[This post is a slightly enhanced version of an email I sent to the Humanist mailing list today in response to this message asking about the value of GIS curriculum in scholarship. Here, I begin by quoting the relevant parts of the original post] At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there [...]
I write this shameful post as someone who has taken more than a week’s worth of statistics classes (and gotten ok grades). And after I spent all night last night trying to figure out a way to have the answer below make sense, I figure it makes sense to try to put the answer online. [...]
“By 1930 in the Soviet Union it was a different story. It was not that Marxist economics could not be quantitative but that it should not be quantitative. Stalin believed twinning mathematics and Marxist economics made it “the most reactionary bran…
Yesterday I put together some data on the Premier League to see if an old hypothesis (relegation leads to the same couple of teams going up and down) was true. Turns out it wasn’t. In the 18 completed seasons of the Premier League, 43 different teams have participated, and most teams that come up, stay [...]
Continue reading about Right, then, Premier League running averages
Today’s huge news, regarding the agreement in principle of a sale of Liverpool Football Club to New England Sports Ventures (the company that owns, among other things, the Boston Red Sox) has prompted me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long, long time: look at the history of the Premiership table [...]
Continue reading about Relegating thoughts while glancing at Premiership tables
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about [...]
Continue reading about Curating addendum (ok… “webmapping vs. mapping”)
Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you [...]
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient. After all, if one takes that waste of [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?
Obviously, I suppose, my previous post about the likelihood of getting all 8 anniversary Astérix figurines in only 14 tries of Kinder Surprise eggs was related to a classic statistics problem, the Coupon Collector’s Problem. The problem assumes a uniform random distribution of coupons (I guess, in cereal boxes, or something), and then goes about [...]
Continue reading about Astérix and the coupon collector’s problem