As I write this, colleges in Taiwan are switching to online learning for the first time since the pandemic started. This is because, for most of the past year, Taiwan was able to contain the pandemic at the border. This past week, however, marks the first time ever that there has been sustained local transmission and it is currently unclear whether or not the government can get things back under control.

I actually started teaching online for the first time back in February. That’s because I’m officially on a one year leave from my university in Taiwan, while I serve as the “Chair of Taiwan Studies” at Leiden University. Starting so late in the game meant that I was able to ask my friends (most of whom already had one or two semesters of experience teaching online) for advice. Now, as my Taiwanese colleagues start teaching online for the first time, I shared what I had learned on social media. Seeing how popular my post was, I thought I’d clean it up a bit and share it here on the blog as well. Probably most readers have already been doing this for a while, and many may be getting ready to return to in-person classes in the fall, but hopefully this list (and the subsequent comments) will serve as a useful reference guide for anyone who needs it.

1. Do a survey at the start of the semester.

Ask students about their learning situation. Don’t be intrusive, but ask if they want to share anything about their setup or home life that might impact online learning. For instance, do they have a slow wifi? An old computer? A bad camera? Family or pets that might interfere? Etc. This should be an optional question on the survey, but it gives them a chance to tell you early on, so you know what to expect and can help them if you need to. For students who have been doing online classes for a while, you can also ask them what they like or don’t like about online learning. What has worked for them in other classes? What has driven them crazy?

2. Set up a chat room for the class, one that actually works.

The chat features in most video conferencing software as well as those in most “learning management systems” (LMS) are very poorly designed. It helps a lot to use something that is set up from the beginning just for chat. If your students already use something, like WhatsApp, you could go with that, but I used Discord which students liked. Keep it open during class, and set it up to send notifications when you are logged off.

3. Share a document.

There are a number of apps now, such as Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, Notion, etc. that allow multiple people to edit a document at the same time. Open one up and share it with the class for each lesson. I recommend throwing your lecture notes in there and then having the students comment on that or add their own notes as you go. You can do this in addition to a powerpoint presentation, or instead of one (as I did).

4. Use breakout rooms.

In my own survey I asked students what they hated most about online learning and they said it was the lack of interaction with other students. After each lecture I used breakout rooms and had them discuss amongst each other, writing their thoughts and comments either in the shared document or in the chat room for the class.

5. Make time for one-on-one meetings with students.

Or, in a large class, with small groups. This allows you to get to know students better, despite everything being online. (This was something I hadn’t planned initially, but the students asked for it in the survey.)

6. Have students keep an online journal.

Encourage students to read and comment on each other’s journals. This helps to create a sense of shared experience that is often missing in online learning.

7. Stick around at the end of each class.

This gives people a chance to have a quick meeting with you without having to sign up for office hours.Don’t log out till the last student has logged out.

8. Start each class with a music video.

Play something nice while you are waiting for everyone to login. If you play good music, students will want to log in early so as not to miss it.

Other suggestions? Share in the comments.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

During the past few months colleges and universities all over the world have shifted our teaching online because of the COVID 19 Pandemic. While many in our community have taught extraordinary online courses for decades, both because of the needs of rural and remote communities and because of the increasing global neoliberalization of higher education, many of us have not.

As we scramble to put courses online for the first time ever in extremely short time periods (many of us were asked to have online courses up and running in less than two days once our employers announced the switch to online teaching) and at a time when we are worried for the health of our communities, our families, our friends, our students, our colleagues, and the millions of strangers who are facing this pandemic globally, we may need a little help.

Taking very seriously the clear and compelling calls to resist the fiction that we can become brilliant virtual teachers overnight and the cogently articulated worries that this pandemic and the rapid push for online instruction may have long term consequences for higher education given the many companies, state legislators, and administrators who have been pushing for pedagogy without faculty for decades now, we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

Our platform is not meant to replace active engagement with students by faculty, nor is it meant to provide the same kind of pedagogical content and experience that out students receive in the classroom, or in online courses that have been developed with due time, resources, and training. We remain concerned that in the neoliberalized university, online teaching is rarely a good way to produce collective knowledge and reciprocal engagement. But for the sake of our students, we are following the dictates of our employers while trying to stay true to the spirit of relationality that many of us find more essential than ever in our work. There are lots of wonderful people creating similar sites of sharing and caring so we’ve kept our ask specific.

What should I do for my mini lecture?

These videos can be based on your research, your synthesis of other people’s research, your reading and analysis of key theoretical texts, your critiques of the discipline of anthropology, and just about anything else that you would use in your own classroom to teach about our field. We welcome any form of creativity that you can come up with and we welcome lectures pitched to different levels. For each video, while we know people will produce their own content, we ask the following:

1. Please keep the videos between 10 and 30 minutes.
2. At the beginning of the video, please say who you are and what you do. (“I’m Paige West and I’m a cultural and environmental anthropologist.”)
3. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what you are going to tell them about and why. (“This video focuses on the research that resulted in my first book, Conservation Is our Government now. It can help us understand the relationship between European ideas about nature and culture, the ideas about the world that people living in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea have about value, and the power dynamics that exist in international environmental conservation projects.”)
4. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what kinds of questions you were asking when you did the research or the analysis you are about to present and how you worked to answer those questions or conduct that analysis. This is a kind of ‘methodological’ component for the videos. We include this so that these videos can be used both for topical teaching and for more general introduction to anthropology courses.

For accessibility purposes, we’ll be trying to add transcripts of all videos as quickly as we can. Our plan is to hire work study students (who suddenly have no work) and students participating in the #COLA4all strike at the University of California.

How do I record my mini lecture?

• You can use Zoom (platform of choice for #COVIDcampus) to record your mini lecture, which also allows you to include a slide show on the screen pretty easily. Here are some instructions.
• Most recent model iphones and other smart phones will take good enough video and audio. You can place your phone on a shelf or rig up a make shift tripod, hit record, and you’re off to the races. Here are some tips about filming yourself.
• If you would like to record a conversation with a collaborator, rather than a solo lecture, you can do that in Zoom (see above) or in Skype (instructions here)

Where do I upload my materials?

We have chosen the Open Education Resource Commons (OERCommons.org)as our platform. First, go to OERCommons and create an author account. Then email us at AnthropologyTeaching@gmail.com with your name and the address with which you registered so we can add you as an author to the Anthropology Mini Lectures resource. Once that’s out of the way, here are the steps:

1. Login to https://www.oercommons.org/ and navigate to the “Anthropology Mini Lectures” resource which you’ll find in the “My Items” section of your profile (the profile button is on the top right of the screen)
2. Click the “edit” button.
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click the “Insert new section” button.
4. Give your section the name of your lecture (keep it brief, simple, and informative).
5. In the “Main Content” section, click on the “Insert Video” button and follow the prompts to upload your video (NB: the upload will take a while–please be patient! If the progress bar stalls or the upload really doesn’t work, follow the instructions in #6.)
6. Add any additional files (PDFs, documents describing suggested digital assignments or exercises, slide shows, etc) by clicking on “Attach Additional Resources” and following the prompts. You can attach multiple files but must do so one at a time.
7. Click SAVE (at the top of the screen). We will do our best to update the page with new resources at least once per day.

Finally, thank you. Many of our students are scared and feeling extremely alone. We believe that our classrooms, and the social worlds that they are capable of producing, may be a place of refuge for many of our students in the coming weeks and months. Before they left campus, we saw that a few times a week. We were part of what seemed like, with all the appropriate caveats in place here, a normal, daily, weekly, and monthly routine. We know that all students are different, and that many of them have obligations that take priority over their courses even at the best of times. So we are not assuming that we have any undue power over how okay or safe they feel in the world. However, for many of us, teaching gives us a sense of normalcy and creates both spaces of learning and spaces of collective being and stability. During this next few months, we all may need that.

Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Colombia University and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Paige’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid 1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more and the founder of the journal Environment and Society. In addition to her academic work, Paige is the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans and the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.

zoë

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice university. Zoë works at the intersection of (medical) anthropology, critical disability studies, STS, and queer theory. Most of her ethnographic work explores the intimacies, socialities, and materialities of life making among injured US soldiers and veterans. She’s also been thinking about new feminist, queer, and cripistemological histories of neurology…among other things.

anthropology.rice.edu/zoe-wool

Source

The good news is that there is one easy addition that can make every syllabus shine a little brighter, something every good enough syllabus needs (and every kick ass syllabus has) that, thanks to the handy examples below, will take mere minutes to add if it’s missing from yours: An accessibility or disability inclusion statement.

Generally, accessibility statements inform students of university resources and policies for accommodating disabilities, accommodations that are required under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is why many universities require them. But that is not why you should have one.

You should have one because a thoughtful accessibility statement is an opening to a pedagogical practice that offers a small but powerful push against the ways college and university systems exacerbate rather than rectify social inequalities by calling out the ableism of the academy and creating an experience that is more just and accessible for all students. Granted, if your school has a boilerplate accessibility statement (check the student disability services office or teaching support office to find out) it probably doesn’t do that. It is probably legalistic, perhaps unwelcoming, and almost certainly not informed by principles of disability justice or universal design, both of which see access as an opportunity to address social and structural inequity and marginalization by centering disability while pushing at its presumed edges.

To help you make your accessibility statement the best it can be, I’ve crowdsourced some examples from our wonderful colleagues in the Disability Research Interest Group, the subsection of the Society for Medical Anthropology that brought us such treasures as these guidelines for accessible AAA presentations, and this survey about in/accessibility at the AAA meetings (if you haven’t taken the survey, get to it…ALL of you!). I’ve separated the institutional boilerplates from those customized with critical disability politics in mind. The significance of the difference should be pretty damn apparent.

Finally, the most important thing about the accessibility statement may be what you do with it.

Just as decolonization at the level of the text is not itself decolonization (as Faye Harrison, Lila Abu Lughod, Jafari Allen, and other anthros of color continue to remind us), a great accessibility statement does not sufficiently address ableism in one’s pedagogy, classroom, or institution. Read the statement with students on the first day of class, remind them throughout the semester of your commitment to access, and most importantly, look for ways to practice access throughout the semester in your pedagogy and in your classroom (in any room, really). For more on how to do that, check out this fabulous tip sheet on feminist disability pedagogy (which also includes syllabus statement tips) or look for resources on Universal Design in Education. Though STEM focused, Washington University’s DO-IT Center has great Universal Design resources (like the info graphic on page 14 of this publication).

Boilerplate Accessibility Statements (you can do better)

Case Western Reserve University:

In accordance with federal law, if you have a documented disability, you may be eligible to request accommodations from Disability Resources. In order to be considered for accommodations you must present a memo from disability resources. Please contact their office to register at 216.368.5230 or get more information on how to begin the process. Please keep in mind that accommodations are not retroactive.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill facilitates the implementation of reasonable accommodations, including resources and services, for students with disabilities, chronic medical conditions, a temporary disability or pregnancy complications resulting in difficulties with accessing learning opportunities.

All accommodations are coordinated through the Accessibility Resources and Service Office. See the ARS Website for contact information: accessibillity.unc.edu.

Relevant policy documents as they relation to registration and accommodations determinations and the student registration form are available on the ARS website under the About ARS tab.

College of William & Mary:

William & Mary accommodates students with disabilities in accordance with federal laws and university policy. Any student who feels they may need an accommodation based on the impact of a learning, psychiatric, physical, or chronic health diagnosis should contact Student Accessibility Services staff at 757-221-2512 or at sas@wm.edu to determine if accommodations are warranted and to obtain an official letter of accommodation. For more information, please visit /www.wm.edu/sas.

Rice University:

Disability Support Services
If you have a documented disability or other condition that may affect academic performance you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111 / adarice@rice.edu / x5841) to determine the accommodations you need; and 2) talk with me to discuss your accommodation needs.

Critical Accessibility Statements (better than ‘good enough’!)

Professor at a large public research university

Class Accessibility and Inclusion
If you need a reasonable (or even unreasonable) accommodation, please let me know and I’ll try make it happen. This goes triply for folks with non-visible disabilities or who pass or mask or compensate. No need to do that here.

Zoë Wool, Rice University

This course is intended for all Rice students, including those with mental, physical, or cognitive disabilities, illness, injuries, impairments, or any other condition that tends to negatively affect one’s equal access to education. If, at any point in the term, you find yourself not able to fully access the space, content, and experience of this course, you are welcome (and not required) to contact me by email, phone, or during office hours to discuss your specific needs. I also encourage you to contact the Office of Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111/ adarice@rice.edu/ x5841/ https://dss.rice.edu)./ If you have a diagnosis, ODSS can help you document your needs and create an accommodation plan. By making a plan through ODSS, you can insure appropriate accommodations without disclosing your condition or diagnosis to course instructors. 

Professor at a mid-sized public research university

If you have a disability or a personal circumstance that will affect your learning in this course, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can discuss the best ways to meet your needs. (Any student who needs accommodation for disabilities should also contact Student Accessibility Services at xxxxx@school.edu to obtain an official letter of accommodation for all their courses.)

[The author of this statement also says: “I emphasize my willingness to help with accommodations aloud on the first day of class. I also give a questionnaire in which I ask about accommodations, allergies, pronouns, planned travel, etc. so that I can be in touch with individual students about their needs in the class”.] 

Universal Design for Learning at McGill University’s Office for Students with Disabilities

As the instructor of this course I endeavor to provide an inclusive learning environment. However, if you experience barriers to learning in this course, do not hesitate to discuss them with me and the Office for Students with Disabilities, 514-398-6009.

Lydia Brown (AKA Autistic Hoya)

Accommodations for Disabilities: 
If you have any kind of disability, whether apparent or non-apparent, learning, emotional, physical, or cognitive, and you need some accommodations or alternatives to lectures, assignments, or exams, please feel free to contact me to discuss reasonable accommodations for your access needs.

[Lydia Brown also notes: “Standard headers for this section generally say, ‘Special Accommodations’ or even avoid the word disability altogether in favor of euphemisms like learning differences or challenges.

Professors, you can make a strong statement for access and inclusion from the beginning of the course. You can, without saying or signing anything at all, make students like me feel immensely safer from the start.”] 

Michele Friedner, University of Chicago

I am committed to meeting the needs of all seminar participants. To arrange class-related accommodations, please see Student Disability Services: http://disabilities.uchicago.edu/accommodations. I am happy to meet with students to discuss ways of expanding access in the classroom that are not only mandated by law. Please feel free to make an appointment with me to discuss. 

Mara Green, Barnard College

Disability accommodations: For disability and other learning-related needs and accommodations, please communicate with me during the first week of class, whether in person or through email. Of course if concerns arise later in the semester, let me know as well. Disability-based services are provided through Barnard’s Office of Disability Services, located in 008 Milbank Hall (ods@barnard.edu) and through Columbia’s Disability Services (https://health.columbia.edu/disability-services). I am committed to working with you, so do not hesitate to come talk with me. 

Cassandra Hartblay, University of Toronto, Scarborough

Accommodations: Please assert requests for accommodations often and early. It is never too late to request accommodations – our bodies and circumstances are continuously changing. You will be asked to make use of formal accessibility services on campus; however, you will not be asked to disclose personal medical information. If there are ways in which the overall structure of the course and general classroom interactions could be adapted to facilitate full participation, please do not hesitate to raise your ideas with the instructor: comments and suggestions about the format of readings, lectures, and class discussions are welcome.

A note on basic needs:

Finally, Jessica Waggoner at the University of Houston turned me on to the basic needs statement, something that took on additional importance for their classes in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (which hit Houston at the start of last year’s fall semester). They learned about it from this post on basic needs in/security in higher education, which suggests this syllabus statement:

Basic Needs: Any student who faces challenges securing their food or housing and believes this may affect their performance in the course is urged to contact the Dean of Students for support. Furthermore, please notify the professor if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable her to provide any resources that she may possess.

zoë

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice university. Zoë works at the intersection of (medical) anthropology, critical disability studies, STS, and queer theory. Most of her ethnographic work explores the intimacies, socialities, and materialities of life making among injured US soldiers and veterans. She’s also been thinking about new feminist, queer, and cripistemological histories of neurology…among other things.

anthropology.rice.edu/zoe-wool

Source

This post reflects on the Field Study Handbook as a practical resource for anthropologists and other qualitative researchers. Challenging questions can arise from anthropology’s engagement with the corporate world where the exploration of everyday needs goes hand in hand with their creation. Chipchase is acutely sensitive to these concerns. The Handbook isn’t a manifesto for how ethnography can be used by corporations. It’s a guide for researchers working to provide insights derived from understanding how people live their lives for a range of clients, whether these are companies, nonprofits or government organizations. The Handbook is consistently attuned to the ethical issues at stake. The preface sets out these aspirations clearly.  In the author’s words this is  a  `how to book that covers the practicalities of running field research. More importantly, it’s a why-to book, that questions then helps you align personal and organisational intent’ (Chipchase 2017: xvi).

The Handbook is not an academic text. It is aimed at the design researcher community. Preoccupation with design leads, ironically, to disjuncture between the book’s form and its usability for actual field researchers. The Handbook is beautifully designed in terms of layout and illustrations.  The large hardback format, weighing in at 1.666 kg or 3 pounds 10 ounces, means you probably won’t be taking it to the field with you. The price point of $125 US puts it beyond the reach of the most academic researchers. This is a pity. If this were a pocketable paperback or an eBook it would be a really useful addition to every fieldworkers toolkit. And much of its content will be missed by potential users across all research sectors.

Although the Handbook  is oriented towards team based research it has much to offer sole researchers doing the kind of fieldwork which is foundational to anthropology. Reading this book gave me a clearer understanding of how ethnographic research is carried out in the commercial world and the iterative process which is the backbone of good ethnographic work, whether conducted rapidly by groups of people or by individuals over an extended time frame. In showing how to organize multi person teams to do ethnographic fieldwork  I gained a heightened appreciation of the multiple skills that solo anthropologists need to produce good research and how many of these skills can transfer outside the academy.

The Handbook is clearly written and logically structured through the different stages of a research project. The first few chapters deal with planning, including pitching and contracting with clients, selecting fieldwork locations and recruiting participants. Fieldwork is as much about unlearning as it is about learning. Chipchase advises choosing `somewhere you don’t know so well, you have less to unlearn’ (Chipchase 2017: 329). Better insights can be gained outside of capital cities. There are practical suggestions about using social media to get up to speed on what’s happening before arrival, making links with the local partners with whom one will be working as well as relevant details about fieldwork in different locations, such as the differences between airport and local times and the widespread refusal accept pre 2006 US notes across many countries in Sub Saharan Africa (something I have experienced many times).

The book is packed with thoughtful advice about working with  local researchers and participants. Respect for the informant is paramount. Data management and confidentiality are addressed at length.  The reflections on informed consent are highly pertinent to our profession, not only because of University ethical review procedures, because they highlight what can sometimes feel like an uncomfortable gap which the open endedness of anthropological analysis creates between the acquisition and eventual use of ethnographic data. For academic anthropologists the final work in which interview material is used may be very different from the objectives of the initial fieldwork. Chipchase emphasizes  the importance of intent and the boundaries this imposes, as well as possible ways of enabling informants to review the data collected. A ‘full circle’ approach to research is a recommended option where ‘prior to leaving the session, the participant is encouraged to review and, if they wish, delete any of the data the team collected about them’ (Chiphase 2017: 302). Of course, this isn’t always possible for the kind of fieldwork many of us carry out which often has a large informal component, but the concerns with participants’ well being and that `data gathering should exist within social norms’ should guide any fieldwork.

Several chapters address the how- to of field research and of organizing the material. Tried and tested techniques for learning about a context quickly are accessibly outlined, such as watching how people queue in public places, spending time at transport hubs and testing the boundaries of social norms through investigating, but not transgressing, the borders of acceptable behavior, through buying pornography for example. The behavior of the researcher also matters. The Handbook is refreshingly honest about the core interpersonal skills and behaviors needed to be an effective ethnographic researcher, including suggestions for how these can be developed. There are tips for organizing multiple types of data, including photographs, and an excellent guide to structuring the interview process. Commissioned research has certain advantages over solo fieldwork in that multi person teams can cover more ground and note taking and interviewing can be shared. The time and cost constraints on commercial work lead to a more explicit concern with efficiencies and a consideration of the optimal methodological instruments for a given situation. An infographic provides a visual comparison of the time it takes to use different note taking and transcription methods, summarizing in two square inches what many of us learned through hours and hours of hard work, namely the additional time costs of audio or visual recording if transcription follows compared with taking notes directly to a laptop.

The Handbook is 500 pages plus of insights, techniques and tips. I’ve already used some of them in my own work and I’ve recommended it to colleagues in a commercial think-tank and to members of a multidisciplinary team of health researchers with whom I’m currently working. I’m planning on doing some fieldwork in the Autumn and while this edition is way too big to fit in my, or anyone’s, bag I’ll be using many of its ideas. A new edition is in process which will be smaller and more portable. It will be out later in the year. Check out the link for updates.

Maia

Maia Green works on the anthropology of international development and issues of social transformation in East Africa. She has written on diverse topics ranging from anti-witchcraft practices to the proliferation of NGOs. Maia Green teaches at the University of Manchester.

manchester.academia.edu/MaiaGreen

Source

The secret is Markdown. Although Markdown started as a geeky tool for people who wanted a simple way to design webpages, it has since gained popularity for all kinds of writing as more and more text editors and note taking apps make it the default way to style your text. The idea is simple enough: where a rich text editor would show you text in italics or bold using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a Markdown editor will display them like this: *italics* or **bold**. At this point most people look confused. Isn’t that a step backwards? Isn’t the whole point of using computers so I don’t need to see the hidden code that styles my text? But if you’ve ever copied text and lost your formatting, or struggled when your word processing seems to think your text should be in a different style than what you expected, you know that computers don’t always behave the way we want. Making the style information visible solves that problem because if something goes wrong, you can immediately see the problem. What is great about Markdown is that the code is so simple and easy to use that (unlike LaTeX) it barely takes any time to learn.

Another advantage of Markdown is that it makes it easy to move text from one app to another, or to transform text into a web page, Microsoft Word Document, PDF, or PowerPoint presentation without too much fuss. So while this post is about an easy way to make PowerPoint presentations, it is really about the power of having your text formatted with Markdown!

Before proceeding, it is important to point out that there are many different flavors of Markdown. The original version, for instance, didn’t support footnotes, while the one used by the WordPress blogging platform that runs this site does. Similarly, there are a number of different apps that support writing presentations in Markdown, but they each use slightly different code. Some might start each new slide wherever they see a header # Which is any line that starts with a pound sign, while other apps use their own divider code. Deckset, the app I’ll be using in this tutorial, uses three dashes, like this: ---.²

For some sample text let’s take the first few lines of Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. I’m going to add some basic Markdown formatting so that it has headers (# or ##), lists (*), and block quotations (>), as well as the Deckset slide demarkation code (---). Here’s what it looks like:

# To be, or not to be 
*Hamlet*. Act III, Scene I.
by William Shakespeare

---
# To be, or not to be, that is the question:

* Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
* The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
* Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
* And by opposing end them: 

---
# to die, to sleep

> No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
> the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
> that Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
> devoutly to be wished. 

---
> To die, to sleep,
> To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

--- 
> for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
> when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
> must give us pause. 

And here is what it looks like after running through Deckset:

You can, of course, choose from many different themes, insert images, links, and even presenter notes if you like. Nor is Deckset the only app that can do this. Slidium is another macOS app, and Marp is simpler but works on multiple platforms. Other options can be found on this list which seems to get updated regularly.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare. Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum? Assum Typi non habent claritatem insitam est usus legentis in iis. Claritatem Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius Claritas est etiam. Nam liber tempor cum soluta. Est etiam processus dynamicus qui.

only to have it end up looking like this?

Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare.
Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum? Assum Typi non habent claritatem insitam est usus
legentis in iis.
Claritatem Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius Claritas est etiam. Nam liber tempor cum soluta. Est etiam
processus dynamicus qui.

Most word processors have a command that lets you see invisible markers like spaces (usually represented as a faint dot “•”) and what are still quaintly called “carriage returns,” or “line feeds” (generally shown by the symbols ”¶” or “↵”).¹ If you turn that feature on, you will see that there are way too many such return symbols in the above text. It might seem like the solution would be to find and replace all those returns with spaces, but then you would have no paragraphs at all in your document. What you want to do is replace all the mid-paragraph returns, but leave those between paragraphs.

Using Regular Expressions (RegEx), as discussed in the last post in this series, what we would want to do is search for every return (or line feed) that is not followed or preceded by a return (or line feed). In addition–since some paragraphs are separated not by a blank line but by a tab or sequence of spaces at the start of the new paragraph–we want to look for those as well. I find the following search works pretty well for me: (?<=[^\r\n\t ][^\r\n])\R(?=[^\r\n][^\r\n\t ])  It is easy to find many patterns like this in online forums, as I did, saving you the trouble of having to re-invent the wheel.

If you prefer not to have to muddle around with code, there are a number of tools out there which can automate this kind of text cleanup for you. On macOS my favorite is the package of free WordService menu extensions from DEVONtechnologies. These are extensions that work with the built-in “Services” menu that pops up on macOS whenever you control-click on some selected text. The package offers a number of useful commands to do things like change the capitalization of the selected text (e.g. turn “THE APPLE” into “The Apple,” or “The apple,” etc.), reformat line breaks (or remove them altogether), and one that can give you useful statistics such as the word or character count of the selected text, etc.

Considering that WordService is free and does pretty much the same thing, you might not want to spend $45 for TextSoap, but if you already have a subscription to the Setapp bundle of macOS apps then TextSoap is included with your subscription. Another option is Textwell which works on both macOS and iOS and can do much more than just clean text. It has some built in tools, much like those offered in WordService, but (if you aren’t afraid of tweaking the JavaScript in the example code) you also can make your own actions. I really like that these can be synced between the desktop and iOS. Clean Text for iOS is even easier to use, but less customizable. Since I don’t use Windows, Linux, or Android, etc. I’ll leave it for others to recommend their favorite text cleanup tools for those platforms in the comments.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

What we will do is look for every instance in your text of two words in a row that are both capitalized and then reverse the order of those two words. While this scenario may seem somewhat far-fetched, the technique we will use to solve the problem, using Regular Expressions (RegEx), is one of the most useful things I ever learned in my life. I use RegEx several times a month to solve all kinds of problems. You may find it a little frustrating to use the first time, but once you get the hang of it, and discover some tools to help you get the code just right, it will become a regular part of your toolkit. Examples of things I use RegEx for include cleaning up extraneous line breaks in text copied from a PDF, extracting information (like email addresses) from a large text file, or combining cells imported from a database into a properly formatted document. The uses are endless, and once you know how to do it you might find yourself thinking “If I spend 10 min figuring out the correct RegEx for this I can save myself hours of work.”²

Let’s start by grabbing a sample text to use for the tutorial. I’ve copied the following from the intro to the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology, which is useful because it has a bunch of names, but also poses some unique challenges:

The year’s final issue of Cultural Anthropology features a new contribution to our Openings and Retrospectives section, an Openings collection on “Chemo-Ethnography.” Nicholas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey make the case for a critical engagement with modern chemistry in its political, economic, and affective valences, inviting us to take “chemo” seriously as that which can both cure and poison. In her essay, Michelle Murphy evaluates technoscientific practices that have come to materialize chemical exposure, indicating how infrastructures of chemical violence are cloaked even as the violent effects of exposure invite surveillance and pathologization of those living in hostile conditions. Elizabeth Povinelli’s piece inhabits a chemical burn from the inside, meditating on intoxication and exposure; fire and fog; invisibility, velocity, and the training of neural noticings.

Since we now live in the Canine Republic, “Nicholas Shapiro” needs to be written as “Shapiro Nicholas,” but “Cultural Anthropology” should not be re-written. Also, we will run into a problem with the fact that Elizabeth Povinelli’s name is written with the possessive “’s”. Let’s take these problems one by one.

First, we have to find the proper names in this paragraph. To do that I will start with the simplest definition of what a proper name should look like: a word that starts with a capital letter and is followed by a number of lower case letters and then a space. This is what that looks like in RegEx: [A-Z][a-z]+\s Let’s break that down:

• [A-Z] looks for any capital letters
• [a-z] looks for any lower case letters
• + extends the search for lowercase letters by saying we can have one or more matching results for the previous search parameter (i.e. “a” or “aa” or “aaaaaa”)
• \s looks for a space

This is what that gets us (click on any of the images in this post to go to the RegEx101 site where you can play around with the code to see how it changes the results):

As you can see, this search result catches too many fish in its net. We want to catch the big fish, but leave the small fish (like “The”) out. The easiest way to do this is to replicate the search so that we only find cases where two proper names appear in a row. Like this: [A-Z][a-z]+\s[A-Z][a-z]+\s

But now we have one catch that isn’t a fish: “Cultural Anthropology” and one fish that got away: “Elizabeth Povinelli.” We can easily tell the search to ignore names starting with “Cultural” by adding (?!Cultural) to the start of the search. But why didn’t Elizabeth Povinelli come through? It was excluded because of the possessive apostrophe, so we can add the apostrophe to the list of characters we search for in the second name. Now our search looks like this: (?!Cultural)[A-Z][a-z]+\s[A-Z][a-z’]+\s

So far, so good. We have caught all the fish we wanted, and only those fish. One problem with RegEx is that it is rare that you can find a search that will work for every single use case. That is why some websites might reject your email address as invalid even though it isn’t. (Actually, a good RegEx should really work with almost all email addresses, but some programmers are just lazy.) For this reason, it is good to write new search parameters for each search you do and to test them against the document you are working on before using them. RegEx is powerful, but that very power can wreak havoc on your text if you aren’t careful!

So far we have only solved the first part of the problem. Once we have found the proper names, we need to reverse their order. To do that we have to mark off the first word and the second word with parentheses in our search, as such: (?!Cultural)([A-Z][a-z]+)\s([A-Z][a-z’]+)\s Our search hasn’t changed, but we can now use those bracketed results in our replace command, which will look like this: \2 \1  That tells the program to write out the second search result, followed by a space and then the first search result, followed by another space. This is almost perfect, except for one small problem you may have already guessed:

The year’s final issue of Cultural Anthropology features a new contribution to our Openings and Retrospectives section, an Openings collection on “Chemo-Ethnography.” Shapiro Nicholas and Kirksey Eben make the case for a critical engagement with modern chemistry in its political, economic, and affective valences, inviting us to take “chemo” seriously as that which can both cure and poison. In her essay, Murphy Michelle evaluates technoscientific practices that have come to materialize chemical exposure, indicating how infrastructures of chemical violence are cloaked even as the violent effects of exposure invite surveillance and pathologization of those living in hostile conditions. Povinelli’s Elizabeth piece inhabits a chemical burn from the inside, meditating on intoxication and exposure; fire and fog; invisibility, velocity, and the training of neural noticings.

Unfortunately, we ended up with “Povinelli’s Elizabeth” instead of “Povinelli Elizabeth’s” which is what our canine overlords wanted. Rather than changing our original search and replace to avoid this problem, it is easier to follow the first search and replace operation with another one that will clean up these mistakes. In this case the search command would look like ([A-Z][a-z]+)’s\s([A-Z][a-z]+)\s  and the replace command would be \1 \2's . At this point you should be able to understand how this works. Take a moment to see if you can understand the code before moving on.

Obviously, it would never make sense to write code to fix a single instance in a document, it would be easier to do it by hand, but if you had a 20-page paper to work with, not to mention a book manuscript, you might appreciate knowing how to code the solution in RegEx. True, RegEx does require learning some specialized code which is hard to remember if you aren’t a computer programmer who uses this stuff every day, but fortunately, there are lots of tools out there which can make this easier for you. The RegEx101 website linked to all of the searches in this tutorial is my favorite, but there are many other resources out there as well, not all of which require you to actually learn RegEx for yourself. In my next post, I plan to talk about some more user-friendly options, but I think it was important to first understand the underlying principles before moving on. If you don’t understand how tools like RegEx “see” text it is hard to understand what some of these other tools are doing. Hopefully, even if I haven’t convinced you to learn RegEx for yourself, you have gotten an idea of how it works and what kinds of things it can do.

List of posts in this series

• Free Your Mind, the Text Will Follow (Working With Text 1)
• RegEx 101 (Working With Text 2)
• Text-laundering (Working With Text 3)
• Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
• Roll Your Own QDA (Working With Text 5)

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

I’m about to hand over after being chair of a department for over four years. Being a chair is a bit like death and taxes.  If you are lucky enough  to  be  employed on a long term contract in an academic institution you will probably end up formally managing your department. More realistically, given the ways that we as academics seek to  manage ourselves and strive to defy what universities define as  `leadership’, you will end up trying to manage  the  mutually reinforcing expectations gap between your colleagues and your university.  This role is time consuming and frustrating.  Reacting to an endless conveyor belt of  directives  and initiatives  from on high feels like being buried under volcanic eruptions of  target focused,  metric obsessed audit sludge.

Meetings, committees, documents and  communications  take up huge reserves of time and energy.  It’s hard to sustain the  kind of focus  necessary for research and academic writing. I certainly haven’t been able to generate new scholarship  in the way I would have liked to during my time as chair.  I haven’t read as many books or done as much writing  as I would have probably done otherwise.  It’s taken me far longer to finish things. But I have managed to keep things ticking over and I did get much  better at  dealing with the  admin  onslaught year on year.  Here are some survival tips for those  of you about to take on  what university management likes to call a `leadership role’,  or  what academics tend to describe as a huge admin burden.

Timing is everything.  There’s never perfect time to do these roles,  personally or career wise, but some times are better than others.  I’ve been chair while my son is finishing high school.  I couldn’t have escaped far or for long  during this period.  For the same reason,  it made  sense to defer my sabbatical until I can really use it.  For me that’s fieldwork in Tanzania.

Huge admin roles don’t work well if you are struggling with a new project, but  they can be a good  opportunity  to finish something up. I used some of the time while I was chair to complete a manuscript and to write up some fieldwork.  Although it was disappointing not to achieve anything really new  during this period, I’m consciously limiting future commitments in order to clear creative space  when my term ends.

Think medium and longer term.  An advantage of doing something now is that you don’t have it hanging over you. You know when you won’t be doing it because you will have  done it.  You can make other plans. You can also help others plan  by organizing workloads as far ahead as possible.  There will always be changes but if you have the core framework in place people know what they are doing and can get on with their lives. You also reduce the transaction costs of endless last-minute negotiations.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.  Productivity blogposts endlessly go on about how hugely successful tech capitalists  like  Steve Jobs and  Mark Zuckerberg  reduce the number of micro decisions they have to take by always choosing the same outfit.  I’m not suggesting  opting for `dad’  jeans or hoodies as an efficiency hack. But you can reduce the number of small decisions that have to be made by having clear principles to  guide the choices you make.  How to spend money is a good example. If you know at the start of the year where the money is going  you don’t have need more meetings to discuss what to do with it.  Meet with the core team periodically to determine whether  everything is on track.  Use staff meetings to talk about what people really care about,  not where to  buy the food for the student party.

Finally,  this excellent post by Tim Hartford shows how to make email work for you as archive, calendar and to- do list, with minimal organizational effort.   There’s much to be gained from using his system whatever else you have to do.

Maia

Maia Green works on the anthropology of international development and issues of social transformation in East Africa. She has written on diverse topics ranging from anti-witchcraft practices to the proliferation of NGOs. Maia Green teaches at the University of Manchester.

manchester.academia.edu/MaiaGreen

Source