A valuable contribution to the debate regarding the future of big data.
An academic study explains how ethnography’s cultural analysis can deepen the mining of big data.
In the last 20 years, there have been two parallel revolutions ripe for dovetailing: the movement among the sciences toward the analysis of increasingly complex systems demanding disciplinary collaboration and the birth of big data, the expert collection and mining of infinite piles of statistical minutiae. According to the author, the difficulty with data analysis today is that despite its increasing sophistication, it still needs help managing the “nasty problem” of human complexity—the fact that all of this statistical fodder requires organization and interpretation in order to be transformed into real understanding. Ethnography has a pedigree of doing precisely this: It not only carefully draws generalizations about human behavior from specific data (this makes it “microgenetic”), but it also plumbs cultural questions. Shaffer (How Computer Games Help Children Learn, 2006) proposes a way the techniques of ethnography, which produces a “thick,” qualitative analysis rich with cultural significance, can be combined with the “thin,” quantitative analysis of big data: “To do anything less—to pretend that the mountains of data are not islands in a sea of cultural significance—may be mathematically rigorous, but in the end is conceptually empty.” The author, an ethnographer trained at the prestigious Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides an impressively comprehensive account of what ethnography is. He explores the way the discipline handles the inevitable problem of bias, the use of statistical models, the nature of generalization, and the basic methods of analysis. Shaffer also examines the theoretical nature of the connection between qualitative and quantitative analysis and the potential pitfalls involved. His study is clearly designed for other academics—average readers won’t be gripped by lengthy discussions about epistemic frameworks—but his prose is startlingly accessible and is likely to appeal to anyone with an amateur interest in the systematic examination of culture. This is a timely and original work and should be required reading for ethnographers and statisticians alike.
A valuable contribution to the debate regarding the future of big data.Pub Date: April 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-578-19168-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Cathcart Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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