Original and Extra...Complicated

Field experience as a cultural mediator led me to the hypothesis about how ICT software was capturing narratives.  In the experiment, participants watched a video and described it three times:

stage 1 out loud in Acholi
stage 2 written on a mobile device in Acholi
stage 3 out loud in English

I predicted a pattern of similarities between the the written Acholi version and the oral English version.  I thought that because the software had been developed from a western cultural perspective, that even when the interface was translated for users, they would have to get into an English mindset to engage with the logical organization of the software.  And because of this effort at a cognitive level, the narrative they would produce via the ICT would be more similar to the oral English version and less similar to the oral Acholi version.  In this way it could be said that the Acholi narrative was disrupted.

hypothesis: that narrative given via ICT in Acholi would be more similar to performance in English than to oral Acholi.  [stated as a null hypothesis: The oral Acholi version will resemble the ICT Acholi version]

The apples and oranges bit that makes statistical modeling a challenge is two-fold.  First, the experiments I adapted were comparing only speech (similar to my stage 1 and stage 3).... more like apples to apples.  And secondly, each of their participants provided similar narrative content, at least, similar enough to compare... so  here, oranges to oranges.  In my case, even though I controlled the topic, the video, one participant remembered seeing a dispute instigated by a woman while another remembered seeing a group of government thugs enforcing curfew.  Furthermore, some participants provided only a few phrases while others talked for several minutes, many paragraphs of data.  Their descriptions of the video clip are barely in the same galaxy. 

The plan was to compare each narrative stage by analyzing frames.  A frame refers almost to a fragment or phrase constructing the narrative of, in this case, an event.  Take for example the frame, I saw fighting  and I saw two men fighting.  While similar, these would be considered two different ways of framing because of the added detail of the number of actors, the two men. 

The frames, such as giving a general overview followed by reference to who was in the frame-- I saw fighting. I saw people fighting-- would be considered two frames.  If the details in these frames are not markedly different between any two stages, then they are counted as the same even if the syntax is different such as I saw a fight vs. They are fighting. 

When differences occur, they are not only counted but ranked for importance.  Based on the narrative structure in Acholi (used as a baseline/norm and derived from this study as well as literature), the general category, then the participants, then details of actions and location are given hierarchical importance.  So for example, if two versions match until a detail of location, if one mentions a location and the other does not, they may still be considered a match if the general scene category and description of participants and actions match.  If the locations differ entirely, one event is recalled as being in a market and one at a taxi stage, then they will likely be considered different narratives.  For shorter narratives, most if not all frames and details must match.  

Another consideration is tone.  Throughout stage 1 and 3, the space that an oral modality gives for adding extra words, words which convey the (un)certainty of the speaker about his/her memory play a role in strength of the witness statement.  However, both stage 2a and b do not afford this same linguistic wiggle room.  There were built-in points to express doubt in stage 2b, and they are a point of focus in analysis.  Stage 2a was an open SMS format, so it was up to the participant to inject the intended level of (un)certainty.  Divergence in tone, in expressed level of doubt, constitutes a means for differentiating narratives as well. 
 
For stage 2 (a and b), it gets a bit trickier to compare written results with spoken... and sometimes only a ticked box for yes or no.  But this is the meat of the question.  Does the ICT format adequately capture the categories and concepts for the event frames? (Many participants in my experiment were reluctant to hold the device, type themselves, and often spoke the answers aloud which I recorded with an audio device and typed for them.  The data collected via the mobile device in stage 2 was not, therefore, strictly written.  Much of it was still spoken.)

For stage 2b to be judged a match with another stage, the answers should convey similar information to that given in one of the oral narratives without contradicting or adding new information.  If the reader had only the information from stage 2b, could s/he reasonably imagine a scene as told in one of the other narrative versions?  If one of the oral narrative versions has several other frames or details not captured by stage 2b, then no, but if the sense of the event framing such as ‘theft with violence’ was captured by the answers to stage 2b’s question series, then it can be reasonable concluded that stage 2b adequately captured that narrative.  (If it sounds complicated, you're not wrong.  As I have said before, this was a first attempt at bringing a problem to the surface so it can be better understood, studied, and addressed... so far, lots of good indicators plus heaps of ideas to improve future trials.)

Because of the ordering of the stages, stage 2a often repeated much of what was said in stage 1.  For psychology experiments, the effects of ordering are considerable and are usually countered by mixing up the stages; however, in this case, the role of priming was anticipated.  The structure of the experiment captures the real-life field experience where an individual recalls an event orally and then creates a written record of that event with ICT software, often with the help of a trained information collection specialist.  Priming effects would counter my hypothesis, in other words, I almost stacked the deck in favor of my own hypothesis failing.  So if the results show my hypothesis still has value, there must be a very strong force at work.

Of the instances that were considered 'ICT success,' most came from participants who followed the stage 2a path.  This may have been because it was a quick experiment and easy to simply repeat in written form what you had just said out loud.  It is fresh in your mind.  The differences came in the form of tone as well as more obvious detail and frame shifts.  The tone change is interesting because in the oral account, the speaker may have said, I saw some fighting like maybe there was this guy who caused a problem or maybe it's a taxi conductor wanting change....  There was doubt and alternatives expressed.  In stage 2a, the version was clear and direct.  I saw one guy hit another guy in the street.  The versions often make it sound much more like the participant is sure of the identity and ready to accuse someone to the police; whereas the oral version is not accusatory and gives a couple of possible scenarios for what prompted the chaos.  If I only read the ICT version I would believe there was an actionable threat, a report of violence that needed a response.  If I heard the oral version, I would not be as concerned.  The aggregation of this type of report, stripped of the measured tone of the speaker can heighten perceived threat levels unnecessarily.  

I will spend more time on this topic in further posts as well as talk about the results of my frame analysis.  (Two other colleagues are reviewing my results. Independent evaluation.)  But preliminary conclusions are that my hypothesis was correct.  So that's cool.  Other results point towards the strong division between oral and written narrative structures, something we all kinda know intuitively and there is a ton of research on how speaking is different than writing, so it's reassuring that results stayed with this pattern... the interesting parts come in looking at  

Apples and Oranges and Acholi

I'm pretty sure there aren't muscles in my brain.  But I swear I can feel teeny tiny sinuous straining in my head when I stare at my data.  Raking over the pages.  Dicing it up.  Piecing it back together in new combinations. Milking every ounce of remotely interesting reportable information from it.  Participants 5 and 9 mentioned the word BLUE. great. no idea what that means. yet.

Two things are in the back of my mind: Daniel Dennett's latest book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, because one of the early chapters is about failure.  Strategic flops.  He talks a lot about the toil of generating ideas.  And it does feel like a rare and wonderful thing that we (people who have the luxury to just sit around and ponder) get a problem that really strains those brain muscles.  Data analysis has also brought to mind an image of sculptors from another age who could see their design within the marble while slowly chipping away toward it.  I am reasonably confident that somewhere within all the data I've collected, if I sift and sort enough, the description I envisioned at the start is poised to emerge.  What I don't know is what tools I need to get there.  And then again, if my first pass at designing an experiment like this wasn't quite right, was it a strategic flop?  Did it generate anything that will lead me in the right direction next time or provide a least (fingers crossed) a partial picture?

When I initially designed my experiment, (The experiment was conducted in three stages. Participants were asked to watch a short video on a laptop from Youtube titled, ‘Crazy Nigerians’ which they might watch alone or in pairs. They were asked to describe what they had seen in Acholi, ‘Lok ma ineno/ Tell me what you saw,’ then they were handed a mobile device to answer question(s) about the video, and finally they described the scene again in English.)  I knew that it might not work (the risk of all experiments), but I hoped it would provide a certain kind of data, a certain kind of description of the situation I was investigating.  Unlike previous qualitative work, this experiment might be more useful to software engineers.  Additionally, it narrows the focus from language or communication generally to event construal, or a type of cognitive connection to language.  How we conceptualize an event in time and space, who was there, etc... how this is stored in our memory and recalled through language has been shown by previous bilingual research to vary by language, but what happens when ICT is thrown in the mix? 

As mentioned in previous posts,  I modeled my experiment on the work of several others in the field of cognitive linguistics.  In particular, Aneta Pavlenko (the new president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics) and Christiane von Stutterheim an expert on narrative.  Once my results take shape, I will integrate comments from members of the software development community.  Just as I have done with earlier papers, writing to engage several disciplines is one of the biggest challenges.  I am by no means trying to please everyone, but at least get my point across and be prepared to answer reasonable criticism.   

In subsequent posts, I will be addressing initial themes as well as analysis techniques since this is a new, although adapted, method.  So far... the emergence of an alternative hypothesis indicating narrative disruption, the identity of the attacker in the video, and the conveyance of doubt/uncertainty have emerged as the main themes.... Stay tuned.

Footprints, Skeletons, and other Telltale Signs

One of the tricks I'm told that authors try to do as they develop characters for novels is invent deep back stories, intricate details which may never appear in the actual novel, but nevertheless inform the character's actions.  The incident with the clown and the candles at the 7th birthday party.  The aversion to sesame seeds, etc. etc....

When I began to investigate ICT for conflict management, I was mostly thinking about the software I had worked with on laptops.  The interface layout was a primary concern for me and it was as if I was approaching my analysis like I was dissecting a painting.   In fact, there are many scholars who treat 'space as meaning' in this way.  As my project developed, I came to center more on mobile technologies, and their interface layout is dramatically different, often starkly minimal.  However, I believe the underlying logic of the original software for the desktop program still guides the structure and organization of the mobile version in the same way as the novel's character is guided by previous experiences kept invisible to the reader.  Colleagues who play devil's advocate push me try to imagine another way in which information could be organized.  They ask me to say precisely how the current system is inadequate.  I can't at the moment.  This is in part because the current system comes from my own culture and makes sense to me.  However, I think my experiment can demonstrate that sense-making as captured by narrative flow, scene conceptualization, isn't universal.

Is it possible to track backwards, to recreate the logic of the desktop experience from the mobile one?  For the mobile software I've been working with, it's not super sophisticated, so it hasn't been designed for mobile-only.  Generally, it reads like a survey, gathering information in a step-wise fashion from structured questions which try to streamline answer choices and simplify the user's need to type or scroll around.

Does the simplification, the invisible backbone of the desktop version driving the organization of information gathering actually end up driving the narrative instead?

As I analyze my initial findings, I am grouping participant responses with a few questions of my own.  Or rather, after reading the responses through a few times, the things that jumped out at me can best be captured with the following questions:
(The next step is to look for what doesn't jump out, what conforms, or what may even contradict my hypothesis.)

1. Did participants tend to identify the scene (a video they watched) as an argument, fight, theft, or 'other' in the preliminary description.
2. Did this change between step 2 and 3 (after interaction with mobile survey)? How?
3. In which language (English or Acholi) did they give more details? Or equivalent?
4. Participants seemed to include details from their personal lives to give structure to the ambiguous scene… examples? Frequency?

I used two surveys, one contained one open question and participants could just type in a similar manner to sending an SMS and the second version was a structured survey with multiple choice questions, open format, and yes/no questions.  It was patterned after the type of ICTs I expect participants to interact with more and more in the future.  

So far, I have noticed that some participants who have the open format do not change their description throughout the three description stages while a few who interacted with the structured survey changed their version of events.  For example, two participants who first described watching a fight later said it was a robbery because this was one of the multiple choice options or narratives that presented throughout the structured survey.  Some participants told me afterwards they could see what I wanted them to say.  (To be honest, having watched the video perhaps 200 times, I have no idea what is going on in the scene, so I didn't have a 'true' narrative in mind among the choices.) 

The complicated game of psychology is partly the result of a population that has been inundated with researchers.  While my work is unfamiliar and participants were generally curious and positive about wanting to participate, the survey questions that touch on theft, violence, or conflict may trigger a connection to the type of research to which they are habituated and thus associate with certain objectives.  This is exactly why I wanted to conduct an experiment instead of interviews.  To avoid the guessing game.  The posturing and manipulation for responses.  Often the intention is to please me, the researcher, but in the case of an experiment like this, a comparison of the thought stage of language production, of conceptualization of scenarios which manifest in specific ways bilinguals cross or mix their languages.  I am reasonably confident the experimental design guards their responses from this kind of manipulation because they are unaware of what I am measuring.  

That's not to say we don't discuss it.  Some of the most valuable insights for me were gained during the discussion about the context and purpose of my research.  Participants asked some important questions.  However, I maintain that the quantitative more than the qualitative will be the more valuable outcome (and more novel aspect) of this research as a first step toward how culture can be considered as a variable in design.

The Culture of Whistleblowing

Baba Jukwa of Zimbabwe exposes corruption.  He remains hidden behind this cartoon symbol.  The posts on his Facebook page about government officials have put a high price for the discovery of his identity ahead of the 2013 elections on July 31st.

In a recent interview for ICT Africa, Dr. Jabulani Dhliwayo explained that in Zimbabwe, as well as other countries in Africa with similarly high levels of corruption, the risk to whistleblowers is extreme and the corruption so deep, so pervasive that they have no chance to pursue justice though the systems and institutions of government. A mask, a pseudonym, a means of remaining anonymous and outside the system are essential.  The interviewer questioned whether the citizens could trust the reports from a source who would not reveal themselves and did not work within a system which could verify reports.  Dr. Dhliwayo replied, this is the best they can hope for right now.

Zimbabwe is frequently mentioned in the same breath with Cuba and Belarus as one of the countries which have bought surveillance technology from China. (Literally the same source is always quoted, which says 'suspected to have' and gives no more specifics which I find suspicious and frustrating... so this suggests a side project.)  Anyway, while this firewall and tracking software is meant to limit and finally root out actors like Baba Jukwa, Dr. Dhliwayo explains that the skills of the security services are not as advanced as the software they're tasked to monitor.  (Small sigh of relief for activists across Zimbabwe.)

Current cases in the U.S. of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning highlight the contrast of overtly engaging with the system vs. Baba Jukwa's strategy of anonymity, particularly with respect to the emphasis on the character of the individuals over the content of the material they sought to bring to public attention.  Does inventing a two-dimensional cartoon keep the focus on the political message and limit character assassination to the obvious speculation on identity or judgement about revealing identity... all arguably less reality tv show than when there is a real individual with family, friends, neighbors, dentists, teachers, and baristas to dig dirt on? 

Perhaps this is too simplistic or obvious.  The U.S. has a judicial system in which to bring perpetrators to justice and there are ways, as Snowden or Assange are demonstrating, to take advantage of international legal systems to remain unharmed as a whistleblower.  Both of these avenues would not be available in many countries.

This is not the only example of using a mask to create a sort of shield from which to attack authority figures. 

La Comay, a five-foot puppet (or a man in a flamboyant costume topped off with a foam head) is another example of disguising the identity of a person pursuing sensitive topics.  While the actor who used this vehicle in Puerto Rico was not anonymous, by adopting such an over-the-top character whose comic and salacious style was far from formal journalism, he had more latitude on serious topics and could even book tough interview guests.  (no longer broadcasting)

And how does the mask strategy appear (or disappear) across cultures when using software platforms where crowds can report corruption or crimes?  Some are designed for reports to be made anonymously and to function within or as auxiliary to the justice system, but there are other crowd-created projects which have sprung up in different cultures which approach anonymity differently.  Vigilante or sunlight, they are often based on social media such as Facebook or Twitter.  These efforts have been criticized for lack of verification or worse such as in Mexico where some individuals have been tried as terrorists for inciting violence based on rumors they spread through Twitter.  The individuals were partially veiled, and then revealed.  Much of the reporting of violent drug related crime is being spread in this manner, but the identities of the sources is, to some extent, hidden.  And this state of being in the shadows is not culturally problematic, in fact, it seems necessary because of the risks involved in reporting.  In contrast, in Canada after the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, citizens policed themselves via Facebook to 'name and shame' looters and other offenders (to the great frustration of the real police).  The need and desire to remain anonymous while pointing the finger was not a high a priority in Canada.  Neither, as it turns out, was verification. 

(photo edition.cnn.com)

Is there a culture, a history, a tradition to how we cry foul?  And thinking about how the whistleblower must go about presenting evidence, (as I said some countries simply have a higher risk factor) how people expect whistleblowers to behave... is a mask permitted?  Is a mask even part of that tradition? vs. a more cowboy approach of riding out and putting a target on yourself?  Or is this a measure of the health of our institutions, our systems of justice? (I truly didn't intend to bring in the the Lone Ranger, but he was a cowboy with a mask back in the days when our justice system was still getting up and running... I'm going to propose this as a scale to Freedom House.)

Yu's on First

No matter how clearly we think we've written something, we've all had someone who's read our email, our essay, our simple message and come back with a completely different reading than we intended.  The miscommunication, the multiple interpretations come at the semantic level in my experience, the result of a disagreement on degree or connotation or tone.

Similarly, we've all misheard things.  "Have I got cat spies?" "No. Have you got a half size?"  Ah.  Our brain fills in as best it can around the morphemes it missed even though we know what we came up isn't semantically solid.

Here in Gulu, I can only describe the mode of misunderstanding as feeling a bit like a hybrid of these two-- on the one hand, the problem I'm seeing happens between writer and reader, but on the other hand, the nature of the problem isn't as much semantic as it is denotative. 

In my experiment, I ask participants to fill in one of two surveys in Acholi. (surveys designed with native speakers)  I was prepared for the semantic level misunderstandings surrounding some questions, but I was not prepared to have denotative deviation, something along the lines of my writing the word 'carrot' in English and having someone interpret it as 'marble.'  That's basically what has been happening, a dispute at the foundational level of word meaning.  I'll give a second example in case that wasn't clear.

I throw the ball.  (what is written on the page)
I throw the fight. (what you, a native speaker of this language understand from what you've read)

I've never had this kind of misunderstanding before.   

Not every participant has the same misinterpretations, so it's not a mistake, typo, or spelling variation.  I don't entirely have an explanation yet, but in one instance a participant will give me a lecture about the inaccuracy of my survey to have included such a bizarre term and in the following session the individual sees no problem.

I understood from my research and from other linguistic environments, that with an oral language, meaning is tied to listening and speaking.  This experiment brought this process into relief for me as a native speaker of a chirographic language because I was able watch the meaning mechanism weaken on the page, dissolve without the context of sound.  In the short-form writing mandated by mobile applications, meaning becomes fuzzy, unpredictable, contestable. (I wrote about the 6 meanings of gwok in a previous post.  Coo has 9)

One of the series of questions I asked participants before we began the experiment was about language use in daily life, at work, and with their mobile device.  Did they mostly talk on their phones, talk and text, how did they use their phone?  Most respondents were college educated.  Many were multilingual.  The most common answer to, 'How do you use your phone?' was that they rarely texted or not at all.  They preferred to call even though texting is cheaper.  Everyone texted in English.  And they told me this with a tone that said this was a foolish question.  A few later added that they could mix languages to joke with friends in Acholi, or they can send a text to their grandmother in the village who does not speak English.  I have no quantitative data to look at how frequently this happens.  There are other studies which look at the frequency and context of language mixing.  A participant from a micro-finance organization described why he used English to text:

“We wish to text in Luo, wish to maybe send voice mails in Luo, but [the mobile phone] has been invented in another country, so in English we have to now do that. [me: Why couldn’t you text in Luo?]  In Luo?  It is not easy. You know our language is very short. chuch chuch chuch [noise of texting action].  So to formulate is not easy.”

He was describing the problem of the misunderstanding I had encountered.  It is avoided in speech because Achoil (sometimes called Luo) uses a lot of repetition as well as intonation to convey meaning.  This kind of thing isn't easily adapted to mobile applications where the design focus is on minimalism and streamlining of interface text.

Have now wrapped up my three months in Gulu with transcriptions and translations mostly completed.  On to data analysis.  Will be sharing first impression from the field at Africa Writes, July 5th at the British Library.