Simple steps to promote qualitative research in journals It happened again. After months of waiting, you finally got that "Decision" email: Rejection. That's not so bad, it happens to everyone. But it's the nature of the rejection that gets to you. The reviewers (you...
This is a guest response to Simon Frankel Pratt's musing on methods. Lucas Dolan is a PhD Candidate at American University's School of International Service. In a recent contribution, Simon Frankel...
I realize this is a weird thing for me to ask, since the vast majority of my publications--as well as a few of my works in progress--have relied on regression. But I was wondering this recently...
Having recently attended a workshop and conference on beneficial artificial intelligence (AI), one of the overriding concerns is how to design beneficial AI. To do this, the AI needs to be aligned...
If you have been living under a rock as I apparently have, then like me you may be unaware of the DA-RT controversy that is brewing in the American Political Science Association.* Turns out that some of our colleagues have been pushing for some time to write a new set of rules for qualitative scholarship that, among other things will require “cited data [be] available at the time of publication through a trusted digital repository” [This is from the Journal Editor's Transparency Statement, which is what is being implemented Jan. 15]. The goal I gather is to enhance transparency and...
“Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop Sponsored by the International Studies Association-Northeast Region 9 November, 2013 • Providence, Rhode Island International Studies has always been interdisciplinary, with scholars drawing on a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques of data collection and data analysis as they seek to produce knowledge about global politics. Recent debates about epistemology and ontology have advanced the methodological openness of the field, albeit mainly at a meta-theoretical level. And while interest in...
This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not. I'm working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) -- one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We've been puzzled by the apparent lack of theorization of "the body" in Latour. For example, if social relations must be 'fixed' by physical objects, why isn't the human body one such object? If any of our readers are able to weigh in, I'd appreciate it. I've been considering discontinuing the m4a versions of the Duck of Minerva podcast. They...
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I'm a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the...
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout statistics ever produced.The excellent Silbey at the Edge of the American West is stunned by the torrents of data that future historians will be able to deal with. He predicts that the petabytes of data being captured by government organizations such as the Air Force will be a major boon for historians of the future --(and I can't be the only person who says "Of the future!" in a sort of breathless...
One should not blog in anger. In an effort to make my points, I think I overstated my case and offended some people, which I did not intend to do. Wait. Isn't that what blogging is all about? Maybe I did intend to do that.Seriously, if I were to amend this, I would make a number of changes.First, it is not that second-hand sources are bad and inherently inferior to primary sources. They are absolutely necessary. There is a bit of a division of labor between historians and us, as we are more often looking at the forest for the trees, or to mix ecological metaphors, trying not to get lost in...
I've had it. Recently I was asked to review a book that will not be named for a journal that will not be mentioned. It was by an author with a pretty good reputation with an excellent press on a subject that I am well informed on. (I won't mention names. Dan can take him or her to the woodshed later.) I thought I would be doing the field a service and forcing myself to read what I thought would be an entertaining book that I might not otherwise have the time to read. The problem: it is f&ck*ng mess.Actually that really isn't the real issue. The real problem is that I am absolutely positive...
Part of the research project that is keeping me too busy to blog involves capturing, coding and visualizing the issue agenda for various transnational networks. Here is a visualization of the core human rights network on the World Wide Web, circa 2008.* (Nodes represent organizational websites and ties represent hyperlinks between them. Node size corresponds to in-degree centrality within the network.)You can click for a larger view.It looks to me as if there are really two networks here: a human rights network and a development network, all tied together conceptually under the rubric of...