I wrote about an extremely poor NYT piece on the Data Colada / Francesca Gino kerfuffle.
I'm with "the bloggers"
Noam Scheiber’s report on the controversies surrounding the work of Francesca Gino is … well, it’s terrible. Let me count (some of) the ways.
Let’s start with the title: “The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers.” Now, journalists typically don’t title their own pieces, but throughout the report Scheiber refers to the people who run Data Colada as “the bloggers.” The point seems to be to contrast a Figure of Recognized Authority (“the Harvard professor”) with her online critics (“the bloggers”) — a tactic reminiscent of the days when journalists sneered at people who sit around in their pajamas typing on their laptops. But these critics are also professors, at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, the Wharton School at Penn, and the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley. It’s only late in the report, after an extensive and fawning portrait of the suffering Professor Gino, that Scheiber acknowledges the academic credentials of those who have called attention to apparent anomalies in Gino’s research. But he still calls them “the bloggers.”
Second: Scheiber writes, “Even the bloggers, who published a four-part series laying out their case in June and a follow-up this month, have acknowledged that there is no smoking gun proving it was Dr. Gino herself who falsified data.” What does “even the bloggers” mean? There’s nothing unusual or noteworthy about “the bloggers” not directly accusing Gino of dishonesty, because that’s not what they do. They point to apparent anomalies — often, inconsistencies between (a) the conclusions drawn by scholars and (b) the data they claim to be drawing on — in research papers; it is not their job to figure out how the anomalies got there. They aren’t looking for a “smoking gun” in the hands of Professor Gino.
In general, Scheiber seems to have seen it as his job to take up Gino’s sense of outrage. He says very strange things, like “She did not present as a fraud.” Well, of course. One cannot succeed in deceiving people if one presents as a fraud. The statement is an irrelevance. Similarly, Scheiber says that Gino often provided “a plausible answer” when he questioned her. But what his questions were, what her answers were, why he found them plausible, and how all that relates to the evidence provided at Data Colada — we’re not told any of that.
Finally: Scheiber seems not to have asked what, to me, would be the single most obvious question: Why is she suing “the bloggers”? Apparently the cause is “defamation,” but how does the think they have defamed her simply by pointing to anomalies in her published research papers? The closest Scheiber comes to approaching the issue is in this passage:
… the bloggers publicly revealed their evidence: In the sign-at-the-top paper, a digital record in an Excel file posted by Dr. Gino indicated that data points were moved from one row to another in a way that reinforced the study’s result.Nothing about this makes sense. First of all, what is “sinister” about noting a manipulation of data in an Excel sheet? If that’s wrong, what’s wrong about it? What “conclusions” did the Data Colada investigation “jump to”? And above all, even if all of her criticisms are correct, why not offer a rational refutation rather than file a lawsuit? Suing her employer, Harvard, makes obvious sense, since Harvard has suspended her from her job without pay and is seeking to revoke her tenure. Faced with similar circumstances I might also sue. But suing people for writing that the data meant to support certain conclusions seems to have been manipulated by person or persons unknown? That requires some explanation.Dr. Gino now saw the blog in more sinister terms. She has cited examples of how Excel’s digital record is not a reliable guide to how data may have been moved.
“What I’ve learned is that it’s super risky to jump to conclusions without the complete evidence,” she told me.
Scheiber doesn’t ask any of these questions. He’s not interested in anything except a profile of a wounded person. But I agree with the lawyer for “the bloggers” who says that such a lawsuit is “a direct attack on academic inquiry.” What Gino is doing certainly looks like a straightforward attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might ask hard questions about her research. I came away from Scheiber’s pseudo-inquiry thinking that I need to contribute to Data Colada’s legal defense fund. I don’t believe that’s what Scheiber intended.
W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today, and I’ve written a brief reflection, with many links.
Auden, fifty years later
W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today.
He is the single most important writer and thinker in my life, and has been ever since, in my very last class in graduate school, I read his collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand. (Though it’s more than a collection of essays: it’s Auden’s Ars Poetica or Biographia Literaria.) The prose led me to the poetry and then there was no going back.
I wrote my first book (a book that had a peculiar route to publication) about Auden, featured him as one of the central figures in my The Year of Our Lord 1943, and have now produced three critical editions of his books: The Age of Anxiety, For the Time Being, and (forthcoming) The Shield of Achilles.
Some of my essays and reviews about Auden available online:
- “Auden and the Dream of Public Poetry”
- “The Poet’s Prose”
- “Auden and the Limits of Poetry”
- “Sandfield Road” (an imaginary conversation)
- “The Love Feast” (a review of the Complete Poems)
- There are many posts on Auden here on this blog — see the tag at the bottom of this post — but this is one of the more important ones.
He was, shall we say, quite a character, and the anecdotes about him — about his titanic messiness and equally exceptional kindness — may readily be found. I do wish I had known him personally, but his work is so filled with his distinctive personality that I always feel that I do.
Auden has done more than anyone else to help me understand what it means to be a Christian in my own moment — one neither hankering after a vague Utopia or pining for an illusory lost Arcadia. In poetry and prose alike, he has given me great pleasure and inexhaustible food for thought. One of the great themes of his work is the necessity and the blessing of gratitude, and thus he has been my primary instructor in how to be grateful. Today, especially, I am grateful for him.
For me (though I am sure others will disagree!), the artistic power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in the harmonious balance that is achieved between Burne-Jones’ illustrations and Morris’ frames, borders, typography and the visually striking double-page spreads. And users can investigate each of these aspects individually in turn on the website. The decision to make it a primarily visual experience is both practical and editorial. Practically, it just would not be worth the time and effort to digitize nearly 600 pages, especially when the complete works of Chaucer are available for anyone to read almost everywhere and for very cheap. Even if this aim was desirable and could have been achieved efficiently, it would have changed the very nature of the project, bloating it out into a project where the focus became so broad that the visual aspects would have become, if not diluted, then certainly more obscured amongst a sea of similar-looking text-based pages.
It took me a long time to find a WordPress theme that (with a few minor tweaks) made my big blog look the way I want it to look, but I finally did.
Had I known about this passage from Dorothy Day’s diary, it would have been really useful to me for The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread With the Dead.
Looks like there’s a gator on the Brazos, Ma.
This is magnificent: The Kelmscott Chaucer online.
A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive. It’s a quick and easy way to minimize what writers, directors and actors do, to act as though entertainment (or, dare I say it, art) is simply churned out — and could be churned out by anyone, sentient or not. It’s just content, it’s just widgets, it’s all grist for the mill.
We got new windows in our house today, modern double-glazed windows to relace the single-pane ones that were original to the house (built in 1956). The most immediately noticeable thing: how much quieter the house is now.
Brad East on AI sermons is just outstanding: “Study and writing aren’t a mere means to an end—unfortunate but unavoidable. Both entail a crucial spiritual and intellectual process that should not be circumvented.”
department of corrections
danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally not one, of the books on the list boyd links to have been banned. Neither have they been “censored,” which is what the article linked to says. That’s why boyd can buy and read them: because they’ve been neither banned nor censored.
What has happened is this: Some parents want school libraries to remove from their shelves books that they (the parents) think are inappropriate for their children to read. You may think that such behavior is mean-spirited or otherwise misconceived — very often it is! — but has nothing to do with either banning or censorship.
But, of course, the American Library Association has been quite effective in redefining the words “banning” and “censorship” to include actions that are far less drastic — less drastic and not especially common: as Micah Mattix has documented here and here, there simply is no widespread movement to keep books off school library shelves.
In a sane world, the term “ban” would be reserved for books whose sale and circulation are illegal in some given place, and “censorship” would refer to the removal, by some legal or commercial authority, of certain portions of a text or film or recording. (I say “commercial” authority because sometimes companies that own the rights to works of art decide, without legal pressure, to delete some lyrics in a song or change certain words in a book.) But thanks to people who want to smear their RCOs, it is now common to use precisely the same words to describe (a) what the nation of Iran did to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and (b) a polite letter from a parent to a school librarian asking that books that offer anatomically detailed descriptions of sexual practices not be readily available to third graders. Of course, many concerned parents are not polite, but polite letters on this topic still count, for the ALA, as a “challenge,” and the organization defines a challenge as an attempt at censorship or banning.
This failure to make elementary distinctions is neither politically nor intellectually healthy.
I sometimes wonder whether this kerfuffle isn’t something of a smokescreen, intended to distract our attention from more serious and troubling attempts at what George Orwell called “the prevention of literature” — for instance, removing books from sale altogether, pulping offensive books, or ensuring that they aren’t published at all. (In some cases that means that the authors aren’t published at all.) You can buy books that some parents have protested; you can’t buy books that, because of political pressure, have never seen the light of day. So you know what I’m craving today? A little perspective.
Wes Anderson: “If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re young: On ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on set.”
Today Angus took his first selfie (with my son). We’re all so proud.
If you’re a Chicagoan, and probably only if you’re a Chicagoan, you’ll appreciate Anders Erickson’s video on Malört — a liqueur that John Hodgman quite accurately describes as tasting like “pencil shavings and heartbreak.”
SO GLAD to see that Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz is out in the UK. I had the privilege of reading drafts, one chapter at a time, and even in that form found it utterly thrilling. Everyone should read it!