Dan Scott @dbs@scholar.social

I helped design a bilingual survey, but didn't implement it. The PI entered it all into Qualtrics, twice: once for each language.

Now that we have the results, the codes don't match up between languages (of course), so I have to do a ton of cleanup before I can start analysing the data.

But first I have to stop staring at https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-tools/translate-survey/ wondering why the PI didn't just use that?

See p.8 of https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.63n2.119 for my current example. (It's paywalled--stupid ALA--but Google Scholar will find a perfect copy for you at academia.edu)

If I zoom in on-screen, I can barely make out the blurry label text.

Worse, even when printed at 600dpi--theoretically the whole reason for the weird layout--fig. 3 is unreadable.

I hate when I have to struggle to read graph labels in PDF articles on even a 27" QHD screen.

There has to be a better way. Like HTML?

Or at least not arbitrarily scaling the graphic down to 5/8s of the page width. Use the full "8.5"" page-width; it's not like an extra page or two in article length is costing you anything.

Today from when you join the review of draft #1 of a collaboratively-edited 30 page whitepaper on how to implement X in an information retrieval system, where X is a cool thing big corporations have been doing for a few years, and ask the question "So has any research been done on whether X actually benefits users? Is there a lit review?", and you get (presumably embarrassed) silence as a response.

Guess who gets to pull together that lit review?

Well, good news is that the data was saved in the database correctly; bad news is that the incorrect data that I was shown & downloaded resulted in my negative evaluation of the tool's reliability & data accuracy. (I finished the survey before the researcher responded to me).

Completed a survey + exercise sent out by a PhD candidate working in the same research space. I found and reported a bug in the exercise that might skew their data significantly.

They're doing really interesting work, and including a hands-on exercise in the middle of the survey was a methodological approach that was new to me. I liked it!

But I hope that bug doesn't screw things up too much--my heart sank when I ran into it.

Every time I try and copy a bit of text from a PDF and the text comesoutallsquishedtogether or fully justified via spaces, I get annoyed.

I get angry when it's a paper behind a paywall, because apparently it takes a lot of $$$ for those publishers to mess up basic reader requirements.

O-ho, and the editor's reply: "The biggest issue on our end is that we rely on the royalty payments we receive from MUSE and JSTOR to run the journal and our contracts require exclusivity."

$$$, and a possibly overly conservative reading of those contracts? I can't imagine every journal on MUSE/JSTOR is blocked from offering OA options.

My response: "This is indeed unfortunate, as it means that our faculty and students cannot comply with open access mandates from funding sources such as the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Non-compliance would render them ineligible for future grants. I will therefore have to recommend that they choose a different venue for publishing their work."

Journal's reply to a request to allow deposit of a post-print copy of an article to an institutional repository:

"Our experience has been that most university libraries have access to [Project MUSE or JSTOR] so our target audience usually has access"

This, despite pointing out SSHRC (amongst many other funders) "open access within one year" publication requirements.

Super disappointing.

Well hey there journal website don't you think that maybe you should post your ISSN(s) somewhere?

Side note: figured out how to use stem: blocks in Asciidoc so that I can continue taking notes on my laptop rather than scrawling in my notepad.

I think it helps to be able to express things in the required notation rather than just using symbols, e.g.

stem:[\forall x, y \in I, x > y => f(x) \lt f(y)]

I survived day one. The agenda was... ambitious, and predictably the workshop leader began to start skipping through content. Which leads to shaky foundations, because of course almost all math builds on previous math.

So the next three days are going to be very challenging. But I can do it!

Settling in as a student in what's going to be a heck of a day. Coming up: 200+ slides and associated exercises in set logic / basic algebra, and functions.

Workshop hasn't started yet but I've already pointed out a transposition error in one of the problems and a Markdown quirk (lettered list in source generating a numbered list output, screwing up references) to the instructor. Probably a nervous/defensive reaction on my part. Have to try not to be _that student_

I was about to recommend zenodo.org as a data repository then discovered it has been down for over three hours. #notGoodTiming.

So you might think a PhD symposium on information studies research might a) archive the website & program and b) include links for presenters and their presentations but (at least in my most recent anecdotal case) you would be wrong.

I went ahead and saved the current site in the Wayback Machine, sent my links to the organizers, and suggested they might want to create folders for each year of the symposium. But I'm sure they're tired!

My relationship to "word count" has shifted over time

Before: start writing a day or two before a deadline (or a few hours...) stop writing when I reach the expected word count, slap on a title, intro, and conclusion that seem to match, done

Now: write everything I need to say, see I've doubled the expected word count, spend days revising/cutting/crafting and worrying about the removal of so much context and qualifiers

Almost done this draft proposal, all I have to do is outline the expected theoretical and applied contributions of my proposed area of study.

hahahaha I expect to be doing that for years to come; let me just summarize that in 100 words