Shelter from the tweetstorm

It’s happened to me too: I’m angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I’ve got stuff to say. It’s more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don’t have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another.

I’ve seen other people doing this, and I’m fine with it. But for a while now I’ve seen people doing something more planned, numbering their tweets. Many people try to predict how many tweets are going to be in a particular rant, and often fail spectacularly along the lines of Monty Python’ Spanish Inquisition sketch. Some people are clearly composing the whole thing ahead of time, as a unit. Sometimes they’re not even excited, just telling a story. It’s developing into a genre: the tweetstorm.

I get why people are reluctant to blog in these cases. If you’re already in Twitter and you want to write something longer, you have to switch to a different window, maybe log in, come up with a picture to grab people’s attention. Assuming you already have an account on a blogging platform. It doesn’t help that Twitter sees some of these as competitors and drags its feet on integrating them. And yes, mobile blogging apps still leave a lot to be desired, especially if you’ve got an intermittent connection like on the train.

People also tend to be drawn in easier one tweet at a time, like Beorn meeting the dwarves in the Hobbit. Maybe they don’t feel in the mood for reading something longer, or opening a web browser.

There may also be an aspect of live performance for the tweetstormer and the people who happen to be on Twitter while the storm is passing over, and the thread functions as an inferior archive of the performance, like concert videos. I can understand that too, but it’s a pain for the rest of us.

The problem is that Twitter sucks as a platform for reading longform pieces, or even medium-form ones. Yes, I know they’ve introduced “threading” features to make it easier to follow conversations. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to follow a single person’s multi-tweet rant. Combine that with other people replying in the middle of the “storm” and the original tweeter taking time in the middle to respond to them, and people using the quote feature and replying to quotes and quoting replies, and it gets really chaotic. If I bother to take the time, usually at the end it turns out it’s not worth it.

In terms of Bad Things on Twitter this is nowhere near the level of harassment and death threats, or even people livetweeting Netflix videos. But please, just go write a blog post and post a link. I promise I’ll read it.

What’s worse is that people are encouraging each other to do it. It’s one thing to get outraged on Twitter, or even to see someone else get outraged on Twitter and tell your followers to go check it out. It’s another when you know the whole thing is planned and you tell everyone to Read This. Now.

I get that you think it’s interesting, but that’s not enough for me. Tell me why, and let me decide if it’s worth my time to go reading through all those tweets in reverse chronological order. Better yet, storify that shit and tweet me the URL.

You know what would be even better? Tell that other tweeter, “What an awesome thread! It would make an even better blog post. Do you have a blog?”

@everytreenyc

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

@everylotnyc is a Twitter bot that explores the City’s property database. It goes down the list in order by taxID number. Every half hour it compose a tweet for a property, consisting of the address, the borough and the Street View photo. It seems like it would be boring, but some people find it fascinating. Stephen Smith, in particular, has used it as the basis for some insightful commentary.

It occurred to me that @everylotnyc is actually a very powerful data visualization tool. When we think of “big data,” we usually think of maps and charts that try to encompass all the data – or an entire slice of it. The winning project from the Trees Count Data Jam was just such a project: identifying correlations between cooler streets and the presence of trees.

Social scientists, and even humanists recently, fight over quantitative and qualitative methods, but the fact is that we need them both. The ethnographer Michael Agar argues that distributional claims like “5.4 percent of trees in New York are in poor condition” are valuable, but primarily as a springboard for diving back into the data to ask more questions and answer them in an ongoing cycle. We also need to examine the world in detail before we even know which distributional questions to ask.

If our goal is to bring down the percentage of trees in Poor condition, we need to know why those trees are in Poor condition. What brought their condition down? Disease? Neglect? Pollution? Why these trees and not others?

Patterns of neglect are often due to the habits we develop of seeing and not seeing. We are used to seeing what is convenient, what is close, what is easy to observe, what is on our path. But even then, we develop filters to hide what we take to be irrelevant to our task at hand, and it can be hard to drop these filters. We can walk past a tree every day and not notice it. We fail to see the trees for the forest.

Privilege filters our experience in particular ways. A Parks Department scientist told me that the volunteer tree counts tended to be concentrated in wealthier areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that many areas of the Bronx and Staten Island had to be counted by Parks staff. This reflects uneven amounts of leisure time and uneven levels of access to city resources across these neighborhoods, as well as uneven levels of walkability.

A time-honored strategy for seeing what is ordinarily filtered out is to deviate from our usual patterns, either with a new pattern or with randomness. This strategy can be traced at least as far as the sampling techniques developed by Pierre-Simon Laplace for measuring the population of Napoleon’s empire, the forerunner of modern statistical methods. Also among Laplace’s cultural heirs are the flâneurs of late nineteenth-century Paris, who studied the city by taking random walks through its crowds, as noted by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.

In the tradition of the flâneurs, the Situationists of the mid-twentieth century highlighted the value of random walks, that they called dérives. Here is Guy Debord (1955, translated by Ken Knabb):

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are gloomy and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume that elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the historical period or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.

In an interview with Neil Freeman, the creator of @everylotbot, Cassim Shepard of Urban Omnibus noted the connections between the flâneurs, the dérive and Freeman’s work. Freeman acknowledged this: “How we move through space plays a huge and under-appreciated role in shaping how we process, perceive and value different spaces and places.”

Freeman did not choose randomness, but as he describes it in a tinyletter, the path of @everylotbot sounds a lot like a dérive:

@everylotnyc posts pictures in numeric order by Tax ID, which means it’s posting pictures in a snaking line that started at the southern tip of Manhattan and is moving north. Eventually it will cross into the Bronx, and in 30 years or so, it will end at the southern tip of Staten Island.

Freeman also alluded to the influence of Alfred Korzybski, who coined the phrase, “the map is not the territory”:

Streetview and the property database are both a widely used because they’re big, (putatively) free, and offer a completionist, supposedly comprehensive view of the world. They’re also both products of people working within big organizations, taking shortcuts and making compromises.

I was not following @everylotnyc at the time, but I knew people who did. I had seen some of their retweets and commentaries. The bot shows us pictures of lots that some of us have walked past hundreds of times, but seeing it in our twitter timelines makes us see it fresh again and notice new things. It is the property we know, and yet we realize how much we don’t know it.

When I thought about those Street View images in the beta site, I realized that we could do the same thing for trees for the Trees Count Data Jam. I looked, and discovered that Freeman had made his code available on Github, so I started implementing it on a server I use. I shared my idea with Timm Dapper, Laura Silver and Elber Carneiro, and we formed a team to make it work by the deadline.

It is important to make this much clear: @everytreenyc may help to remind us that no census is ever flawless or complete, but it is not meant as a critique of the enterprise of tree counts. Similarly, I do not believe that @everylotnyc was meant as an indictment of property databases. On the contrary, just as @everylotnyc depends on the imperfect completeness of the New York City property database, @everytreenyc would not be possible without the imperfect completeness of the Trees Count 2015 census.

Without even an attempt at completeness, we could have no confidence that our random dive into the street forest was anything even approaching random. We would not be able to say that following the bot would give us a representative sample of the city’s trees. In fact, because I know that the census is currently incomplete in southern and eastern Queens, when I see trees from the Bronx and Staten Island and Astoria come up in my timeline I am aware that I am missing the trees of southeastern Queens, and awaiting their addition to the census.

Despite that fact, the current status of the 2015 census is good enough for now. It is good enough to raise new questions: what about that parking lot? Is there a missing tree in the Street View image because the image is newer than the census, or older? It is good enough to continue the cycle of diving and coming up, of passing through the funnel and back up, of moving from quantitative to qualitative and back again.

Printing differences and material issues in Google Books

I am looking forward to presenting my Digital Parisian Stage corpus and the exciting results I’ve gotten from it so far at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics at Iowa State in September. In the meantime I’m continuing to process texts, working towards a one percent sample from the Napoleonic period (Volume 1 of the Wicks catalog).

One of the plays in my sample is les Mœurs du jour, ou l’école des femmes, a comedy by Collin-Harleville (also known as Jean-François Collin d’Harleville). I ran the initial OCR on a PDF scanned for the Google Books project. For reasons that will become clear, I will refer to it by its Google Books ID, VyBaAAAAcAAJ. When I went to clean up the OCR text, I discovered that it was missing pages 2-6. I emailed the Google Books team about this, and got the following response:

google-books-material-issue

I’m guessing “a material issue” means that those pages were missing from the original paper copy, but I didn’t even bother emailing until the other day, since I found another copy in the Google Books database, with the ID kVwxUp_LPIoC.

Comparing the OCR text of VyBaAAAAcAAJ with the PDF of kVwxUp_LPIoC, I discovered some differences in spelling. For example, throughout the text, words that end in the old fashioned spelling -ois or -oit in VyBaAAAAcAAJ are spelled with the more modern -ais in kVwxUp_LPIoC. There is also a difference in the way “Madame” is abbreviated (“Mad.” vs. “M.me“) and in which accented letters preserve their accents when set in small caps, and differences in pagination. Here is the entirety of Act III, Scene X in each copy:

VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene X in copy VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene X in kVwxUp_LPIoC

Act III, Scene X in copy kVwxUp_LPIoC

My first impulse was to look at the front matter and see if the two copies were identified as different editions or different printings. Unfortunately, they were almost identical, with the most notable differences being that VyBaAAAAcAAJ has an œ ligature in the title, while kVwxUp_LPIoC is signed by the playwright and marked as being a personal gift from him to an unspecified recipient. Both copies give the exact same dates: the play was first performed on the 7th of Thermidor in year VIII and published in the same year (1800).

The Google Books metadata indicate that kVwxUp_LPIoC was digitized from the Lyon Public Library, while VyBaAAAAcAAJ came from the Public Library of the Netherlands. The other copies I have found in the Google Books database, OyL1oo2CqNIC from the National Library of Naples and dPRIAAAAcAAJ from Ghent University, appear to be the same printing as kVwxUp_LPIoC, as does the copy from the National Library of France.

Since the -ais and M.me spellings are closer to the forms used in France today, we might expect that kVwxUp_LPIoC and its cousins are from a newer printing. But in Act II, Scene XI I came across a difference that concerns negation, the variable that I have been studying for many years. The decadent Parisians Monsieur Basset and Madame de Verdie question whether marriage should be eternal. Our hero Formont replies that he has no reason not to remain with his wife forever. In VyBaAAAAcAAJ he says, “je n’ai pas de raisons,” while in kVwxUp_LPIoC he says “je n’ai point de raisons.”

Act III, Scene XI (page 75) in VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene XI (page 75) in VyBaAAAAcAAJ

Act III, Scene XI (page 78) in kVwxUp_LPIoC

Act III, Scene XI (page 78) in kVwxUp_LPIoC

In my dissertation study I found that the relative use of ne … point had already peaked by the nineteenth century, and was being overtaken by ne … pas. If this play fits the pattern, the use of the more conservative pattern in kVwxUp_LPIoC goes against the more innovative -ais and M.me spellings.

I am not an expert in French Revolutionary printing (if anyone knows a good reference or contact, please let me know!). My best guess is that kVwxUp_LPIoC is from a limited early run, some copies of which were given to the playwright to give away, while VyBaAAAAcAAJ and the other -ais/M.me/ne … point copies are from a larger, slightly later, printing.

In any case, it is clear that I should pick one copy and make it consistent with that. Since VyBaAAAAcAAJ is incomplete, I will try dPRIAAAAcAAJ. I will try to double-check all the spellings and wordings, but at the very least I will check all of the examples of negation against dPRIAAAAcAAJ as I annotate them.

Introducing Selected Birthdays

If you have an Android phone like me, you probably use Google Calendar. I like the way it integrates with my contacts so that I can schedule events with people. I like the idea of it integrating with my Google+ contacts to automatically create a calendar of birthdays that I don’t want to miss. There’s a glitch in that, but I’ve created a new app to get around it, called Selected Birthdays.

The glitch is that the builtin Birthdays calendar has three options: show your Google Contacts, show your contacts and the people in your Google+ circles, or nothing. I have a number of contacts who are attractive and successful people, but I’m sorry to say I have no interest in knowing when their birthdays are. Natasha Lomas has even stronger feelings.

Google doesn’t let you change the builtin Birthdays calendar, but it does let you create a new calendar and fill it with the birthdays that interest you. My new web app, Selected Birthdays, automates that process. It goes through your contacts, finds the ones who have shared their birthdays with you, and gives you a checklist. You decide whose birthdays to include, and Select Birthdays will create a new calendar with those birthdays. It’ll also give you the option of hiding Google’s built-in birthday calendar.

I wrote the Selected Birthdays app in Javascript with the Google+ and Google Calendar APIs. Ian Jones was a big help in recommending the moment.js library, which I used to manipulate dates. Bootflat helped me add a bit of visual style.

For the app to work you’ll have to authorize it to read your contacts and write your calendars. For your privacy, the app communicates directly between your browser and Google’s server; once you download it there is no further contact with my server. There is no way for me to see or edit your contacts or calendars. You can verify that in the source code.

Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions. I have also made the code available on GitHub for free under the Apache License, if you want to build on it. A number of people have said they wish they had an app like this for Facebook. If enough of you repeat that, I’ll look into it!

Teaching phonetic transcription in the digital age

When I first taught phonetic transcription, almost seven years ago, I taught it almost the same way I had learned it twenty-five years ago. Today, the way I teach it is radically different. The story of the change is actually two stories intertwined. One is a story of how I’ve adopted my teaching to the radical changes in technology that occurred in the previous eighteen years. The other is a story of the more subtle evolution of my understanding of phonetics, phonology, phonological variation and the phonetic transcription that allows us to talk about them.

When I took Introduction to Linguistics in 1990 all the materials we had were pencil, paper, two textbooks and the ability of the professor to produce unusual sounds. In 2007 and even today, the textbooks have the same exercises: Read this phonetic transcription, figure out which English words were involved, and write the words in regular orthography. Read these words in English orthography and transcribe the way you pronounce them. Transcribe in broad and narrow transcription.

The first challenge was moving the homework online. I already assigned all the homework and posted all the grades online, and required my students to submit most of the assignments online; that had drastically reduced the amount of paper I had to collect and distribute in class and schlep back and forth. For this I had the advantage that tuition at Saint John’s pays for a laptop for every student. I knew that all of my students had the computing power to access the Blackboard site.

Thanks to the magic of Unicode and Richard Ishida’s IPA Picker, my students were able to submit their homework in the International Phonetic Alphabet without having to fuss with fonts and keyboard layouts. Now, with apps like the Multiling Keyboard, students can even write in the IPA on phones and tablets.

The next problem was that instead of transcribing, some students would look up the English spellings on dictionary sites, copy the standard pronunciation guides, and paste them into the submission box. Other students would give unusual transcriptions, but I couldn’t always tell whether these transcriptions reflected the students’ own pronunciations or just errors.

At first, as my professors had done, I made up for these homework shortcomings with lots of in-class exercises and drills, but they still all relied on the same principle: reading English words and transcribing them. Both in small groups and in full-class exercises, we were able to check the transcriptions and correct each other because everyone involved was listening to the same sounds. It wasn’t until I taught the course exclusively online that I realized there was another way to do it.

When I tell some people that I teach online courses, they imagine students from around the world tuning in to me lecturing at a video camera. This is not the way Saint John’s does online courses. I do create a few videos every semester, but the vast majority of the teaching I do is through social media, primarily the discussion forums on the Blackboard site connected with the course. I realized that I couldn’t teach phonetics without a way to verify that we were listening to the same sounds, and without that classroom contact I no longer had a way.

I also realized that with high-speed internet connections everywhere in the US, I had a new way to verify that we were listening to the same sounds: use a recording. When I took the graduate Introduction to Phonetics in 1993, we had to go to the lab and practice with the cassette tapes from William Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics, but if I’m remembering right we didn’t actually do any transcription of the sounds; we just practiced listening to them and producing them. Some of us were better at that than others.

In 2015 we are floating in rivers of linguistic data. Human settlements have always been filled with the spontaneous creation of language, but we used to have to pore over their writings or rely on our untrustworthy memories. In the twentieth century we had records and tape, film and video, but so much of what was on that was scripted and rehearsed. If we could get recordings of the unscripted language it was hard to store, copy and distribute them.

Now people create language in forms that we can grab and hold: online news articles, streaming video, tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook comments, podcasts, text messages, voice mails. A good proportion of these are even in nonstandard varieties of the language. We can read them and watch them and listen to them – and then we can reread and rewatch and relisten, we can cut and splice in seconds what would have taken hours – and then analyze them, and compare our analyses.

Instead of telling my students to read English spelling and transcribe in IPA, now I give them a link to a video. This way we’re working from the exact same sequence of sounds, a sequence that we can replay over and over again. I specifically choose pronunciations that don’t match what they find on the dictionary websites. This is precisely what the IPA is for.

Going the other way, I give my students IPA transcriptions and ask them to record themselves pronouncing the transcriptions and post it to Blackboard. Sure, my professor could have assigned us something like this in 1990, but then he would have had to take home a stack of cassettes and spend time rewinding them over and over. Now all my students have smartphones with built-in audio recording apps, and I could probably listen to all of their recordings on my own smartphone if I didn’t have my laptop handy.

So that’s the story about technology and phonetic transcription. Stay tuned for the other story, about the purpose of phonetic transcription.

A tool for annotating corpora

My dissertation focused on the evolution of negation in French, and I’ve continued to study this change. In order to track the way that negation was used, I needed to collect a corpus of texts and annotate them. I developed a MySQL database to store the annotations (and later the texts themselves) and a suite of PHP scripts to annotate the texts and store them in the database. I then developed another suite of PHP scripts to query the database and tabulate the data in a form that could be imported into Microsoft Excel or a more specialized statistics package like SPSS.

I am continuing to develop these scripts. Since I finished my dissertation, I added the ability to load the entire text into the database, and revamped the front end with AJAX to streamline the workflow. The new front end actually works pretty well on a tablet and even a smartphone when there’s a stable internet connection, but I’d like to add the ability to annotate offline, on a workstation or a mobile device. I also need to redo the scripts that query the database and generate reports. Here’s what the annotation screen currently looks like:

I’ve put many hours of work into this annotation system, and it works so well for me, that it’s a shame I’m the only one who uses it. It would take some work to adapt it for other projects, but I’m interested in doing that. If you think this system might work for your project, please let me know (grvsmth@panix.com) and I’ll give you a closer look.