Juan Battle on the Social Justice Sexuality Initiative

In this week’s episode of the JustPublics@365 Podcast Series, I interview Juan Battle on his work heading the Social Justice Sexuality Initiative.

Professor Battle is Professor of Sociology, Public Health, & Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also the Coordinator of the Africana Studies Certificate Program. In this interview we talk about the goals of the Social Justice Sexuality Initiative as well as collecting survey data and acquiring funding. Professor Battle ends by talking about his work with community activists and sharing the large amount of data he collected.

Podcast – Juan Battle on the Social Justice Sexuality Initiative

Introduction to Social Justice Topic Series: Stop-And-Frisk

Today begins our month-long social justice topic series which asks academics, activists, and journalists to reimagine New York City after the end of stop-and-frisk and to consider how civic engagement and greater democracy might be promoted for all residents. The first week of this month’s series, Stop-At-Frisk At A Glance, will provide an overview of the issue to-date. We will include a blog post on the connection between social justice and activism, as well as interviews with activists and academics in the field. Emily Sherwood, a member of the JustPublics@365 team, will introduce an interactive timeline about milestones in the Stop-and-Frisk story along with steps to creating your own digital timeline to use as a form of digital activism and social engagement.

“The Morris Justice Project teamed up with the Illuminator to share some of the initial findings of their ongoing research into policing in the Morris Avenue area of the South Bronx. As a crowd watched from across the street, the Illuminator projected survey results onto a high-rise apartment building. Two short films were also projected: Julie Dressner’s New York Times op-doc “The Scars of Stop and Frisk” and “Community Safety Act” by The NYCLU and Communities United for Police Reform. Drummers from BombaYo provided a musical intro.”

Stop-and-frisk has been a tool used by the NYPD for decades, though in recent years the number of criticisms and grassroots protests around police tactics has increased tremendously. In the case of Terry v. Ohio (1968), the United States Supreme Court established a national legal basis allowing officers to stop, question and frisk citizens. This decision allowed police officers to stop and detain individuals based on reasonable suspicion rather than a higher level proof of probable cause. According to the NYCLU, New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 4 million times since 2002. Nearly 9 out of 10 of those stopped and frisked have been completely innocent with Black and Latino communities representing an overwhelming target of these tactics.

While Mayor Bloomberg and New York City police officials have stated stops-and-frisks are beneficial for decreasing crime, citizens of NYC affected by stop-and-frisk saw these tactics as intrusive, unwarranted and ineffective. Together with activists, journalist, and academics, the city of New York City organized to shed light on the realities of stop-and-frisk and on August 12th, 2013, the U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin found that the New York City Police Department had violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments in the way that they have conducted stop-and-frisks, thus ending a controversial policing experiment.

Click here for more information about our Monthly Social Justice Topic Series.

If you have any questions, research that you would like to share related to Stop-and-Frisk or are interested in being interviewed for the series, please contact Morgane Richardson at justpublics365@gmail.com with the subject line, “Stop-and-Frisk Series.”

—

Be Informed. Stay Updated. Stop, Question and and Frisk Policing Practices in NYC. A Primer (Revised).

JustPublics@365 Podcast Episode Janet Gornick

Janet Gornick on Income Inequality; Heidi Knoblauch; Luxembourg Income Study Center (LIS), inequality, the Graduate Center, CUNY

In this week’s episode of the JustPublics@365 Podcast Series, I interview Janet Gornick on her research on working families and income inequality. Professor Gornick is Professor of Political Science and Sociology and director of the Luxembourg Income Study Center (LIS) at the City University of New York. In this interview we talk about the impact of income inequality and why people should care about issues of inequality. She answers questions about her research on duel earner families and the work of LIS. Professor Gornick ends the interview with insights into how her work has been used by activists and how she sees herself as a scholar-activist.

Jessie Daniels, Chase Robinson, and Matthew K. Gold on JustPublics@365

JustPublics@365 is launching its podcast series this week! The weekly podcast highlights academic research on social justice and inequality. To kick off the podcast series, I sat down with Jessie Daniels, Chase Robinson, and Matthew K. Gold to talk about the project’s goals and how JustPublics@365 leverages digital media. In this interview I ask the three principle investigators of JustPublics@365 about knowledge streams and the ways that digital media can foster “public scholarship.”

Podcast – Jessie Daniels, Chase Robinson, and Matthew K. Gold on JustPublics@365

(new) Public Goods– Thursday oct. 3 @ the New School 9:30-12:30

(New) Public Goods: Design, Aesthetics and Politics. Oct, 3 @ 9:30am

Parsons the New School for Design and the School of Design Strategies invites you to the 2013 Stephan Weiss Lecture Series:

(New) Public Goods: Design, Aesthetics and Politics
A conversation curated by Eduardo Staszowski, Vyjayanthi Rao, Scott Brown and Virginia Tassinari.

Thursday, October 3
9:30am-12:30pm

Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall
The New School, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York

This Fall’s Stephan Weiss Lecture considers the import of design practices concerned with the production and distribution of public goods, including public services and utilities, public policy, government institutions, and other organizations working within the public realm or subjected to broad public scrutiny. Increasingly, the focus of design is shifting from questions of form to questions of transformation. The Weiss Lecture will explore the challenges these design practices pose to the relationship between institutional infrastructure and regulative norms, as well as to emerging forms of commons and community. Configured as a Design Strategies Dialogue, this event brings together five leading figures from the world of design and the social sciences, alongside discussants Clive Dilnot, Victoria Hattam and Jamer Hunt:

PELLE EHN: Professor at Malmö University’s School of Arts and Communication

MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER: Professor at Malmö University School of Arts and Communication and Director of Studies for the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education

CARL DISALVO: Associate Professor in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology

JOAN GREENBAUM: Professor Emerita at City University of New York and the New Media Lab at the CUNY Graduate Center

KEITH MURPHY: Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California Irvine.

With Discussants: Clive Dilnot, Victoria Hattam and Jamer Hunt

Podcast Series Launch

This October, JustPublics@365 is launching a podcast series highlighting research by CUNY faculty on issues of social justice and inequality.

The series will feature the work of faculty from the Political Science, Sociology, English, Psychology, Social Work, Anthropology, and Music departments who will share insights from their research as well as how they came to do the research they do and how that research might connect to social justice activism and may have an impact on the world beyond academia.

Scheduled interviews include conversations with Janet Gornick, Juan Battle, Margaret Chin, Mike Fabricant, Michelle Fine, Ashley Dawson, Francis Fox Piven, Victoria Sanford, Leith Mullings and others.

The first podcast, an interview with Janet Gornick, will be released on Monday, October 7.

From Tweet to Blog post to Peer-Reviewed Article: How to be a Scholar Now

Digital media is changing how I do my work as a scholar. How I work today bares little resemblance to the way I was trained as a scholar, but has everything to do with being fluid with both scholarship and digital technologies. To illustrate what I mean by this, I describe the process behind a recent article of mine that started with a Tweet at an academic conference, then became a blog post, then a series of blog posts, and was eventually an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

My article, Race and racism in Internet Studies: A review and critique (New Media & Society 15 (5): 695-719), was just published in the August, special issue of New Media & Society on The Rise of Internet Studies, edited by Charles Ess and William Dutton. The germ of an idea for the paper began at the American Sociology Association Annual Meeting in 2010. I attended sessions about online discourse and, given my interest in racism in online discourse, I kept expecting some one to bring up this issue.

NoSoMuch_Aug2013 I was disappointed by the lack of attention to racism, or race more generally, in the sessions I attended, and Tweeted that observation, using the hashtag of the conference (#asa2010). When I consulted the program for the conference I was truly perplexed to find that the only session on race and digital media was the one I’d help organize. In a lot of ways, a Tweet is just a “soundbite” in 140-characters of text. And, as the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggests, there’s nothing wrong with a soundbite, especially if you want to reach a wider audience than just other specialists in your field.

That one Tweet – and the lack of scholarship it spoke to – got me thinking about the kinds of sessions I would like to see at the ASA and the sorts of things I thought sociologists should be studying in this area, so I wrote a blog post about it, “Race, Racism & the Internet: 10 Things Sociologists Should be Studying.” As I usually do now, I shared that blog post via Twitter.

I got many responses from people who shared their work, and the work of their students, friends and colleagues, with me in the form of comments to the blog or @replies on Twitter. The suggestions for further citations came from people I know almost exclusively through our interactions via the blog or Twitter. That feedback from geographically-remote, institutionally-varied yet digitally-close colleagues got me thinking about expanding that single blog post into a series of posts. I wanted to review the wide-range of interdisciplinary work happening in what Ess and Dutton call “Internet studies.” Why bother with this, one might reasonably ask?

Central to this new workflow of scholarship is the blog, Racism Review (RR), which I started in 2007 with Joe Feagin, a past president of the ASA, with the goal of creating an online resource for reliable, scholarly information for journalists, students and members of the general public who are seeking solid evidence-based research and analysis of “race” and racism. The blog has very much become part of “how to be a scholar” in the current, digital moment. I use it to post first drafts of ideas, to keep up-to-date on the research literature, and since I firmly believe that writing is thinking, I often use it to work out just what I think about something. The blog has also become a way to support other scholars both in their research and in teaching. A number of academics have told us that they use the blog in teaching; one, Kimberley Ducey (Asst. Prof., University of Winnipeg) uses RR blog posts in an instructor’s manual for a traditional intro sociology textbook as lecture suggestions, in-class activities, and essays/assignments. Through the many guest bloggers we host, I learn about other people’s scholarly work that I might not otherwise know about. And, the blog has become a mentoring platform, where early career scholars often get started with blogging and then go on to create their own. The blog is also content-hungry, so I’m always thinking about scholarship that might make an interesting blog post. So, back to the series of posts.

From late February to early March, 2011, I did a series of blog posts that expanded on the initial “10 Things,” post from August, 2010. Those posts were all about the current scholarship on race, racism and the Internet with each one focusing on a different sub-field in sociology, including: 1) Internet infrastructure and labor force issues; 2) digital divides and mobile technology; 3) racist social movement groups; 4) social networking sites; 5) dating; 6) housing; and 7) the comments sections of news and sports sites. This last area, racism in comments sections, prompted a research collaboration with one of the presenters from that 2010 ASA session I organized. The paper from that project eventually appeared in the journal Media, Culture & Society.

At about the same, there was a fortuitous Call for Papers for the Ess & Dutton special issue on Internet studies at 15 years into the field. So I combined all of the blog posts into one paper, and thought more about what my critique of the field as a whole might be. For that critique, I ended up revisiting some of Stuart Hall’s earlier writing about the “spectacle” of race in media scholarship and incorporated that with elements of Joe Feagin and Sean Elias’ critique of “racial formation” as a weak theoretical frame for Internet studies. The paper went into an extended peer review process, I revised it once, and it finally appeared (online ahead of print) in December 2012, and in print in August, 2013.

Except for the very end of this process – submitting the paper to the journal for peer-review – none of this way of working bares the least bit of resemblance to how I was trained to be a scholar. My primary job as an academic is to create new knowledge, traditionally measured by the number of articles and books I produce. Traditional graduate school training has taught us to think of a “pipeline” of notes, posters, conference papers, journal submissions (and/or, book proposals), revisions, resubmissions and finally, print publication. For me, how to be a scholar now is completely different than when I went to graduate school because of the way that digital media infuses pretty much every step.

This process I’ve described here – from Tweet at an academic conference, to a blog post, to a series of blog posts to a paper that became an article – is just one of many possible iterations of how to be a scholar now using digital media. Other permutations of how to be a scholar now might include live Tweeting an article you’re reading. Sometimes, when I get pre-set “alerts” in my email about newly published scholarship I’m interested in, I will share a title and a link via Twitter. If, upon reading further, I find the piece especially perspicacious, I may share select sentences via Twitter. If it happens that there’s a current event in the news that the article can help illuminate, then I’ll draft a blog post that incorporates it.

My experience with the germ of an idea shared as a Tweet at an academic conference that became a blog post, then a series of blog posts, and (eventually) a peer-reviewed is just one example of what it means to be a scholar now is changing. From where I sit, being a scholar now involves creating knowledge in ways that are more open, more fluid, and more easily read by wider audiences.

~ This post originally appeared at the LSE Impact Blog.

Illustrated Blogging Advice for Researchers

I really think that you should blog. That whatever is getting in your way, you should shove it aside and just write something.

But let’s be honest, my advice is insufficient. As my last couple of posts went up I could just picture some of you saying, “well sure, it’s easy for you, you draw cartoons.”

So I sought out a little help (or rather, a lot of help). Today’s post features expertise from (and cartoons inspired by)…

Seth Godin (sethgodin.typepad.com)
Beth Kanter (bethkanter.org)
Henry Jenkins (henryjenkins.org)
Robert Kosara (eagereyes.org)
Jessie Daniels (racismreview.com/blog)
Nathan Yau (flowingdata.com)
Lisa Wade (thesocietypages.org/socimages)
Ewen Le Borgne (km4meu.wordpress.com)
Tom Murphy (aviewfromthecave.com)
David Henderson (fullcontactphilanthropy.com)
Jane Davidson (genuineevaluation.com)
Molly Engle (blogs.oregonstate.edu/programevaluation)
Jara Dean-Coffey (jcdpartnerships.com/towhatend)
Bonnie Koenig (goinginternational.com/blog)
Stephanie Evergreen (stephanieevergreen.com/blog)
Karen Anderson (ontopoftheboxeval.wordpress.com)
Pablo Rodriguez-Bilella (albordedelchaos.com)
Chi Yan Lam (chiyanlam.com)
Ann Emery (emeryevaluation.com)
Sheila B Robinson (sheilabrobinson.com)
Molly Hamm (mollyhamm.wordpress.com)
Jamie Clearfield (jclearfield.wordpress.com)

The Questions

I asked two questions, other than the slightly leading nature of the questions (woops, I’ll do better next time), I provided no direction on response length or style, so the responses varied greatly.

1. What’s been your biggest blogging challenge (finding the time, picking good topics, the technology, etc.)?

2. What piece of advice would you give (or have already given) to an evaluator or researcher interested in starting a blog?

Advice and challenges change over time, so it was important to me to reach out to bloggers with a wide range of experience. This post would not exist without the expert help. I’ve thanked each blogger, but if you get anything out of their advice, please send them your own appreciation.

***

A little admin before we get started…I’ve been considering putting together an online workshop on blogging for evaluators and researchers.

The basic approach would involve walking through content development, helping you set up the technology, and talking about strategies for reaching an audience. The workshop would take place on the web and include video tutorials and practical lessons.

I would want to do it right, so this would take a lot of work on my part, and I’ll only set this up if there is enough interest. So if you are interested, sign up here to let me know.

Jamie Clearfield

On challenges

I’d say the biggest challenge for me is actually hitting the publish button. Getting an idea that I think is worth writing about is challenging for sure – but I think the bigger issue is believing in the idea enough to actually put it out on the web. The first blog post sat as a draft for a bit and finally it was a “rip the band-aid off” moment…

Advice

I think the best advice I’ve gotten and would give is to just keep things simple and believe – believe in your ideas and experiences and that there are people who are reading. Don’t over think things too much and have fun.

Molly Hamm

On challenges

Biggest blogging challenge: Keeping up with all of the information from other bloggers in the field while finding time to create your own contributions. I find that it can be easy to get so involved in following other conversations that you forget to add your own two cents! So you may feel as though you are actively participating in blogging and other e-communities while your own blog sits in silence (yes, I need to update my blog!)

Advice

Create a regular schedule for blogging and stick to it. This is something that I really need to work on, but I think it’s important to set a realistic writing goal for your blog (number of posts per week, month, etc.) and then reserve a specific day/time per week/month where you commit to writing on a regular basis. This will ensure that you take the time to gather your thoughts and put them out into the blogosphere.

Also it’s useful to have handy a notepad (tdigital or Post-it!) to jot down inspiration/ideas when they hit. Especially useful to write down ideas as you’re sifting through other blog posts, tweets, reports, websites, e-learning, etc. This allows you to constantly use available information to inform your own writing (reading with a purpose that is actually connected to your blog!)

Sheila B Robinson

On challenges

My biggest challenge is content. I have lots of ideas that spring to mind, but my challenges lie in:

a.) having enough “meat” to go along with an initial idea to flesh it out and write something I think will be relevant, interesting, helpful or useful to someone, and

b.) having the confidence to put it out there – I hold back sometimes thinking about the fact that lots of people are blogging about similar ideas (after all, the “hot topics” are of interest to lots of us), and wondering if I have enough of an original spin on something to create a viable post.

Advice

I would give someone the same advice I received (from someone you know VERY well!) [ed. note: she’s talking about me ]

a.) Just do it! You have virtually nothing to lose. I overcame the concerns about “what if I won’t have enough time or enough content, or enough visitors,” etc. by coming to terms with the fact that if I write something, there it is and it’s fine.

If I don’t have time or content, I simply don’t post. If the blog goes by the wayside and I decide to move on to other projects, I’m OK with that. Holding myself to a weekly schedule didn’t work for me for very long after all, and I’m OK with that. It may very well work for others, so I would advise them to try a schedule and see how it goes.

Blogging is somewhat like dieting – you may have to try different strategies; some may work for a short time, or a long time, or not at all, and you have to be willing to change your strategies based on your results. And your expected results are unique to you. Some people diet to lost weight, some to alleviate a health problem, some to feel better. Some people blog for fun and because they enjoy writing; others do it to build a reputation or clientele, or to sell their products.

b.) Some posts will be more interesting and receive more traffic than others, and so be it. Whether you’re Seth Godin, or Sheila Robinson, traffic will ebb and flow and I’ve learned that that is not what it’s all about for me.

Sure, it’s fun to watch the numbers and I get excited when I get more traffic and people are paying attention to my work. Who wouldn’t? But neither am I crushed when a post fails to generate much interest. It’s all fun for me, and the evaluator in me finds it interesting to look at my data and think about what people like and want to read. But I have nothing to sell right now, so my goals may be different from some others.

Ann Emery

On challenges

At first: Nor having anything to write about.

Now: Having way too much to write about.

Advice

Include an image with every post. Images make your content more share-able (aka a mini version of your image will show up when you and others link to your post on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, etc.)… which means more views and more appealing, interesting posts.

Get creative. Avoid those generic stock images. Go for screenshots, photos you took yourself, videos, sketches, and cartoons.

Chi Yan Lam

On challenges

My biggest blogging challenge… probably has to do with finding the time. It takes a real commitment to sit down and produce something of a ‘blah’ quality, let alone something of a ‘wow’ quality. It’s challenging because blogging isn’t particularly accorded any value within academia. (Can it really go no my CV? No.)

Advice

1) I kept a blog for more than a year before gaining any traction. The turning point for me was when I started the 5×52 project. I let go of the idea that I had to write full-length scholarly ‘high-quality’ posts.

I realized that the blog could be a space for my thinking. Instead of insisting on writing for an audience, I wrote for myself. I guess what this boils down to is this: Blogging is simply a platform. There are many successful models of blogging. The important thing is to make blogging goals consistent with one’s goals. Don’t Emulate. Create.

2). I really buy into the whole concept of digitals scholarship. It starts with the belief that no research is good unless communicated. Building on that, I believe that all academics/researchers should engage in knowledge dissemination. For a practical field like ours, it makes sense to engage in digital scholarship — blogging, tweeting, etc…

Pablo Rodriguez-Bilella

On challenges

Being regular and constant has been my biggest blogging challenge. Some (good) months I can write two or three times what I write in others (bad months). I have also tried to have at least a “light post” each week (smartly call “Viernes Light”), but the issue of regularity has also been present there.

I cannot say that I can´t find good topics to pick, usually the problem has been that there are several good topics I would like to write about them.

Advice

Writing a post is usually lot of work, but don´t forget to let the world know about it! You should become a good friend of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and find the smartest way to post in each of them.

For instance, in LinkedIn you should carefully select the groups more appropriate for your topics, and be careful to not spam every group with your messages (you will receive some warnings before being expelled for not following the etiquette).

Karen Anderson (ontopoftheboxeval.wordpress.com)

On challenges

I’ve been blogging for a couple years now and I’d say the fire burns out for me at times and I can’t think of anything fresh or relevant.

Advice

Don’t start, it becomes quite the addiction. (lol)
look outside of evaluation for inspiration and tips…places like problogger.
Make efforts to engage and partner with bloggers online and offline.
Consitency is king
Find a niche…quick, you don’t want people guessing what they’ll get from you all the time.
Subscribe and comment on other Eval blogs
Have a larger purpose for your blog, what mark do you want to make, what’s the ‘end goal’?

Stephanie Evergreen

On challenges

Opening myself to criticism. Blogging was originally just an outlet for me but as it grew and got attention I realized the world includes people who like to argue and Internet trolls.

Advice

Choose topics you want to learn more about and use the blog as an excuse to bone up on your skills or knowledge a bit.

Bonnie Koenig

On challenges

I haven’t had any particular blogging challenges. Perhaps because I came ‘late to blogging’ compared to many of my colleagues and friends, I asked for a lot of advice before I started blogging and mostly knew what to expect (and perhaps challenges to anticipate).

Advice

Blog when you have something useful to share – don’t be bound by specific timelines and feeling like you ‘have to write something’.

Jara Dean-Coffey

On challenges

I think it is probably two things:

1) Finding a concentrated amount of time (at 2 to 3 hours) to focus in on a topic and then move in to writing a strong enough drive that requires no more than 30 minutes to refine, and

2) Creating a range of voices that speak to our approach, our experiences and reflections that resonate with a variety of audiences and which compel others to take risks, have confidence in their inherent knowing and to strengthen their intentionality.

Advice

Spend some time looking at other people’s blogs and the blogs they read. Find ones that speak to you in terms of perspective and tone.

Ask yourself a few questions (I have a couple worksheets) such as:
a) why do I want to write,
b) what do I want to write about,
c) who is my audience and what interests them,
d) what is my perspective/voice (expert, trainer, synthesizer….) ..etc.

And now, just write. Make yourself a schedule and commit. It doesn’t get any easier unless you practice. Oh, and part of the value I find in blogging is disciplined reflection on my own practice.

Molly Engle

On challenges

My biggest blogging challenge is what to write…there is so much; yet is it timely, needed, wanted? I have to remember that evaluation is an everyday activity…however obscure. (I ignore the technology unless something goes wrong; I am, after all, a technopeasant.)

Advice

Starting a blog—be passionate about your topic; if you are, you will always be able to write something even if it doesn’t seem timely or needed. (chocolate torte, anyone?)

Jane Davidson

On challenges

Definitely finding the time! Patricia and I started strong but seem to have been so swamped with other things that it is difficult to get much up on the blog. But, we would rather do good stuff less often than just fill the space for the sake of it.

Advice

The blogs I love the most are the ones where the bloggers’ personalities and senses of humor shine clearly through. Write good, thought-provoking stuff, but don’t be shy about putting your own signature spin on it.

The nice thing about blogs is that people deliberately opt to tune intoyou – unlike discussion lists, where we have to be conscious of chewing up too much of the airspace. Don’t swamp people with too much content, but make whatever you put out there fun to read! And a cute cartoon will do wonders as well!

David Henderson

On challenges

Finding the time is a good excuse, but I am too intimately aware of my stupid internet browsing habits to justifiably argue I don’t have time to blog.

I think more challenging is not to psych myself out. I will regularly start posts all to decide that whatever “insight” I’m writing about feels so plainly obvious to me, that it wouldn’t be valuable to anyone else, and then scrap the post all together.

Advice

There’s a lot of crap and dubious advice out there. I always encourage folks who want to start blogging to not be afraid to elevate their posts above the all too common nonprofit blogging dribble.

I like to think about blogs as light version of a research report or paper. In this framing, blog posts are not totally absolved of the constraints of substantiating arguments and citing sources. The best bloggers are those who I learn from. To that end, I’d advise new bloggers to think about blogging as (at least in part) a teaching platform.

Tom Murphy

On challenges

For me it is still getting over publishing and putting myself out there. Even when I am doing more of a reported story than a blog/opinion I feel a sort of resistance to publishing and the vulnerability that comes with it once it is out there. The other stuff is relatively easy for me at this point, but there is that fear of rejection or failure that immediately follows hitting the publish button.

Advice

Think of it as an extension of what you are already doing. You are reading and pulling together a lot of information and resources about what you know best. Blogging is a public way to gather that information, make a few notes and share with others.

The benefits are that people will interact with you. It can foster connections and potential suggestions/opportunities that may not have existed prior. Also, there is the fact that there is evidence showing how blogging about research can lead to more citations and reads of published works. As long as the person does not say anything improper, blogging is a great support for a researcher’s work.

Ewen Le Borgne

On challenges

Originally it was the discipline to get at blogging and to carve out time for it. It took me 2 years to become a regular blogger but at some point it clicked and became a bit of an addiction – of the nice type though!

No, more recently I find that the challenge has been to precisely reverse the engine and to perhaps blog a bit less but really aim at good quality posts – the wow posts you mentioned. I sometimes post a piece that I know I’m not too happy with – but it’s sometimes difficult to resist the instant gratification of getting a post out there and seeing the reactions.

Advice

First off, to find out that they are not alone in this and to look at other testimonials and experiences from other researcher/evaluator bloggers (it’s likely to be much more convincing coming from their peers than from any other source), then to think carefully about the focus of their blog and its relation with their organisation/clients etc. This can become a thorny issue so it deserves a bit of thinking.

The rest is just fly and fly higher, trial and error, reflection all along the way, engagement… and fun! My personal motto if ‘fun, focus and feedback’ and I think it suits blogging pretty well

Lisa Wade

On challenges

Thinking big picture, one of the biggest and most exciting challenges is change. Adapting to unexpected change started right away.

When we started blogging six years ago, the idea was that it would be a place for my sociology instructor friends to swap images we were using in teaching. As more and more people started reading who weren’t sociologists, we had the opportunity to adapt the site, making it a place for anyone interested in sociological commentary. The result was a lot more work and responsibility, but the reward was proportionally exciting.

Technological change has also offered both opportunities and new demands. When we started, blogs were just blogs. As the years have gone by, the importance of being on Facebook (especially) and Twitter (secondarily so) and the fun possibilities of things like Pinterest have emerged. Now it isn’t just Sociological Images, it’s Sociological Images and its auxiliary sites. These are now all part of the day-to-day work and reward of the site.

Finally, my own career has changed in ways that I never anticipated. The blog has made me more visible as a social commentator and I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak to journalists, write for well-known outlets, and travel for public speaking.

Together, the rising readership, expanding reach of the site, and the new dimension to my career has required me to adapt many times over. It’s been a fun, but wild ride.

Advice

Academic blogging is, I believe, win-win. As a community, the more we share each others material and try to draw attention to each other, the more social science will become a go-to way of thinking about social problems.

So, if you’re interested in starting a site, think about all other sites as your friend. Borrow their content, let them borrow yours. Talk them up and refer people there. Link and link again.

When we all do our best to draw attention to social science as a lens, more and more people will visit all of our sites. When they do that, the policy makers, voters, and Thanksgiving table debaters all become better able to understand our world and help others understand too. And that’s a wonderful thing.

Nathan Yau

On challenges

The biggest challenged with FlowingData is probably maintaining the right balance between academic and casual. If I get too technical, I confuse a lot of readers, but I can’t get too casual, because I might oversimplify concepts that are actually complex.

Advice

It’s really easy to start a blog these days, so you might as well try it out. Some researchers might be worried that the general public will misunderstand findings, but it’s a great chance for you to explain what you do and involve yourself with groups of people who are excited about the same stuff as you.

Jessie Daniels

On challenges

I would say that the biggest challenge with blogging has to do with time. And, by this, I don’t mean “finding the time” to blog, but more to do with pacing.

I’ve been blogging at Racism Review since 2007, along with Joe Feagin, the blog’s co-founder (and, long ago, my dissertation chair). Ours is a scholarly blog, so we’re always trying to take some current event or news item and reflect it through the research literature to add a new dimension. The pace of how quickly things happen online and the pace of how slowly scholarly research happens are really at odds with each other. I often find that by the time I’ve really thought deeply about some item rippling through Internet, the moment of when that is ‘new’ has long since passed.

The other challenge that has to do with pacing is thinking about the long haul. We’ve been blogging since April, 2007 which, according to my math, is a little over six years. When we first started it, we tried to blog every day. Posting every single day is a pretty daunting pace to keep up with over a long period of time. To help ease that burden, we’ve tried to enlist as many ‘guest bloggers’ and additional contributors as possible, but sometimes cajoling other academics into blogging presents its own set of challenges. In general, I think we’ve done pretty well keeping it up given that Joe and I have very busy academic lives beyond the blog.

Advice

I get asked for advice about blogging fairly often and my biggest advice is to figure out what your particular niche or formula is. As I mentioned, at Racism Review, we try to connect current events having to do with race or racism to solid academic research. Having a really very clear, specific idea at the outset about what your contribution will be makes it much easier to get started and to maintain it over time.

Robert Kosara

On challenges

There is an obvious answer here and there is a somewhat deeper one. Of course it’s a challenge to find the time. I could do other things. I could read. I could sleep. I could go for a run.

I think the biggest challenge has been to find the right direction for this blog. After almost six years, I’m still not sure where this thing is going. I keep changing direction. Sometimes, somebody tells me they do or don’t like something. But I don’t have a clearly defined audience like a fashion blog or a technology blog or similar.

It’s not that there aren’t enough good topics, there are more than I could ever write about. Rather, the question is what do I think I can contribute to? I don’t care about just posting links to interesting stuff, others do that already and I can’t bring myself to just summarize what somebody else has done for a link posting.

The challenge is to not let that paralyze you. I keep a list of topics in my todo program, in a folder. When I don’t know what to write, I look through those and pick one. You need to keep writing, and you need to try things to see if they work. A simple posting today, a little visualization project next week, then a book review, etc.

To summarize it in a word, perhaps the biggest challenge is consistency. Consistency in topics, style, and frequency.

Advice

I have three pieces of advice.

1) Don’t worry about the technology. Don’t tinker. Just write.

2) Pick an audience to write for, but don’t get too focused on that. Your audience might change. People you wouldn’t have expected to read your blog will read it. Be prepared to go outside the box and change direction accordingly. But to write reasonably well, you need to have an idea of who you’re writing for.

3) Hang in there. Nobody will read your blog at first. Nobody. After a year, you might have a few readers. Don’t give up. A blog doesn’t just explode onto the Internet (unless you’re incredibly lucky). It’s going to take time. If you give up after a few months with just a few readers, you will never get more.

Henry Jenkins

On challenges

Before I started blogging, the biggest concern I had was whether I would have the time to keep up with my blog. The advice I got from Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) was “make the time.” And he was right.

Advice

For me, a key is integrating the blog into the broader range of activities I am doing, so I am always looking for ways to use the blog in my teaching, my research, my recreation life, my friendships. You need to decide going in how often you are going to blog and stick to it like you would do any other deadline.

On any given day, there is always going to be something more pressing than blogging, so if you do not think of it as a responsibility to yourself and your readers, you will slow down and eventually stop. I think of it as like a journalist putting out a daily edition, i.e. it’s a deadline that must be met.

I put it out at a consistent time on a consistent day and I can count on my fingers the number of times I have missed a deadline since I started my blog in 2006. When I need to take a break, I announce that I am doing so and give myself permission for downtime, but I do not miss a deadline arbitrarily on a day in, day out basis.

Given the complexities of my life, this means I am planning further and further ahead, so I have a fall back if a piece of content fails to materialize. For this to work, I end up balancing between topical issues and ever-green content that I hold in reserve in case I am facing a hole on any given day that needs to be filled.

Beth Kanter

On challenges

I’ve been blogging for ten years now. I love it. I look at it my personal learning time and I try carve out a half hour or hour every day to write about something. This reflection time is so important. But, with that said, what’s hard is to keep up the discipline so I make the time to reflect and write every day. Sometimes with a busy speaking schedule and client work, it is hard to do.

My biggest challenge is when I get bored … when my muse goes into hiding. Sometimes, I’m so excited new developments or new angles on topics that I’ve been writing about – but there are some times that ennui creeps in. What I do is allow myself to write about a slightly different or adjacent topic or recruit guest bloggers and take a break.

Advice

Look at your blogging time as a form of professional development and a commitment to write something regularly. Don’t get caught up with making it perfect either …. a blog is different from writing a research article.

Seth Godin

On challenges

Decide on the audience you want and ignore everyone else.

Advice

Write every single day. If something you write spreads to the audience you care about, and if it changes them in the way you hope, write more like that.

Discussion

Are you a blogger, if so, what are your biggest challenges? Have any advice to share, or reiterate?

Not a blogger, why not? What’s holding you back?

Let me know in the comments.

~ This post is by Chris Lysy and originally appeared at FreshSpectrum; it is re-blogged here with permission.

What it Means to be an Academic is Changing

What it means to be an academic is changing. Academic researchers are finding it harder to either become or stay ensconced in an ivory tower removed from the rest of society.

(Image source)

In a recent LSE Review of Books podcast, Matthew Flinders, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, talks about his new book Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2012), and discusses some of these changes. At about the 8 minute mark in the podcast, Flinders says:

“What does it mean to be a university professor? For me, it doesn’t mean professing to other professors or to students. That’s part of the job, but it’s only one small element. The role of an academic is changing. We’re going through a culture shift – a culture shift that’s driven by external drivers. And these external drivers are basically saying that at a time when public monies are very scarce, and competition for those resources is intense, if you want to take money from the public purse, you need to show that there’s some social benefit for using that money.

Therefore now, academics are under more pressure to show that their research has some form of impact. Some academics see this as a threat – to intellectual freedoms, to thinking. Within political science, there’s a much broader debate that began in American political science, about the way the discipline has evolved it has become disconnected from the world it professes to study.

In my experience, at least 99% of the profession, at least the younger members of the profession, are signed up to this particular challenge, because they feel that you can’t study politics from your office. You can’t study politics from crunching data. Politics is about emotions and passions and fears and pain. Somehow, the study of politics has become de-politicized. I ask anybody to pick up an academic journal and first, wonder if they’d be able to read it, and secondly, wonder if they’d really understood why that mattered to the real world, or got any of that sense that politics is about human relationships.

If academics cannot construct a narrative that says ‘my research has some relevance to the world in which we live,’ if they can’t do that, then I can understand why politicians and ministers and the public say, ‘well why the dickens are we funding you?’ “

Flinders is speaking about his discipline of political science and about the UK, where there is still public funding for research. Flinders’ comments are nearly identical to those of Michael Burawoy’s remarks about sociology in the US, who has said:

“Academics are living a fool’s paradise if they think they can hold on to their ivory tower. The public is no longer prepared to subsidize our academic pursuits. We have to demonstrate our public worth.”

One example of academics who are successfully reaching beyond the academy is the work of the Center for Urban Research (CUR) here at the Graduate Center, which uses statistical data and mapping software to provide better understanding of a host of urban issues. In partnership with the League of Women Voters, the CUR developed a website for citizens in New York City to quickly and easily find their elected representatives. The site, Who Represents Me NYC, just launched last month.

In Brooklyn, faculty and students at Pratt are using the tools of Urban Design and Architecture to design ways of rebuilding a sustainable NYC waterfront in the face of the realities of climate change post-Hurricane Sandy.

(Image from After#Sandy)

In the Bronx, the Public Science Project has been working with residents there to create The Morris Justice Project, using participatory research to resist the damaging policies of the NYPD.

(Image created by The Illuminator)

The Morris Justice Project partnered with The Illuminator – a roving van created during the Occupy Wall Street movement – to project their community-collected data onto a local apartment building. The projected image took the form of an open letter to the NYPD. The data called out like a “bat signal” gathering neighbors to discuss what it means to live, work, raise kids, shop, go to school, play, and pray in a community that experienced nearly 4,000 police stops in 2011. Half of these stops involved physical force.

These are just a few, New York City-based examples of academic researchers connecting with people beyond the usual, small circle of fellow experts. There are many others, of course. I wrote here just recently about the excellent partnership between the LSE and The Guardian to produce “Reading the Riots,” intended to reach a broad audience with a critical analysis of the riots that swept London.

What all these examples point to are the ways in which being an academic is changing. Partly this change is due to the rise in digital technologies that make publishing a much easier proposition than in the pre-digital era. This change is also partly due to the rise of alternative academic careers, such as data analysts, mapping experts, and data visualization experts, that are opening up at the same time as the adjunctification of academia means fewer, traditional tenure track jobs are available. Of course, the rise of these alternative careers is in no way keeping pace with the decline in tenure track openings, but their emergence, alongside the rise in digital technologies, does point to new ways of thinking about being an academic and a public intellectual.

There’s something else at play that’s changing what it means to be an academic. We live in a moment in in the US which income inequality is approaching historic new levels that, as President Obama recently observed, “is fraying the social fabric of our society.” A recent study finds that 80%, or 4 out of 5, US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. Academics, both those lucky few in tenure-bearing jobs and those looking to find them, are part of this social reality as well. Within such a context in which so many people, including many struggling academics, are hurting it seems improvident, maybe even unethical, to be checked into the Ivory Tower motel using the free Internet, HBO and talking to ourselves.

Transitions: Jack Gieseking Moves to Bowdoin

With happiness for her and sadness for us, it’s our duty to report that JustPublics@365 Project Manager Jack Gieseking is leaving JP@365 to take on a new a position at Bowdoin College as a postdoctoral fellow in Bowdoin’s new Digital and Computational Studies Initiative.

Jack Gieseking

Jack defended her doctoral dissertation on October 22, 2012 and then almost immediately began work as Project Manager a few weeks later. We snapped her up for the same reasons that Bowdoin sought her out: her enormous enthusiasm for her work, her facility with digital tools, her boundless curiosity, her care and concern for everyone around her, and, of course, her uncanny ability to set up immensely complex, multi-tabbed spreadsheets with ease. Over the eight months she worked on the project, Jack helped get JP@365 up and running and kept it moving over the course of an extremely busy launch.

We are enormously grateful to Jack for her great work and we know she’ll go on to do wonderful things at Bowdoin and beyond. We will miss her and we’ll be staying tuned to her twitter account, @JGieseking, to hear about the work she’ll be embarking upon next year. Good luck, Jack, and thanks for everything!

~ Jessie Daniels & Matthew K. Gold

Jessie Daniels in NYTimes Dialogue on the Meaning of ‘Race’

Many of our efforts here at JustPublics@365 are focused on getting scholars to share their research outside of the walls of academia, particularly through social media and big media. Workshops in our MediaCamp series, such as “Op-Ed Pieces and Pitches: Framing Research for Public Audiences” and “Being Interviewed on Camera: Big Media for Academics,” aim to do just that, and we’re excited with the various successes that we’ve had.

cc-licensed photo “hand” by flickr user JUNG HEE PARK

I’m delighted to report on another success, this time from my colleague Jessie Daniels. Jessie, one of the Co-PIs of JustPublics@365, had a letter co-written with Joe Feagin published in this past weekend’s New York Times as part of the “Sunday Dialogue: The Meaning of ‘Race'”. Coming on the heels of the George Zimmerman trial, Jessie and Joe provide a necessary reminder of the shifting definitions of race and their ramifications within our culture. Congratulations to Jessie and Joe for exemplifying what JP@365 is all about.

Full content of the letter is below (original NYTimes link):

Mr. Hodge raises an important question about how to simultaneously destroy the myth and remedy the harm of the myth of “race.” But Mr. Hodge, like almost everyone else, is operating routinely out of a particular way of seeing that filters and distorts everything about “race.” It is what we refer to as the white racial frame, and extensive social science research demonstrates the myriad ways that laws, politics, culture and social relationships are embedded in it. It makes whoever gets considered “white,” by definition, all right.

Who is and is not considered “white” shifts and changes. In 1916 hearings on an immigration bill before Congress, social science experts of the day testified that southern Italians were a different “race,” decidedly not “white,” were incapable of assimilation, and therefore should be barred from entering. So, indeed, “race” is in one sense an “arbitrary … classification imposed on a continuum of physical differences,” but it also systematically and consistently works to the advantage of some (mostly whites) and to the disadvantage of those classified as “others.”

The harm of white racism is real, and takes the lives of black and brown on a daily basis, decade after decade: Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, James Byrd Jr., Yusef Hawkins, Emmett Till and so many others. The danger in trying to dismantle the myth of “race” before we are ready to remedy the harm of racism is that we will do neither.

JESSIE DANIELS
JOE R. FEAGIN
New York, July 18, 2013

The writers, professors at CUNY Graduate Center and Texas A&M University, respectively, are the co-founders of the scholarly blog Racism Review.

“Reading the Riots” : Academic-Journalism Partnership

Partnerships between academic social science researchers and journalists hold great promise for addressing inequality. At a meeting earlier this month at the London School of Economics (LSE), Professor Tim Newburn of the LSE discussed the Reading the Riots project. This project was run jointly with The Guardian with the aim to produce evidence-based research that would help explain why the rioting spread across England in the summer of 2011. The slides are below and the full podcast of the event is available. It’s definitely worth a listen to hear Newburn describe the opportunities and challenges of this unique academic-journalism partnership.

Social Science in the Public Sphere: Riots, Class and Impact from LSEImpactblog

As Newburn describes, one of the key opportunities the partnership with The Guardian provided traditional academic researchers is reach. The readership of The Guardian far exceeds that of any academic publication by several orders of magnitude and that’s really a game-changer for social science research. At the most basic level, it means that academics need to think about who they want to speak to (and with) when moving beyond the narrow scope of other specialists.

Among the challenges that Newburn enumerates are the radically different pace of work for academics and journalists. Journalists are trained to write quickly to meet deadlines. Academics, well, we like the sound of deadlines as they “whoosh” passed and are accustomed to a much, much slower pace of producing writing (aside: I think this is part of why blogging proves so challenging for many academics).

Newburn also points to some of the interesting methodological issues that arose during this collaboration. He observes that academics and journalists are often engaged in the same practices (e.g., interviewing people, analyzing data), but that academics are often mired in contemplating “how” we engage in these research practices. (Following Newburn’s remarks, the podcast of the event continues with an interesting discussion about “impacts,” something that we’re very interested in here at JustPublics@365.)

In our own academic-journalism partnership between The Graduate Center and the CUNY J-School, I’ve been delighted and amazed at the success of this collaboration around creating the MediaCamp workshops. These workshops offer skill–building in media and digital media combine research and digital media for the public good. We haven’t yet attempted collaborating around a specific research topic, such as the Reading the Riots project, but perhaps that will be next.

What Newburn’s Reading the Riots project and our own MediaCamp workshops mean to me is that there is a new kind of space opening that combines the best of both research and journalism. In this hybrid space, academics and journalists will increasingly collaborate, borrow and remix methods from both fields, and at least potentially, reach wider audiences beyond the narrow range of specialists. Perhaps most exciting to me, is the idea that academic-journalism collaborations could be an innovative way to address issues of social inequality.

Modernism and Audiences, or Killing Time

There has been much happening on this blog of late, and as I return from this mass of ideas that almost sizzle with newness to my more prosaic world of undergraduate teaching and reading, I feel my head brimming over with ideas. I want to bring ALL of this to my students. I want to restructure my entire syllabus(es) so that we can discuss, say, immigration reform and web technologies. I want to build a whole class around the Stop and Frisk app, and turn the conversation away from essay structuring, thesis statements, narrative arcs, and so on to the one that I want to be having: this one.

Rest assured, my English Composition students will still be stuck discussing themes and writing claims until they can formulate insights on their own in well-worded journals and essays. My British Modernism students will be brought back to the Eliot poem (The Waste Land) or the Bernard Shaw play (Pygmalion) on the syllabus for the week, even though we could talk about the social nature of linguistic markers in contemporary New York for hours. And it’s (kinda!) relevant, because Shaw especially builds his whole play around the hollowness of sounding “posh,” showing a flower girl who changes her accent to completely change social perception about her. Language, especially slang, is delicious, as these authors show. Moreover, such “text-to-world” conversations where we take an idea from a play from 1916 and relate it to us today are really important. But they remain curtailed parts of my classroom. Caught between my responsibility to finish the syllabus and the appeal of transforming that curriculum, I am struck in a way by the question of audiences.

Take, for instance, a previous student wandering around the hallways of our department last semester. Seeing me, Rahila popped into my office and with sweet naïveté assumed I was available to speak with her. She told me about enjoying her Chaucer class but that she kept feeling the same disconnect she had experienced with British Modernism in a previous semester. I liberally paraphrase: “These people are clever enough about describing their problems,” she said, “and I like their skills. But where am I in that audience? And, where are the books from then that talk to me and of me?”

The real Alice from Alice in Wonderland

Rahila’s real intellectual distress put me in mind of an article by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (2008; in the spirit of open access, here is a non-subscription copy), where they discuss the broadening scope of Modernist studies in recent times. For them, modernism is no longer a time-bound and hidebound grouping of canonical texts but an organizing principle with core texts and ancillaries so that “scholars now attend to works produced in, say, Asia and Australia” and “investigate complex intellectual and economic transactions among, for example, Europe, Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean.”

As a result of expansions in the field, we can and should disrupt the idea of modernism as “a movement by and for a certain kind of high (cultured mandarins) as against a certain kind of low (the masses, variously regarded as duped by the “culture industry,” admirably free of elitist self-absorption, or simply awaiting the education that would make the community of cognoscenti a universal one)”. To emphasise their point, the article teems with references to further reading. In other words, to see Eliot’s work as simply a “high art” piece meant for elitist people with lots of extra energy for esoteric research is reductive of the literary work which teems with high and low art references, its author’s desire to be both intellectually rigorous and populist, and our own imperative to see beyond the prescribed modes of learning. It’s unfortunate that Rahila still finds herself trapped on one end of the high/low paradigm that critics working in the field find as limited and limiting as she does.

In other words, scholars and authors have already responded to her dissatisfaction–but she hasn’t yet reached them, and not for want of trying but for lack of time. She’s what can be called a new audience member, and it seems to take a lot of time for true insight to develop. (I speak from experience; eight years of graduate study have mostly revealed the stretches I still need to learn and think about.) Unfortunately, the typical undergraduate survey course hardly allows the time to cover half of what one ought to know about a subject. My students often leave vaguely dissatisfied while I follow them out the classroom door talking about all the outside reading they should do when they can. Sometimes, they invest all their frustrations into a final research paper that digs deep into its chosen subject, and after long hours of their reading and thinking, emerges at the end of the term like a crystalline gem.

This returns me to my original thought about audiences. I don’t know if Rahila read the article I referred her to, nor if my Composition students would have preferred to talk about au courant social justice issues instead of the regular lesson on a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. How can I give them those things when I haven’t given them a good handle on the concept of modernism yet, or even some basic guidelines about how to write cogently? In class, I privilege the core skills from my syllabus “Learning Outcomes” and hope that my recommendations, reading lists and the like, will at some later stage be of use to these next wave of thinkers and citizens. The new digital technologies we use certainly allow us more “room” to think and write in, but we need both space and time. How can we, as audiences new and less-new to a variety of subjects, use these new technologies to re-confront the tyranny of time?

Data Visualization of Activist Lesbian-Queer Histories

Jen Jack Gieseking CC BY-NC-SA jgieseking.org

Activist history is especially important to lesbian and queer women because it is this marginalized group’s primary public, visible history. Data visualization tools can help us understand that history.

My research looks at the lives, spaces, and experiences of justice and injustice of lesbians and queer women in New York City from 1983 to 2008, a span of time marked at the beginning by AIDS activism toward the end by the popular cable tv show “The L Word” and asks: did these women’s lives get better? If so, how important was activism to this? Part of this answer is in the archival data of lesbian and queer women’s activism.

Originally part of my dissertation research and now a part of the series of books I am writing, I knew the activist and organizational history was much more complex because I surveyed the complete collection of 2,300+ organizational records at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). Out of that, I created a data visualization (see left) of all NYC-based organizational records spanning my period of study, 1983-2008 (n = 381).

My choice of data visualization as a tool was inspired by a conundrum: how do you make sense of 25 years of radical and mundane social, sexual, political, and cultural history in nearly 2,000 detailed nodes of information spanning a word to a paragraph to a few pages each?

The minutiae of politics, places, and people’s everyday lives was available in the stories of lesbian and queer organizational records and publications in ways that weren’t accessible through other research methods, like the focus group interviews I used in another part of the research. Rather than the individual stories that emerged from personal interviews, an entire chronological history of lesbian-queer life could unfold in the quantitative study of these places, spaces, and people.

This is where data visualization came in. I had read Nathan Yau’s utterly inspiring Visualize This when it came out but never dug in to data visualization and didn’t know how it might be useful for my research.

Attending the MediaCamp workshop on Data Visualization with Amanda Hickman was a breakthrough for me. In that workshop, I realized that the only way my data from the LHA would be revealing and fun was through data visualization. Using the data visualization tools HighChartsJS and jsFiddle, in just a few hours I saw the way my data shifted from 2D to a 3D platform for the public. These tools made my data about activist lesbian and queer women suddenly interactive and engaging in ways I had not imagined.

Here’s an example. One of the key takeaways from my focus groups with lesbians and queer women who came out between 1983 and 2008 was the persistence experience of loss and mourning of key lesbian-queer places, namely neighborhoods and bars, as well as bookstores and other community spaces. At the same time, many women, especially those who had come out in the 1980s and 1990s generations, lived with an expectation that one just created the organization or space they required, often through activism or socializing. When we turn to the actual numbers of lesbian and queer organizations in terms of their totals and their patterns of opening and closing, there is more to these shifts.

The generational social and political shifts explain a great deal about the growth of these organizations and this helps to frame my reading of this visualization. The number of activist lesbian-queer organizations rises significantly in the 1980s and early 1990s, as we can see in the graph above, both in terms of the total and those founded. Many of these groups were inspired by the continued to response to issues facing women and the successes of the feminist movement, as well as the burgeoning and powerful response to the AIDS crisis and the inspiration for change instilled by many movements for action.

There are also outcomes for organizing in the 1980s and 1990s that this graph also illustrates. Prior to this time period, there were very few if any social support services especially for LGBTQ people at the state or national level. During rhis period of activism there was a pattern of growth in the non-profit industrial complex as a primary method of social support for LGBTQ people in the US. In the 2000s, the number of these groups plateaued. This matches the ways non-profit organizations have become the official brokers of what remains of the US welfare state as it relates to LGBTQ concerns.

The LHA records have more to say on a range of issues relevant to lesbian and queer women. In a series of posts on my site, I’ll be posting a set of interactive data visualizations from my analysis of the 381 NYC-based records available at the LHA of lesbian and/or queer organizations spanning 25 years (1983-2008). I invite you to join me in exploring the meaning behind an often invisibilized activist lesbian-queer past.

~ Jen Jack Gieseking, PhD is the Project Manager of JustPublics@365. She is a cultural geographer and environmental psychologist. Her website is jgieseking.org.

Digital Media Storytelling Can Influence Policy

Policymakers are influenced by compelling stories and academic researchers who want to influence policy should consider the power of digital media storytelling to influence policy, as this experience in East Harlem reveals.

East Harlem is among the first of New York City’s “Aging Improvement Districts.” In a global society that’s rapidly aging, Aging Improvement Districts are intended to address the concerns about mobility and accessibility for older adults living in large cities. The Age-Friendly New York City Project, which is behind the Aging Improvement Districts, conducted a public health community-assessment survey to find out about the needs of aging New Yorkers living in East Harlem. The researchers were eager to influence policy makers with some of their findings about the needs of seniors in this community, and they wanted to reach back to those in East Harlem had participated in the survey. They soon realized that an ordinary research paper or presentation wouldn’t accomplish either of these goals.

Instead, the researchers decided that telling the stories, in digital video format, was the best way to reach both policy makers and members of the community. This video (15:53) illustrates the research findings of NYAM’s community-assessment survey through the stories of several seniors living in East Harlem:

The video features the stories of several seniors living in East Harlem and was screened at a large event (August, 2011) hosted by NYAM, and attended by policy makers, service providers and members of the community, many of whom cheered when they recognized friends and neighbors on screen.

One of the issues raised by elders in the video was the reluctance to use public pools and a desire for seniors-only hours for swimming. While the video was being screened, one policy maker representing the NYC Parks Department placed a phone call and implemented a “seniors-only swim” on the spot – and then announced it later in the meeting. Today, Senior Swim in NYC is a city-wide program that opens up access to an important recreational resource to older adults.

While it’s possible this change would have happened following a standard research report and slide presentation, but it seems unlikely. What got the policy maker to pick up the phone was seeing and hearing a compelling story, told by people affected by the policy.

Of course, not all policy issues are as easily addressed. Another issue facing seniors raised in the video is the struggle to do laundry. The video features the story of two seniors taking their clothes from a laundromat and then hauling it up four-flights of stairs to their apartment, a struggle for the even the youngest and fittest among us, and a herculean task for two grandparents. Added to this is the fact that many elders in East Harlem live in public housing, and the local housing authority, NYCHA, recently announced a plan to close all laundry facilities in public housing buildings. A deputy commissioner from NYCHA attended the video screening and, moved by the stories of the seniors and their laundry struggle, promised to keep laundry facilities open. Still, the battle to keep laundry facilities open – and operating – at NYCHA buildings is one that continues.

The point is, policymakers are influenced by compelling stories. Research still plays a role here because it informed the development of the stories in the video. Research can also provide information about the scope and scale of a policy issue. The community screening of the video added an accountability and exerted additional pressure on those with some power to make changes. After the screening, the video was posted to the web and circulated among those in the community, to journalists, and a much wider audience than attended the event.

The strategic use of digital media storytelling – both to engage community members and influence policy makers – is a new and innovative development.

Digital media storytelling can influence policy and researchers should consider it as an important tool if their goal is to shape policy.