stereotype

I was reading Maura Seale’s article, “Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians” today and thought that maybe a quick weigh-in on the librarian stereotype ‘issue’ would be a nice way to get back into the blog groove.

I’ll say first that I think Seale has the right idea here; her five categories of librarian stereotype, “the old maid librarian, the policeman librarian, the librarian as parody, the inept librarian, and the hero/ine librarian” seem pretty on the money to me. Except, except! Seale mentions the sexuality or non-sexuality of the stereotypes without (I think) paying full enough attention to this aspect. Where, after all, is the Adam Ant “Goody Two Shoes” librarian? Her very social ‘ineptitude’ (”don’t drink, don’t smoke”) is belied by her sexual appetite (”what do you do?”).
***update: so….duh…the difficulty of memory - I realized by looking at this old video on YouTube that in fact this brainy not-so-repressed character is NOT depicted as a librarian, but a reporter. Silly me. I guess that stereotype is so strong that it even influenced my memory! Also, being reminded that my 7th grade pop idol was kind of lame….life is like that.

I will say that I am often surprised at how often I get this response when I tell a newly met person that I’m a librarian, “Huh…You don’t look like a librarian,” by which I have to assume that they are thinking of the quintessential ‘Old Maid’ version of this stereotype. But, really, what about that new internet-empowered young librarian, so many of whom, honestly, seemed so much hipper than my 30-something self when I was in library school?

Well, anyway, I demure. I am hip, after all; I have this blog don’t I?

surplus

In that marvelous way that the web can get you to something you weren’t expecting find I ran across “Gin, Television, And Social Surplus” earlier today, and it has been on my mind. (Research ethics aren’t holding things together for me today, I’m afraid….)

I’m intrigued by the underlying idea of this discussion that there are some people out there who have tired of unidirectional passive entertainment, and have moved onto this new digital world with some intention of burning up extra brain energy. I do not cease to be amazed at how much television gets watched in this country, and how ubiquitous it is as a means of social engagement. I don’t have a TV and, as a result, I find myself with literally nothing to say during numerous casual social interactions. Of course, I barely stay current with the News, or celebrities, or anything like that really, so I’m getting pretty used to not having anything to say about this stuff. But I don’t intend this to be anti-TV rant, despite the strength with which that temptation is coming upon me. And for full-disclosure/confession purposes I will admit that I do watch television programs on DVD, rather a lot though less as the weather gets nicer. But of course this way eliminates the worst problem I have with TV - the commercials.

But, the very variety and quirkiness that makes the internet, the web 2.0, so promising to the author creates some problems, too. With everybody’s attention focussed on the thing which interests them most (a solipsistic aspect of the web that worries me, but may be not as much of a problem as I assume), we lack the great Common Knowledge (if it can be called that) that the TV has provided us in the 20th century. I think that’s one thing people like about it.

More about this later; it’s time to close the library.

sleepy

My brain is dead. I woke at 5:30am and couldn’t get to sleep couldn’t stop obsessing couldn’t stop the madness! I’m so tired and the Lonely Librarian’s Library is so quiet that I feel asleep at my desk for half an hour.

I’m not doing a great job with the daily postings, but no sense in getting caught up in that.

Been reading more on research ethics, IRBs, and the Nuremberg Code, and hopefully I will have more to say soon. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in reading more and more and more….I have developed a strange new research habit that is utterly dependent on the vast collection of information on the internet, and on my new skills as an online database user. I am constantly stopping in the middle of articles I’m reading to go to the bibliography (not so strange), and then I find myself chasing down the article and saving it to my computer (or whatever), sometimes even taking the time to enter it on some bibliographic management program, like Zotero. It makes reading take a LOT longer. I suspect that it is not helping me, but I catch myself doing it anyway. The next thing I know it has taken four hours to read some fifteen page article; you can imagine the effort it takes to get through a substantial one of 30 or more. And not only that but now I have some five or fifty more must read articles. Doh!

minimalia

Taking a break from the academic discussions of the last couple of days, my head is fuzzy. And the Lonely Librarian is especially lonely with not a one person coming in today. My short Saturday shift ends soon, and I can walk out into the gray warm humidity of a Pittsburgh Spring. Not so bad, really. It reminds me of Portland, OR, where I spent some great years.

It looks like I have to quit drinking coffee; it has been two days since my last cup. Now when I say quit I don’t mean QUIT, but my stomach is making it pretty clear to me that I should do without if I possibly can. Which is hard, let me tell you. I want to whine about it.

My friends and socii have emerged from their winter hibernation, so my husband and I are suddenly invited to all sorts of gatherings. We people - must gather, eat, talk. It’s beautiful.

Though certainly he doesn’t need the sales, I’ll say it anyway - after the first 400 pages of book one, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire becomes pretty habit-forming. I groaned a lot through the first half of Game because I noticed the clumsiness of the writing, but after that, well, I mostly just ceased to notice. That’s about when he hits you with his big bad Plot Hammer, and then the poor sentences just don’t matter so much. I’m being a little over-critical, though. It does happen that the writing problems don’t just become obscured by the rollicking, ass-kicking plot and characterization, the problems don’t appear quite so much. Certainly by two-thirds of the way through the third monster…er…book, A Storm of Swords Martin really has had a hell of a lot of practice writing his epic tale. And, again, it doesn’t really matter. This is True Fantasy and engrossing enough to keep me wanting to read. These are ridiculously long 800-page minimum volumes, the likes of which seem to be a genre specialty. Many of the genre conventions are here, so if Fantasy doesn’t do it for you, go elsewhere. Interestingly, it holds off on the lords-n-ladies teenage-boy-appeal gratuitous sex more than I would have expected - but, don’t worry! It’s in there, just keep reading. But, MAN! Whatta ride! So if you have ever fictionally enjoyed a melee of knights, a dragon birth, new gods, revenge, midnight subterfuge, run to get these books. Really.

racing

I’m very hungry, but I think I have to post something if for no other reason than that I didn’t yesterday.

Yesterday I spent some hours reading a couple of criminology-related articles that deal specifically with ethics in randomized trials. In one article Weisburd argues that randomized treatments in crime and justice are a moral imperative based on the idea that professionals in the field have a professional responsibility to evaluate the effectiveness of programs, practices, and treatments. Boruch, Victor, and Cecil, in the second attempt to resolve the ethical dilemmas of the randomized experiments through more thoughtful means of random assignment and attention to the issues related research design with human beings and legal remedies. Clearly in the case of crime, violence, and delinquency experiments are going to have to attend carefully to the ethical issues having to do with the manipulation of human beings. The key piece of legislation, which both addresses the ethical standards for research as well as a particular solution to them, the creation of Institutional Review Boards is 45 CFR 46.

Most of the discussion of these issues has to do with the notion of informed consent. There also seems to be some literature out there about the difficulties, both ethical and practical, of true informed consent. I’m not 100% that this notion should be so much of the story. Boruch, et al also discuss some issues of privacy and record confidentiality that exist primarily in research that concerns individuals and their outcomes, as opposed to groups. That’s something to add. My collaborator is particularly questions the notion that people should be manipulated in the ways these experiments do at all. I share his concern.

There’s more to think, but I’m hungry and tired.

ethics smethics!

A friend of mine and I are hammering out the beginnings of some work about ethics in social science research. I am trying to get a handle on the basics of what kinds of questions I can ask and fruitfully write about in this field. Something will come of this, I’m sure, but trying to figure out exactly where to go is proving to be a thorny issue for me. Since I am a librarian and want somehow to tie this work to possibilities of publishing in solid library/information science journals I have been trying to figure out how to connect the disparate subjects of articles I’ve been looking at to the information ethics field. Some things have emerged, and I’m going to sketch a few of them out here.

First off, and best for me to keep squarely in mind - research ethics are not exactly information ethics. Research ethics are relevant to methodology, modeling, researcher behavior, avoidance of fraud. Information ethics are specifically dealing with the information and its dissemination - the most obvious overlapping point is in publication. Should editors feel free to publish articles that are transparent in their methodologies but perhaps depict an experiment that was questionable in its ethical bases or illegal - to wit, randomized bombing trials, suborning the law in order to study corruption? There are two different ways this could show up: the researcher creates an experiment that asks people to commit illegal or unethical acts (with full consent, of course), but in a controlled environment. OR, a researcher uses data that was unethically collected, e.g. the case of Nazi science or the Tuskegee experiments. Should peer review include questioning the ethical basis of an experiment? Would it be a problem to ask editors or publishers to be the ethical gate keepers here? It would be nice if the peer review process took care of this because if editorial policies do not specifically recommend that reviewers make ethical judgments, is the editor or publisher the last man standing? Notably, the none of guidelines for APSA journals includes any discussion of ethical guidelines, or at least such guidelines are not freely available. The association itself in its own statement of professional ethics only references research ethics in the barest fashion; most of their discussion has to do with academic freedom and other non-research activities of its members. Its less than two full pages on ethics in publication have to do mostly with the conduct of peer reviewers and editors, copyright issues and confidentiality, nothing about underlying ethics. Even the extensive treatment on editorial policies and publication ethics by the journal of Nature has to with consideration of the researchers’ ethics.

Should editorial policies include guidelines for editors and/or peer reviewers for assessing the ethical questions underlying a particular bit of experimentation or investigation? Do they? Does this set up one or at least a very few to be the ethical arbiters of an entire field of study? That seems a little scary. Who will watch the watchmen, after all?

Where could information ethics and research ethics in the social sciences merge? Risking redundancy: development of ethical guidelines for publishers and editors; guidelines for peer reviewers; ethics of data collection–that is to say, are there kinds of data that should be off-limits to researchers?

This whole thing is exhausting me. I need to read a full article rather than just gazing at stuff and letting my mind wander.

my first knitting post

I have been doing needle crafts since I was pretty young. I think I did my first cross-stitch project before third grade. I am not one of those truly crafty chicks, who are constantly doing new projects thinking up new projects selling their work and doing five more projects. But I have pretty consistently had some needle project or another in the works since that first 14-aida strawberry I did way back when, aside from some years while I was in college and grad school. I do like all kinds of needlecraft but only fairly recently took up knitting. Like blogging, I seem to have waited until the most recent craze of it had gotten pretty far along. In any case, I am not a terribly adventurous knitter, having only just a week ago finished the first baby blanket I ever made. But, goddamn if I’m not impressed by what other people can do with the stuff! Aforementioned baby blanket still needs to be blocked and for some reason I find myself putting it off thinking that somehow I’m going to screw that up. Which I guess is silly. I can only say that the last thing I attempted to block (I admit to being a little lax with this extremely important detail) didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. So while I’m putting this off and then today wondering what the heck I’m going to write I’m looking at the wordpress.com home page I see this fabulously interesting post linked right in the middle of their page On Wool and Blocking . And suddenly, I have both a little bit to write and a little bit more motivation to do the thing.

I guess the internet may be cool after all.

puzzled

I’m having a terrible time coming up with a post today. As if to prove yesterday’s statement that one day can make all the difference, I’m fuzzy-headed, cold, low energy. It’s raining now, too. And Hard.

Every time I spend a little time following links on the internet I end up both amazed and overwhelmed. There’s so damn much of it. Some blogs and websites like this one which I loved immediately, I Love Typography, excite me because they are well-constructed, interesting (at least to me), and reflect both dedication and skill. On the other hand, I find it very easy to let something like this get me down. I’ve been idly doing research on typography for some time now, searching for something to say about this topic that might be publishable. I have a growing typography bibliography, mostly annotated. I get down because it seems so hard in these information-overload days to get a handle on anything, get a real sense of the state of the discipline/art/whatever. I could have followed online typography links all day long. Sure, I’d see a lot of fairly useless stuff, but after some time I discover that I lose my ability to assess the quality of what I’m looking at. And this isn’t even really a topic that all that many people care about, comparatively speaking anyway. Then I get down because I can’t imagine that I could ever have anything worth saying in a friggin’ library journal or any other such scholarly place. Bleh. Research, the process only I can end.

Another great typography link is Typofile, a particularly good example of what collaborative information collection can do.

brief spring post

I post today only in the belief self-discipline being something I have to practice, practice, practice. Self-evident, perhaps, but getting over the hump is NO. SMALL. THING.

I was walking along the Monogahela River yesterday looking across the water and thinking that Spring always seems to just EXPLODE one day. No amount of careful daily watching will prevent that feeling I have one day that Spring just happened without my even noticing it. Ba-BAM! Leaves flowers color. The river was green with reflected foliage. Amazing. And every year it’s a relief, as if it’s not going to happen, but of course….

This is not to say that I cannot observe the creeping approach earlier in the season. The crocuses - those sentries of the flower world, the first little shoots of tulips, the glorious, glorious fact that the sun sticks around a little longer every day - I notice those and know it’s coming. But still….Every year it seems like one day just made all the difference. Which I guess is right some how. One day does make all the difference. In everything.

I read in some publication of the letters of Abagail Adams (yeah, John’s wife), “The approach of Spring unstrings my nerves.” Yeah. Just so.

Too bad I don’t have a better citation.

I’m at a public library computer today - my day off! And I’ve run out of time. So, a quickie! All for the best.

Art, Activism, Equity review

I recently attended one day of a two-day symposium, Art, Activism, Equity at Pittsburgh’s New Hazlett Theater Co-presented Greater Pgh Arts Council & Women and Girls Foundation (Part of the Women in the Arts Festival). My review is an appropriate first post for this blog.

Art, Activism, and Equity Symposium notes
18 April 2008

I arrived on the early side of the meet and greet part of the Friday session and struggled mightily to converse with my fellow attendees, at least initially. Eventually I ran into some people I had a passing acquaintance with and managed for the most part to overcome the intense feeling of awkwardness that seems to descend upon me at times like these. In any case, the symposium then got started, and I could fall into to sitting quietly in a darkened room, an activity which comes quite naturally to me.

Initial words by Jane Werner, Executive Director, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, were brief and amusing in the way that initial words should be, reminding me most importantly that I was among a group of people most of whom probably proudly called themselves feminists – not so common these days and a comfortable place to be.

Worth the price of admission by itself was the opening presentation by Frida Kahlo of the Guerilla Girls. The Guerilla Girls’ activism is meaty and fully informed by all the feminist theory you might need or want but is also laugh-out-loud funny and inspiring to boot. Their success and recognition is fully deserved. FK’s talk combined seriousness and historicity with humor and visual stimulation, technological mishaps aside. And, importantly, it highlighted that the project is not complete. The GGs are utterly relentless, enviably energetic; their labor of feminist love is fruitful and fun. The GG commitment to the documentation of their facts naturally appealed to me as a librarian. Critiques based on numbers run an awful risk of seeming heartless and dull; the work FK showcased was anything but. No doubt this humor is the major factor in their success. And of course, the dedication, and the hard work, and well, the money they had to have put in over the years. But the pay off - work in major museums and taught in art schools, the proof that feminists are fuckin’ funny, and full-color publications, to boot! A long way away from the first self-funded block letter posters. Brava, ladies and apes, brava! My old feminist crush on these ladies has been amply rewarded and refreshed. I’ll buy their books as soon as I get paid.

And speaking of energetic – in our afternoon workshop Faythe Levine displayed that unusual combination of youth, brains, talent, discipline, organizational capability, and non-stop sheer interested-ness that many hope for (myself included) and few attain (me, again). Later, Elizabeth Perry delivered a short but thorough review of the web/web 2.0 applications most relevant to artists and activists, and she did a great job eliciting feedback about these tools from our ever-dwindling audience. By the end of this I admit to having been tired and hungry, butt-aching from the theater seats, and not at all patient with the Senator who spoke about her efforts to rectify gendered pay inequity in Pennsylvania, a common but embarrassing problem we seem to have worse than others. After chowing a bit on the reception food, I had to leave and missed what had to have been a pretty interesting panel discussion session.