Butler says gender is a performative in the speech-act sense but we all know they do not really mean that.
  4. Meaning that the world is a text.

Here is an example of one way performance appears a lot of the time. I have taken this from Holt and Lee’s (2021) crime script analysis of purveyors of forged documents. They do not make claims about performance, this is just a good bit of data for me. In it a vendor of counterfeit documents says: ‘After we receive your message, our support team will get in touch with you directly with all the necessary follow up and complimentary details for the transaction.’ I noticed a lot of text used in online crime transactions of this type are used to give the impression of a honed, complex professional operation at work. It is an open question how incidental these elements are to the crime script.

Whether in the case quoted by Holt and Lee that is true we do not know. Criminal operations adopt the customer care language of the service economy. In part this is grease on the wheels, which is intended to make the transaction more trustworthy in the eyes of the buyer. In part, it becomes a part of the culture: you just talk in that way because that is how it is done. As a previous generation of criminals would be adapt in the language of intimidation so the new generation of service criminals are adept at the global language of human resource management. But at its heart they still need to know how to inveigle, deceive, manipulate and sometimes bring violence to bear on a target. The right performance might help them do that, and it might have evolved as the way of doing things in that context. But it does not make sense to say that the essence of what we are looking at is a performance.

Holt, Thomas J., and Jin R. Lee. 2020. ‘A Crime Script Analysis of Counterfeit Identity Document Procurement Online’. Deviant Behavior 1–18. doi: 10.1080/01639625.2020.1825915.



The fundamental laws of crime and why I’m not a critical sociologist

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, Teaching
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

This post was inspired by reading David Buil-Gil and Patricia Saldaña-Taboada’s article cited below. It helped crystalise my thinking about what colour of sociologist I am.

One of the fundamental insights of critical sociology or criminology is that what we are studying is a social construct. I used to be very enamoured of this as it provides a graspable critical handle on the issue. For example, we might say what matters is what we define as a crime, and how doing so affects people’s life course, how they are labelled and so on. These decisions do matter. Along with that I have come to believe that there are underlying rules which are independent of these constructions. We should not be so enamoured of our constructionist analysis that we stop trying to find or paying attention to these laws. We are often cagey about recognising them given how sensitive crime statistics are to recording and just how awful we have been as a society at recording some crimes, such as sexual violence.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to decide whether you are a critical scholar – everything comes down to its construction – or a social facts kind of scholar – there are basic laws of human society. No, you cannot be both. If there are fundamental rules then all the stuff studied by critical scholars matters but is subordinate to the social facts, or socio-biological facts. That also means accepting that there are some essential qualities to social categories like ‘crime’, however wobbly and contingent any one definition of crime might be.

I am more and more convinced that sociological phenomena like crime obey some basic statistical laws which govern everything else that happens. I suspect that these processes are fundamental to the human condition. They are a basic function of how humans work, and are grounded in the mix of biology, psychology and material essences which make up the human. They shape what we encounter, and our constructions shape how we encounter it. Here we go:

1. Law of concentration. Most crime is committed by a small number of offenders.

2. Proximity rules. Crime takes place when/where it is convenient, and generally harms people who have something in common with the offender.

3. Pesistence of harm. People who are victimised once will often be victimised multiple times (See rule 1).

4. Social specialisation over time. Criminals select for criminal contacts, and their skill/division of labour increases, leading to high lock in over the criminal career.

These laws are demonstrably persistent between jurisdictions, crime types and other variations in the environment. Some of them could be explained by for example the theory of labelling and deviance amplification. The very fact of the social construction of criminal offences works against that. Offences that are ignored by society or deeply mischaracterised still respond to these rules. Now, economics on the other hand …

Another problem with the peformance take on things is it lets some of us off the hook. For example: one position in the debate on sex work takes it that there is something fundamentally dangerous and exploitative about it. The opposing view is that the only dangers emerge due to societal stigmatisation and criminalisation. The only harms are socially constructed ones. That side is also an essential claim, that sex work is just work, but it gets disguised as a critical claim and so gets a free pass on having to prove its case.

References:

Brantingham, P. L., and P. J. Brantingham. 1981. ‘Notes on the Geometry of Crime (1981)’. 26.

Buil-Gil, David, and Patricia Saldaña-Taboada. 2021. ‘Offending Concentration on the Internet: An Exploratory Analysis of Bitcoin-Related Cybercrime’. Deviant Behavior 0(0):1–18. doi: 10.1080/01639625.2021.1988760.

Hipp, John R. 2016. ‘General Theory of Spatial Crime Patterns’. Criminology 54(4):653–79. doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12117.

Kaplan, Howard B., Steven S. Martin, and Cynthia Robbins. 1982. ‘Application of a General Theory of Deviant Behavior: Self-Derogation and Adolescent Drug Use’. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 23(4):274–94.

Glueck, Sheldon, and Eleanor T. Glueck. 1950. Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency / Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck.Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

 



What’s on my dekstop

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching

Photo by Ving Cam on Unsplash

The best software is accessible, extensible and community supported. However because reasons we tend to end up with tools that are centralised and ‘heavy’ – they do too much, much more than you will ever need, they have high lock-in and can’t be easily adapted or customised, they are opaque in their design and their focus is decidedly not on education. It would be great if someone could revive something like Apple’s OpenDoc idea for academic documents. This is where the sciences are miles ahead of the humanities and social sciences and why I think all first year students in all disciplines need to be taught how to use R. This post is very Mac focused, though most of the software I mention is cross platform.

Apps I don’t use and probably would if I was just a bit better organised

There are loads of productive apps I try and never use. Top of the list is the To Do app/task manager. I have lots of lists of plans in many apps sitting on various devices, untouched and forgotten after the second time I used them. Also note-taking apps. I use the mac’s Notes app a bit as a scratch space, and that’s as far as it goes. Project planning apps have gone the same way as ToDos. The time spend fiddling with them did help me sort out what my preferred workflow was, what needed to go where, what had to sync with what, what could be automated, and so on. There are plenty of task mangers to give a go when you need them though and they are useful for large group projects. I really should use LibreOffice instead of Word but totally fail to.

Apps I don’t use and wouldn’t use if using them was the only way to hold the space-time continuum together

Grammarly. The Autotune of writing. Use if you never want to develop your own writing voice, and also if you like everything hyphenated. Also the app installs with start at login enabled by default and is impossible to turn off. Leibniz once said there was no pure evil in the world. Leibniz was wrong.

A certain bibliographic database manager, sounds like Bend Vote.

Siri.

Apps I do use: Research and teaching

Zotero is the best for managing your readings and retrieving articles. At the moment you need the beta version to get the full benefit of inline pdf reading/annotating and if you want to save from Safari.

There are several writing programmes that are designed around academics needs such as Scrivener for long documents and various ones for focused writing such as iA. I’ve not yet tackled the world of LaTeX.

Several qualitative coding apps exist such as Nvivo which suffers from some of the problems I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately the R QDA project seems not to be widely used and has not been update for a while now.

Web browse using Brave for ad-free browsing. Tor for privacy and the darknet.

Use Google Slides for teaching/presenting and Google Docs for collaboration. They are shareable easily most of the time but it’s not so easy when working with people in China. Plus Google mines your soul.

For communication I need a range of apps to work with folk. Telegram is reasonably secure. WeChat is needed for working with Chinese colleagues, as many systems are blocked by the Chinese state.

Lots more to try, from Discord to Ulysses.

Lovely list of writing tools here.

Utilities

Rectangle allows for easy window resizing and layering, one of the Mac’s big weaknesses – very handy when reviewing/marking. 

Popclip for text actions such as opening selected text in a particular app. You can add various functions such as ‘add quote marks’, ‘paste and match’ and randomly cHAnGe cASe for that special ransom note feel.

Alfred for search and various other actions such as url shortening. It can be used to create short text clippings which can be inserted into your writing using a quick keyboard shortcut. I use this when marking essays so I can have a record of what issues come up frequently in students’ work and which I can draw on and adapt when needed.

This is a good guide to getting the most from your mac

Backup and security

I have a Raspberry pi running as a time machine backup and general file server/WebDAV/home cloud using Nextcloud. I also have a cloud backup using a cloud provider. There’s lots of help out there for how to get the most out of a Pi. It is also very calming to troubleshoot.

I use a password manager, Bitwarden. Very handy when you register and forget it.

Finally just a note of thanks to our amazing IT support folks who cope with all the craziness we bring to them. Do what they tell you and above all RTFM.