Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “research”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy'
- kudos:Gab’s been showing up more in the news lately, so I guess I should dust off some of that Gab data I have and move it closer to publication. link to “How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Class Is Canceled Until Further Notice While I Do My Job'
- kudos:Too much truth in this. link to “Class Is Canceled Until Further Notice While I Do My Job”
do you want to be good or to be optimized?
- kudos:This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level: My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.
publication copyright and reprinting consent
- kudos:Ben has been one of my best students over the past 5.5 years. He was a non-traditional student who flunked out of UK decades ago, went on to be a successful small business owner elsewhere in the country, and then leapt at the chance to come back to UK through an online degree completion program. As part of that program, he took one of the classes I was teaching at the time, which counted toward general education credit.
frustration with institutional research analytics
- kudos:Over the summer, I blogged about some concern that I had about a new research portal that my employer had just rolled out. Based on the gentle nudges to update our profiles we’ve been receiving since the platform’s launch, I’m guessing that faculty have not been as keen on the platform as the university is. One of those nudges came this week, and in the spirit of good faith cooperation, I spent some time going through the platform and updating my profile.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Major critic of X sues after being banned from platform | Ars Technica'
- kudos:The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff. link to “Major critic of X sues after being banned from platform | Ars Technica”
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I have thought for years about the way that Twitter research (in the aggregate) serves as a largely unintentional history of Twitter, but I’ve never thought to wonder what that specifically looks like right now.
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Thanks to a combination of personal hubris and inconvenient coincidences, this week involves 4 presentations at 2 conferences, catching up on 3 weeks of grading, and writing P&T letters for 4 colleagues. Hooray for free wifi on my flights.
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My Mormon Studies research will probably never get the citations that my edtech work has, but it’s neat how much more layperson and media interest it generates. That said, I hope late-night weekend presentations stay rare because I’m very tired this morning.
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I’m becoming more and more skeptical of “improve teaching and learning” as a motivation for education (and especially edtech) research—it’s a noble goal, but it distracts us from so many other important questions.
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I think academia undervalues teaching and that teaching-focused faculty deserve more status, recognition, and compensation. Yet, I’m still suspicious of the new BYU-Idaho president’s comments on the need for “a faculty free of the obligations of research.”
upcoming research talk on DezNat for Bainbridge Latter-day Saint fireside series
- kudos:A couple of months ago, Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune mentioned the work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the far-right-influenced DezNat movement. Shortly after Peggy’s article was published, someone who coordinates an unofficial series of Latter-day Saint-related firesides reached out to us about speaking to their group about our research on the DezNat movement. Before accepting, we made it clear that our work isn’t devotional, neither of us are practicing Latter-day Saints, and our work could be understood as critical of cultural and institutional Mormonism; however, the fireside organizers said that they were used to getting into controversial topics related to Mormonism and that our work was welcome with them.
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Another set of proofs, another set of complaints about a copyeditor making changes to my writing in ways that distort my meaning. If I get grumpy about a human doing my writing for me, why would I ever want generative AI to do it?
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Another paper, another fight with copyeditors about not capitalizing danah boyd’s name.
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Journal copyeditors are great when they fix things, but when they break my sentences and don’t ask questions about “[information removed for blinding]”, I wonder what the point is.
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Journal copyeditor changed a bunch of first-person language in our abstract to third-person “the authors,” and I am peeved.
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Every copyright transfer I sign destroys another part of my soul.
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College conversation about investment in GPT-type tech to support research is continuing. I think it’s… fitting that the survey being circulated is clearly using Qualtrics’s auto-suggested Likert responses—and that the responses aren’t quite right for the questions being asked.
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I firmly believe that research is a process of argument—and that statistics are, therefore, a rhetorical device.
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I’ve been struggling with putting together a particular document for over a week. It’s like I’ve entirely forgotten how to do academic writing—something I usually feel pretty confident about.
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My college is floating the idea of investing in GPT-type technology to help researchers code text data. This reminds me of my longtime belief that the distinction between “qual” and “quant” is often less important than the distinction between different research paradigms.
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It’s four hours into my workday, so I guess it’s time to start doing that writing I blocked the whole day off for. 🙃
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect | WIRED'
- kudos:Good article on a worrying trend. It’s things like this that make me skeptical of arguments that generative AI could have real benefit when used properly. It’s not that I disagree—it’s that in the aggregate, I’m not sure the proper uses will outweigh the problems. link to ‘Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Academic Book About Emojis Can’t Include The Emojis It Talks About Because Of Copyright | Techdirt'
- kudos:This is dumb. Copyright is important, but this example shows how much we’ve made it overreach. link to ‘Academic Book About Emojis Can’t Include The Emojis It Talks About Because Of Copyright | Techdirt’
new publication: Anti-LGBTQ+ discourses in LGBTQ+-affirming spaces on Gab Social
- kudos:Late last year, I announced the publication of a study I participated in with Dr. Evan Brody and UK PhD student Mehroz Sajjad where we examined LGBTQ+-friendly spaces on the Gab social media platform. Although that was the main focus of our research project, we also found as we were completing it that there were a number of LGBTQ+-friendly spaces that had been overrun by queerphobic activity and discourses. I’m happy to announce that our second paper, focusing on those specific spaces, has just been published in the Journal of Homosexuality.
quoted in Salt Lake Tribune article on DezNat movement
- kudos:This past weekend, Peggy Fletcher Stack at the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about the #DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter, which takes cues from far-right and anti-feminist online communities. In her article, Peggy was kind enough to reference (and quote from) my new publication with Amy Chapman in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association, which presents the (partial) results of a qualitative analysis of over 1,400 DezNat tweets from 2019.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter Threatens to Sue Center for Countering Digital Hate Over Research - The New York Times'
- kudos:This is ridiculous. link to ‘Twitter Threatens to Sue Center for Countering Digital Hate Over Research - The New York Times’
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It annoys me when a journal asks a reviewer to address specific prompts; it annoys me more when I only realize this after writing my review.
appearance on Dialogue Out Loud podcast
- kudos:One of my most recent articles—a piece on technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition—was published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Publishing in Dialogue has been a wonderful opportunity. It’s a niche journal, so it may never reach the breadth of audience that I usually aim for in publishing. However, that niche focus has also come with a number of benefits. I want to write more about this soon, but the purpose of this post is just to draw attention to one of these benefits: the in-house podcast(s) produced by the Dialogue team.
new publication: far-right and anti-feminist influences on a Mormon Twitter hashtag
- kudos:I am very happy to announce that a paper I wrote with Amy Chapman is finally published and available open access in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association (I have also archived a PDF of the article on my website, available at this link). Amy and I began this project in the spring/summer of 2019, so it’s a relief to finally see our first paper in print. In short, the paper is a descriptive look at tweets using the #DezNat hashtag; DezNat, short for either Deseret Nation or Deseret Nationalism (depending on who you ask) is a movement of arch-conservative Mormons on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Eternity in the Ether: A Mormon Media History, by Gavin Feller
- kudos:I have been looking for this kind of book for a long time, and some of my recent publications would have been stronger if this had come out in time for me to reference it beforehand. It’s not perfect: Some wording is awkward and the conceptual framework (while interesting) could be stronger. However, it’s invaluable for the history it offers and I expect to cite it regularly in the future.
new(ish) publication: inauthentic accounts on teacher Twitter
- kudos:This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts.
technology-mediated authority in early Mormonism
- kudos:As I wrote earlier, I recently appeared on the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast to discuss a recent publication in which I discuss the history of official Latter-day Saint domain names. Near the end of the interview, David Noyce (managing editor of the Tribune and one of the podcast hosts) asked me the “so what” question—sure, this history is interesting, but what’s the takeaway? Here’s (part of) how I answered:
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A friend of mine who works outside academia wrote yesterday to say that she thought my most recent article made for good road trip reading, and I honestly don’t know if anyone’s ever paid a higher compliment to my research.
media coverage of recent article on Latter-day Saint online presence
- kudos:I recently wrote about a new article of mine in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought where I trace the history of the official domain names of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This past week, I was lucky enough for the fine folks at the Salt Lake Tribune to take interest in the article. Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote a summary of my findings in this (unfortunately paywalled) article, which appeared on Sunday.
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Starting to get notices about my Twitter API access being suspended. So long, Twitter research: You were an important part of my career, and I’ll miss you.