Method Madness

I recently found this passage in doing some background reading on narrative.  It's the kind of excerpt that makes me want to get up and do a cartwheel or yell jackpot! and confirm to everyone sitting nearby that I've finally lost it.  (If you don't have the same reaction, that's probably good.)

"Sir Frederic Bartlett, a celebrated Cambridge psychologist, was the first scholar to investigate and theorize cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences in narrative construction.  In Bartlett’s (1932) classic study, Western subjects were read a Native American story, The War of Ghosts, and then were asked to re-tell it.  Because the participants found both the story structure and many accompanying details unfamiliar, they repeatedly transformed the tale in recall, both through omissions of details and through rationalizations, which made the story conform to a more familiar Western pattern.  On the basis of these observations and experiments, Bartlett (1932) developed his theory of schema that informs much of contemporary cognitive science, psychology, and narrative study."  (Pavelenko, in press, p.7)

What I find so exciting about Bartlett's experiment is that it is so similar to my own, but it's from 1932!  It tests the culturally defined pattern of narrative which is linked to how we make sense of the entire plot line of the story.  Discovering that my methodology has some precedent which I have now adapted and appied to communication via ICT strengthens the validity of my approach.

Here in Gulu, Uganda, I am investigating the reverse phenomenon as Bartlett.  I'm interested in individuals far from the cultural of design...telling their own stories through a western artifact.  (Some Acholi speakers may call phones and tech related objects "things for work made with craftsmanship in iron" or alternatively, "things for work made with with skill from whites")  I hypothesize that when a narrative is given in Acholi via an ICT, a narrative shift occurs, but it is the ICT which triggers this shift.  The shift is between an Acholi narrative structure and a western one, and the spatial cues of the technology 'space' we enter when using ICT applications causes users to adapt their narratives and concepts to fit the western model much in the way a bilingual Acholi-English speaker makes small changes when switching into English.  This change happen at the cognitive level, the level of categorization, ordering, and many other 'thinking' level pre-language processes that the speaker may or may not be aware of.  My hypothesis is that the ICT, even if the interface language is in Acholi, is recognized to be 'of the west' because of other visual cues which every culture makes sense of in different ways. (Check out international signage for some great examples.)

My hypothesis is based on years of field observations in a range of linguistic and cultural settings, but the challenge is how to create a research method that captures a phenomenon I have a strong inkling about in valid and reproducible terms that the academic community will also find compelling.

Other research that I find cartwheel-worthy comes out of ALT-I, the African Languages Technology Initiative.  In particular, the engineers Odejobi and Adegbola theorize, 

"services supporting CMC [computer-mediated-communication] intended for use in African environment should exploit and implement language technologies developed around African languages and cultures."

 They propose this addition to current technologies of American and European origin should first,

"describe and represent the knowledge systems underlying African systems of communication in a form amenable to computation, e.g., numerical, graphical, or symbolically…. by critically and analytically address[ing] the question of how African people represent concepts." 

My research is therefore grounded in conceptual transfer theory within cognitive linguistics.  Their idea is both broad and ambitious, and my research begins to explore the possibilities they suggest.  If we concede that there are a myriad of ways in which different cultures communicate, why is there only one style of communication technology as research teams led by both hill Hill and also Zakaria propose, only the western-engineered model of sharing our narratives, transmitting stories, moderating the digital information that has become interconnected with our very identities?  This research examines the impact of information and communication technology design-- the current mono-cultural design-- on narrative, identity and participation with examples from a bi-lingual Acholi-English case study in Gulu, Uganda.

...and this case study involves what exactly?  That is what I have been explaining to community leaders for the past several weeks in order to get the OK to start collecting data. (My Acholi explanation is getting better slowly and involves the word apoka poka  which means difference)


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Odejobi, T. and T. Adegbola. 2010. Computational and engineering issues in human computer interaction systems for supporting communication in African languages. In: O.A. Taiwo ed.  Handbook of research on discourse behavior and digital communication: language structures and social interaction. Chpt. 56. [ebook] ISBN: 9781615207732 [Accessed 20 January 2012].

For the Birds and Mr Brooks

(this is a break from Gulu and current research while I'm out in the field collecting data, but check out my piece with the Policy and Internet Blog out of the Oxford Internet Institute)

This is a response to many pieces I've read on big data analysis and large scale social media analysis and, in particular, a recent NYTs op-ed column by @nytdavidbrooks titled, 'What You'll Do Next' in which Mr. Brooks wrote:

"The theory of big data is to have no theory, at least about human nature. You just gather huge amounts of information, observe the patterns and estimate probabilities about how people will act in the future. . . .

To discern meaningful correlations from meaningless ones, you often have to rely on some causal hypothesis about what is leading to what. You wind up back in the land of human theorizing."

Mr. Brooks is correct, and this is something I've written about before.  As much as big data scientists hate to admit it, there is social science underpinning their algorithms and interpretations.  Teams at top institutes are using a theory called homophily.  And just hearing the name turns my stomach.  Not so much because of the word (although, it is an odd term), but for the same reasons I grimaced when I heard the book Three Cups of Tea spun as a handbook for foreign policy.  However, since my visceral response is not a recognized metric (yet), I will enumerate my objections to the theory’s current application to big data mining.  

It is a social network theory roughly asserting that it is our common ‘likes’ that bind us.  It has inspired research papers with titles such as, ‘Birds of a Feather [Stick Together],’ which chronicles many types of social network theory.  Did I mention, this is all sociology, not information science, and it’s the study of humans relating offline out in the world?  

Yes, these theories started back around the 1960s in the United States when the racial upheaval motivated social scientists to ask, ‘What is it that binds us together at all?’  The insights they gained from work stretching into the 1990s, perhaps combined with the familiar word network, has attracted researchers from information science to apply the finding to the online domain.  

Now assuming that humans behave offline in the same way they do online is one leap, but big data scientists have made yet another.  The heaps of data come from many sources such as social media, applications, and devices.  Headlines were made when researchers at MIT predicted the political leanings of mobile phone users and even tracked the spread of illness based on users' habits. The ground-breaking results from MIT were based on only American user behavior, but discussed as though they were universally applicable.  

Results assumed the one user/one device/one account rule of the US, but this isn’t the pattern in some communal cultures.  Social scientists are just beginning to study user engagement with technology in places like Nigeria and Indonesia and discover how much we thought we knew, how much we assumed was universal, does not hold up under scrutiny and is increasingly dynamic. 

Bulk and ease-of-access to data does not immediately add up to persuasive conclusions.  I am not convinced by the argument I hear so often from big data proponents, ‘the data speaks for itself,’ because the models I come across that are essential for any human to make sense of the tonnage of data are based on cold war era foundations.  Theories like homophily do not take into account the advent of the internet or cultural variations. When interpreting social media data or making assumptions about user behavior, culture is a variable that cannot be ignored. 

The truth is we don’t know what to do with all this data yet.  And I am a bit torn here because my inner-engineer wants to build better models, to improve.  I am fascinated by the problem of how to incorporate cultural variation and increase what we can learn from the rich amount of information at our disposal.  But what will we use this be used for?  Researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center aspired, through this flawed method, to create a model of the Iranian blogosphere as 'unique as a snowflake.'  I probably don't need to explain the value of this research, but the social science foundation proposed simultaneously that all humans behave in a similar and predictable manner and also that unique cultural insights can be gained from a model that ignores cultural variation. (If you got lost in that last sentence, you're actually right where you should be. Most research grounded in homophily makes about that much sense.)  So this is where I hope the larger community of scientists, social and data scientists, can have a rigorous debate about how to do better... make better models and concern ourselves with the broader ethical implications. 

Like it's 1899

 

        When we talk of bridging the gap, the technology gap, the ubiquitous construction metaphors make it seem as though we are in the Age of Victoria building train tracks across every known expanse and into the depths of continents, clearing the way for the new age, for industry, speed, access to modernity.  Every aspect of this approach to getting people online and engaged with technology should come with a top hat and monocle because it’s right out of the 19^th century.  Most solutions to access focus on translation, getting interface scripts or keyboards to register languages besides English.  This seems like a job for a linguist in 1899. . . .To go off and chart, transcribe, and translate foreign languages so they could become part of the world of knowledge.  (That world has changed.) As if nothing exists, can truly progress, get organized, move forward, until it is written down.

Software engineers tell me anything with software is possible.  So let’s leave the horse and buggy behind.  Divorce ourselves from writing.  Throw out the keyboard.  Lose the map.  Unlock the individual user password profile.  There is another way.

Every engineer I tell this to says, 'Fine, so now what?'  Well, I am still working on that part, but essentially, it's up to indigenous (that is to say local) developers to create what makes sense where they are.  My research is an experiment which will quantify a few points where the current ICT design is 'pinching' the most.  Where it is preventing oral cultures from sharing narratives, from organizing information, from conveying concepts in the way which seems most natural in their thoughts.  (The thought/pre-language moment is contested and debated within philosophy, psychology, and linguistics.  It defies definition.)  The areas where I have seen the current ICTs 'pinch' and where I think we should be looking to make some changes are as follows:

3 Guiding Points to shift out of chirographic and into oral cultural design mode:

1. Information is gathered, collected, and moved.  But only what we can carry, in sound and echo.  It moves through repetition.  It is stored in our minds and in our retelling, over and over in the sound our retelling makes.  It does not have the permanence of writing, the ownership of authorship.  It forms by accumulation, being born from many sources; it is fluid, varied from omissions and additions.  Recursive.  How is this different from US culture?  It’s something to do with how we experience time.  And something to do with maps.

2. Group.  There wasn’t a word for group in Acholi until it was borrowed from English.  Gathering, yes, such as a formal occasion like a wedding.  But group, no.  My contribution in the Group project. Women’s Group.  Book Group.  He left the Group to become a Solo artist.  Groupthink.  In English, we call attention to the group phenomenon, the crowd.  But for a communal culture, the group is the norm.  As the religious scholar John Mbiti explained using Descartes’ terms:  

“I am because we are, we are therefore I am.”   

There is a word for alone, the exception.  And technology is a tool of isolating, individualizing power.  S. Turkle writes extensively about this phenomenon at MITs Initiative on Technology and Self.  The question of how a tool that is inherently isolating will impact a fundamentally communal culture should be as much of a design consideration as the interface language. 

3. There is no word for map in Acholi or any of the languages in the region.  It was borrowed from English, but seems to carry the meaning: list, unnecessary things white people must write down to read, e.g., menu, see ‘vegetarian map.’

More about maps...  First, in Fez, among ethnically Tashelit (Berber) friends speaking Moroccan Arabic driving looking for a cousin’s new house where none of us had previously visited.  In the US, if I were on my way somewhere for the first time, I would perhaps have a gps system in my car, get written directions from the person I was visiting, or consult the internet.  I would also consult a map and probably print all of these things or have them available on my phone.  Not in Fez.  There, in the back seat,  I listened to the driver call ahead and ask where to turn then hang up.  We drove a little way, came to the roundabout, made the turn, then pulled over.   Another phone call.  Another instruction.  Singular.  Not a series.  The phone was not passed to a passenger who could write things down nor were several directions said out loud so we could all help remember.  This pattern of calling for one step, one instruction at a time continued turn by turn, landmark by landmark, through the old city and out into a suburb until we reached our destination. The cousin talked us there.  Step by step.  In real time.  (Isn't there a device you can buy that does that?  What's the difference?  See #1 and 2)

Again in Gulu, Uganda in Acholi.  Because there are no maps and not so many signs (and the ones that exist don’t reflect the information you hope for) you have to ask directions... frequently.  When you do, the most common answer, in English is,  ‘Just go along and then you’ll see it there.’  Or, with an arm outstretched, pointing at four buildings, ‘It's that building there.’   So I was curious if there was some part of 'there' which didn't translate from Acholi, maybe there was a tone which imparted more information.  And upon comparison, there is certainly more than one 'there,' but also it's connected to memory and experience.  Extensive research describes how bi-/multilinguals remember things differently in different languages.   And this would be an entire project in itself, but my impression is that the landscape and experiential memory, the sensory data we collect to know a place, to create detailed mental maps, this has been created in Acholi not English.  So if you get directions in Acholi, there are many, many details.

"The white building by the tall tree next to the butcher, be careful of the road there it's not been repaired... and not far from the little road you take to get to the flower shop, have you been there?  It's very nice my daughter works there."  

But to get back to designing ICTs, when a user must shift into English mode, either through interface language or through other visual cues which say to the user unconsciously, 'this is an English space, go into English-mode in your brain,' then their ability to convey details about their environment diminishes if they are shifting out of Acholi and into English, even unconsciously, at the conceptual level.

These 3 points-- information flow, self/group, and maps-- illustrate what I will write more about in later posts and what I hope to bring to light with my experiment here in Gulu, the interconnectedness of time, space and language.  So far, I am pleased to report that these ideas seem to resonate with people here in policy-making, in ICT, and basic users of the current tech. (To my surprise in fact, my research seems to be better understood here than in the US/EU, almost as though I was explaining something very obvious that everyone here already knew.)

From inside the Bubble

Before coming to Gulu, I had already begun to form a few impressions.  Colleagues and friends and pre-field reading had informed me that this was definitely not an untouched corner of the world.  Local researchers seemed wary about my intentions.  Others asked if maybe I didn't want to go to another region where there weren't already so many projects.  Sometimes the inundation of westerners was offered as a comfort to me, "See you won't be alone up there. There are lots of mzungu even more than in Kampala."  Before I came to Gulu, it was clear that it was a town with a reputation. 
 
There are many 'bubble towns' in this world.  Places where you feel like you've entered a Disney production.  Where happiness is enforced.  Some towns in Sweden feel this way.  Herds of healthy wealthy people on bicycles is just weird.  Or the Midwestern homogeneity of Madison, Wisconsin.  The nuvo-hippie utopia that has inspired films.  Gulu town, Uganda is another type of manufactured experience.  The post-LRA peace in Museveni’s Uganda, where he promotes quiet streets and getting on with life in an orderly fashion, has brought an onslaught of NGOs and researchers to the most conflict-affected region in the northeast of the country.  And now, is seems as though the economy is completely driven by the do-gooder spirit.  

Arriving in town, the street is lined not with small businesses but with the headquarters of not-for-profit after not-for-profit. Even though I was prepared for this, I wasn't prepared for the mall of charitable foundations and UN/EU/USAID partnerships... anchored on every corner by banks.  With the influx of international aid, the wider district of around 150,000 people surrounding the small town, now has ten major financial institutions.  And unlike other cities of similar or even larger size in Uganda, many businesses accept VISA. 

What are these for-profit businesses?  Cafe's with wifi, hotels with conference space for the NGO's staff, and stalls of second-hand goods that look like a camping or sports store in the US full of backpacks and luggage (I think I saw mine) and hiking shoes and hats.  Cruising around are big new trucks labeled with charity logos about saving children, planning for the community, and bringing peace.  Many people are wearing shirts or carrying umbrellas that display a wealth of humanitarian organizations' logos and creeds, perhaps connected to their jobs or perhaps a second-hand selection making there appear to be a kind of de facto Gulu style, the ‘Aid-worker Aesthetic.’  An industry of peace and reconstruction. 

Part of this industry is research.  There are hordes of researchers who come to do deep and probing interviews about gender and violence, about how it felt to be a victim of Kony’s army, or unearth the inner life of the internally displaced. The same respondent may be interviewed again and again by several different research projects.  Answers become rehearsed.  Bubble town answers.  Disney produced answers.  Well, if Disney did war atrocity films, but you get the idea.  

How does a town like this dissolve the bubble?  As the NGOs and researchers get pulled toward a new crisis, what will take their place?  Beneath the veneer of reconstruction, Gulu has the appeal of a sleepy small town with small farms, friendly neighbors, a peaceful main street you can walk down with big shady trees… several schools and a growing university.  Museveni just released another ambitious plan to move Uganda toward 2040.  What do people in Gulu plan for their town and their future?

Yes, as a researcher I am one of the descending horde.  But I won’t ask a single question about how anyone feels or how the conflict affected them.   I am interested in the debris of crisis management, ICT, and its limited adaptation to indigenous use.  I’m considering how information and communication technology could better capture Acholi concepts so software designers here could develop tools for the next generation.  I don’t mind what people talk about with me, so long as it’s in Acholi. 

One of the best books*  I read before beginning to learn Acholi and coming to Uganda was about the history of the Luo, Acholi and related tribes.  Long ago, when these groups made their way down the Nile valley, they were challenged by rivalries and territory skirmishes.  They won victories because of their ability to keep secrets,  their quiet, their patience.  These qualities are still evident.  I can only imagine what it’s like for them to be confronted by strangers and asked to share, to confess, to spill out their inner private lives.  Perhaps building a bubble suits everyone.   Assigned roles.  Prescribed emotions.  And the truth can stay neatly out of sight.

I will spend two months here, and I look forward to being mistaken, being surprised, and simply taking in what I can in this short period of time.

* Ogutu, G.E.M., 2001. K E R In the 21^st Century Luo Social System. Kisumu: Sundowner Institute Press.

Without a Map

A Response to Mapping Hate Speech from the War of Ideas blog from Foreign Policy

In Acholi, the language spoken in Northern Uganda where Kony’s LRA was recently driven out, as well as the new nation of South Sudan, they have no word for map.  Why then do most conflict prevention ICT applications organize information around maps?  There are over 40 languages spoken in the region, and none have a word for map.  The disconnect is deeper than language.  It extends to the way in which cultures conceptualize information—what is deemed worth capturing and how it should be organized.  For example, most applications organize information around a linear concept of time.  Some cultures have a circular concept of time, or even a combination of the linear and circular.  If you find this hard to imagine, then you have begun to understand how someone from those perspectives must adapt to share information in the current format.  Beyond changing the language users see on the interface, ICTs have not adapted to other cultural concepts of knowledge management.  This has profound implications for whether or not local users have access to the information or if they feel it’s relevant for their own policy implementation. 

A recent War of Ideas post profiled the conflict early warning initiative called Hatebase which collects hate speech via a Wikipedia-like interface and correlates the entries with reports of violence.  The assumption being that the Rwandan genocide was preventable and monitoring local language patterns could play a part.  However, the feeling of being caught by surprise and failing to prevent the conflict are the feelings of an outsider, not those of a Rwandan.  So it must be asked, who is this tool for?  Individuals in conflict-affected areas are perpetually simplified into victims waiting to be given a voice.  Rwandans had the information, it just wasn’t in written form accessible to the West.  The oral nature of information in other cultures has so far been discounted in ICT design; only when information takes written form is it cemented as fact, as actionable, as ready for analysis.

Among the nearly 6800 languages, only around 100 developed a literature, the rest remain oral to some extent.  Orality in a culture does not imply underdevelopment or opposition to literacy, simply a preference for that mode of expression.  There is enormous potential to re-imagine the visual interface, to respond to cognitive cues and communication norms from the cultures crowding into the digital space... Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, China.  This is an unexplored avenue for ICT design.

How would Hatebase contend with the Acholi word gwok?  It can be pronounced six different ways in order to mean either: dog, shoulder, incapable, misfortune, do not, or protect.  You have to hear it.  Information is something you hear, collect and pass on.  Gam means both to receive answers from someone (and pass them on) and collect people in a taxi and drive them off.  So it is with information here. It moves. It defies conventional categories.  Hatebase may have research value, but without integrating more culture-specific concepts of how to collect and organize communication data, it will never gain a predictive capacity or relevance within conflict areas.

Top of the Ant Hill

Acholi refer to politicians with a figurative term wibye meaning 'top of the ant hill' because like this precarious point on the hill, politicians and their elevated seats of power may crumble and slide down at any moment.   Even if ant hills are not part of your typical landscape, the lack of confidence or lack of trust in leaders that this image relates has relevance for many cultures.


So what can words, phrases, grammatical constructions tell us about a culture?  Not always a lot on their own.  Sometimes they are vestigial, reminders of the roots of a language.  There are many of these for English connecting it back to French or German.  For some American vernaculars, elements of West African languages such as Wolof can still be heard which were blended in centuries ago.

It is important to go slowly when learning a new language.  Remain skeptical, never assuming when something is familiar that you have recognized a true similarity because, to borrow roughly from Magritte, a chair isn't always a chair.  For me, the best evidence that complex concepts cannot be translated with equivalency is that even concrete objects such as 'bottle' or 'chair' which one might assume have direct translations are not always equivalent between languages.  A chair is not always a chair from one language to the next.  It depends on what your language considers chair-ness to be.  It depends on how we conceptualize categories or how we understand membership for those categories.  (I will be writing much more about categories because they are an important cognitive activity.) 

An example from basic the greetings in Acholi illustrates an overlap between an instance where simple translation equivalency might be assumed, but complex cultural concepts are also at work.  (It is these more complex concepts, attitudes and values that interest me, and where I believe linguistic investigation offers a glimpse of insight.) So the simple example: among family or close acquaintances in the morning you might greet each other with:

You slept well?
I slept well.

This seems very natural.  Many languages use this pattern.  However, the Acholi region where it is used has just emerged from several years of war.  The sentiment is in fact literal as in, 'was your sleep disturbed,' and also implying without asking the more sinister, the unsaid. 'Did anyone break into your home and was anyone hurt or killed?  In this way, 'you slept well,' is not a direct translation from the English or any other language.  It has an experiential weight carried in the tone, amassed over years.  This description was given to me by someone young, so I wonder if his grandparents knew another meaning.  These early impressions are the threads I will follow with further study and research.  How prevalent is this attitude?  What is the speed of language change in the highly oral culture here in LuoLand?  How can my methodology capture and convey these dimensions?

Buganda Kingdom

In Acholi they understand why I say my name is Gwyn not Gwen (a distinction even some friends I've known for 10years don't hear).  Because why would you name someone gwen?  That is something you eat.  Gwen means chicken.

Week one Kampala:  This is the start of three months of fieldwork I have planned in Uganda.  A large part of my time will be spent in intensive language lessons to learn the Luo language Acholi.  It is mostly spoken in the northern part of Uganda where I will be headed next.  (see Gulu on the map)  It is one of 41 languages spoken in here by a little over 1M people (also in South Sudan). 

Since I come from the US and the state of Indiana, staff at the language school thought I might have knowledge of 'red indians.'  They particularly wanted to know why they never see any.  This was one of the more interesting and complicated follow-ups to: where are you from I've ever gotten.

Due to some combination of my politically correct American upbringing and the fact that we were in a language school where words matter, I informed them that the people who originally inhabited the US were now referred to as Native Americans.  As the words came out of my mouth, I realized this change came about not long after it was decided that the inhabitants of Africa should no longer be called Natives and simultaneously with African diaspora claiming skin color as a referent.  In one context, the word native has been adopted as more appropriate and respectful of origins while rejected in another case along with its connotations of primitivism.   We agreed the use of skin color in categorization was ok if it was the choice of the group.  English is very concerned with categorizing and naming.  This we also agreed.

Isn't every language?  That is what I'm here to explore.  In fact, I don't believe they are, not in the same manner or to the same extent.  I am a linguistic relativist, which is to say, I think the language we are using influences the sensory information we attend to in our environment.  That's not to say that you can't think or experience or imagine beyond the words and grammar you know.  It is just a starting point for entering the world, and the mode we habitually convey these experiences becomes familiar.  Having learned more than eight languages after my native English, each requires breaking down my English way of thinking to try and adopt the new language's way of parsing and framing life (to varying degrees of success). 
 
To get back to the problem put before me: where are all the Native Americans?  After doing my best to explain the centuries of political, social, and cultural factors resulting in few Native Americans venturing to Uganda, the Ugandan staff felt these Indigenous American nations could use some African-ness to confront the injustices they faced and to coalesce in stronger numbers and affect change.  African-ness, it was explained to me meant:

1. pride in themselves
2. pride in their culture, enough to protect and evolve it as time passes
3. motivation to educate their people, this is way to prosper  

Everyone I've met is ready to problem solve.  There is a positive attitude in the city (among the students and employed people to whom I've spoken) about the changes they've witnessed in their country in recent years.  This comes out in how they are ready to approach life.  With calm confidence.

week two coming soon....