Sounding out ideas on language, interaction, and iconicity

Mark Dingemanse

Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Many researchers have grumbled about the shortcomings of Doke’s descriptive characterization of ideophones (see discussion here), but few have attempted to formulate an alternative. For better or worse, I did,

 1

but it took me a few iterations to arrive at something that I felt worked well enough to be useful in cross-linguistic research.

What’s wrong with “vivid”? The evolution of a definition

One of the benefits of today’s preprint culture is that it is possible to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out, thereby enabling a rapid cycle of revision before things are committed to print. I have myself benefited from comments on preprints, and have acknowledged such public pre-publication reviews in several of my papers. The below remarks are shared in that spirit.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking I

Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction.

Monetizing uninformation: a prediction

Writing is thinking. The writing process is the most neglected part of our job. We spend millions on fancy equipment and uncountable hours on training for using this or that toolkit. Yet we assume the BA-level academic writing course we once followed is sufficient; the rest we’ll just learn on the job and hopefully soon we’ll automate away with LLMs. It is all formulaic anyway.

Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.

Find your own voice: against LLM slop in academic writing

With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science.

Team science is slow science

The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places (e.g. Culture Making, Far Outliers) as evidence of a cultural revival. Although I feel it is really too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now and are even being played during funerals, to great acclaim.

A cultural revival?

The last time I blindly accepted an invitation to speak was in 2012, when I was invited to an exclusive round table on the future of linguistics at a renowned research institute. As a fresh postdoc I was honoured and bedazzled. When the programme was circulated, I got a friendly email from a colleague asking me how I’d ended up there, and whether I thought the future of linguistics was to be all male.

How to avoid all-male panels (manels)

Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana.

 1

To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area (Meeussen 1975:3,

 2

Heine &amp;

Fresh wild melon and meat full of gravy: food texture verbs in G|ui (Khoisan)

The most common use of the term ‘ideophone’ today is as a term for a lexical or grammatical category of words. This use goes back to C.M. Doke, who introduced the term in this sense for the description of Bantu languages. However, Doke did not coin the term. Who did, and how was it used before Doke?

(

 Note:

Looking for a modern definition of the term? Check out “

 ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

” (2019). That chapter supplies the following:

 Ideophone

*. Member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery.* It provides evidence and arguments for the cross-linguistic utility of this definition.) A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is ‘ideophone’.

On the history of the term ‘ideophone’

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and as Aimée Lahaussois has shown (2016), they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?

A lot of our recent work revolves around working with conversational data, and one thing that’s struck me is that there are no easy ways to create compelling visualizations of conversation as it unfolds over time. The most common form seems to be pixelated screenshots of transcription software not made for this purpose.

Playing with R: unrolling conversation

After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research. The project was called “Towards a science of linguistic depiction”. Looking at the publications that came out of it and at imperfect indicators like citations, it’s made some useful contributions.

The role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research

DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. I like how the first example that OpenAI used to present DALL-E to the world is a meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation and generation.

Deep learning, image generation, and the rise of bias automation machines

Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great

 Dictionnaire Touareg — Français


 1

(a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. It was an interesting method;

Expressive verbs in Tuareg

I have been blogging at

 The Ideophone

since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations.

Scholarly blogging, now with DOIs

Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. There’s no need to be cynical to see the virtual inevitability of unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation: the market forces are in place and they will be relentless.

Large language models and the unstoppable tide of uninformation

PLOS ONE notoriously and astonishingly does not have a proofs stage: authors do not get to see how their work is typeset until the very day it appears. Worse, they have a policy of only correcting formatting errors that they themselves introduce by issuing a formal correction notice — a heavyhanded method that most other journals use only for serious errors of fact or process. Unnecessary corrections hurt authors.

Note: I prepared this posting in August 2015, when PLOS ONE was due to publish a paper by us and I wanted to make sure they’d avoid the stupid typesetting errors they made in our 2013 paper. I used the numbers to convince them to show us proofs beforehand.

Why PLOS ONE needs page proofs

Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889.

A visit to Akpafu by Nicolas Clerk, 1889

Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. Many folks who had the privilege of working the late Pieter Muysken fondly remember his habit of grabbing any old piece of paper that came to hand, scribbling while talking, then handing it over to you.

Thinking visually with Remarkable

The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898).

 1

Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago.

Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu

There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post:  Fair enough, you might say.

Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps

 the

one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.

Language between animals and computers

Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area.

The Gruner Map: a 1913 map of the Togo Plateau in present-day Ghana

This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint. The first part is here. I ended that post by noting I wasn’t sure all preprint authors were aware of the public nature of the preprint. I am now assured they are, and have heard from the senior author that they are working on a revised version.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking part II

Clark &amp; Fischer propose that people see social robots as interactive depictions and that this explains some aspects of people’s behaviour towards them. We agree with C&amp;F’s conclusion that we don’t need a novel ontological category for these social artefacts and that they can be seen as intersecting with a lineage of depictions from Michelangelo’s David to Mattel’s talking barbie doll. We have two constructive contributions to make.

How robots become social: A comment on Clark &amp; Fischer

The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power.

Reading Suchman’s classic

 Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions

, I am impressed by her description David Turnbull’s work on the construction of gothic cathedrals. In brief, the intriguing point is that no blueprints or technical drawings or even sketches are known to have existed for any of the early modern gothic cathedrals, like that of Chartres.

Talk, tradition, templates: a meta-note on building scientific arguments

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research.

Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop

A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on  incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.

This Lingbuzz preprint by Baroni is a nice read if you’re interested in linguistically oriented deep net analysis. I did feel it’s a bit hampered by the near-exclusive equation of linguistic theory with generative/Chomskyan aps.

Linguistic roots of connectionism

There is a considerable halo-effect attached to JIFs, whereby an article that ends up in a high IF journal (whether by sheer brilliance or simply knowing the right editor, or both) is treated, unread, with a level of veneration normally reserved for Wunderkinder. Usually this is done by people totally oblivious to network effects, gatekeeping and institutional biases.

I’ve been caught up in a few debates recently about

 Recognition and Rewards

, a series of initiatives in the Netherlands to diversify the ways in which we recognize and reward talent in academia. One flashpoint was the publication of an open letter signed by ~170 senior scientists (mostly from medical and engineering professions), itself written in response to two developments.

Why article-level metrics are better than JIF if you value talent over privilege

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

TL;DR

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

Concrete reasons to be skeptical about an ‘Abstract Wikipedia’

I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”.  In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.

Farewell, Mr. Ideophone: William J. Samarin (1926-2020)

Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?

A while back some low quality citations started showing up on Google Scholar. They had titles like “CHAPTER 2 draft — email xyz@ab.edu” and it was hard find actual bibliographic metadata. Google Scholar seemed to have scraped random PDFs uploaded on Academia.edu and decided it was worth counting the citations in them even in the absence of proper metadata.

How Academia.edu promotes poor metadata and plays to our vanity

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area.

New!

Some of this is now published here (open access, free for all!): Dingemanse, Mark. 2020.

What is ‘non-lexical’? Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, II

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.

Last week I was happy to present my work at a workshop on

 Ideophones and nonlexical vocalisations

in Linköping, Sweden, organised by Leelo Keevallik and Emily Hofstetter. This was the kick-off for a new project on “Non-lexical vocalisations”. It was my first time in Linköping and it was great getting to know the vibrant community of interaction researchers from across departments.

A variety of vocal depictions: Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, I

This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887.

A visit to Akpafu by David Asante, 1887

Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these “Lautbilder” enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has now for the first time been studied in detail.

Words   Few professions should be more familiar with the nature of words than academia. Words are the currency of our trade. They record our cumulative progress and they measure our productivity as we disperse our ideas through articles and books. How easy is it to fall in love with the printed word, black symbols on a white page, tidy spaces separating units of thought like stars dotting the skies of conceptual clarity!

How to paint with language

It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote:  In follow-up work, Malinowski has critiqued the unexamined use of decontextualised strings of words as a proxy for Meaning:  Malinowski did not write this on his substack,

Malinowski (1922) on Large Language Models

Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen &amp; Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit &amp; kwantificatie.

Eerst dit: de brief benoemt het risico dat je met narratieve CVs een soort competitie krijgt tussen verhalen.

Van betekenisloze getallen naar een evidence-based CV

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we DO NOT write per year. Our careers are too diverse and precarious to measure output that way.

A rant about Elsevier Pure

Will synthetic text generators usher in a new age of creative thinking? The remarkable fluency of large language models may make them interesting tools for rapidly exploring semantic and stylistic spaces, yet the deceptive ease with which they generate output also provides countless new ways of appropriating ideas and erasing authorship.

Human creativity in the age of text generators

Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text

 Ceci n’est pas une pipe

. He made several versions over the years, but the work originated in 1928 or 1929. The title Magritte gave to this painting is

 La trahison des images

— the treachery of images.

Magritte on Words and Images (PDF)

Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans in search for gold to buy and people to enslave for the most part stayed near the coast.

‘Remnants of some ancient tribal idiom’: deciphering the oldest Siwu to appear in print

One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions.

Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese

Zotero takes it name from an Albanian verb minus some morphology.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post (Zotero, an Endnote alternative) or come across Zotero elsewhere, you may have been wondering about its name.

The etymology of Zotero

Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana.

This is the first post in a series. Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana. But since this is the first post on ideophones here, let’s first try to answer the obvious question: what are ideophones, anyway?

Early sources on African ideophones, part I: Schlegel on Ewe, 1857

Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri.

It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years.

Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854

We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.

Mindblowing dissertations

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

*

 Summary:

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. As Thai textile artist and designer Nithikul Nimkulrath (2024) has pointed out, knots are the kind of thing we come to know “

 through

and

 in

making”. One of her artworks (see photo) explorers the materiality of knots by translating a physical, hand-knotted container into a 3D render.

Tying ourselves into knots about reasoning

Funeral dirges (

 sìnɔ

in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)

The Ideophone

We don't generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read,
and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is
fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we
have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming
researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I
have come across in the past years.

## *Unflattening* by Nick Sousanis {#unflattening-by-nick-sousanis .wp-block-heading}

::: {.wp-block-image .is-resized}
<figure class="alignright size-full">
<a href="//ideophone.org/files/image-59.png"><img
src="//ideophone.org/files/image-59.png" class="wp-image-5919"
style="width:243px;height:auto" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/image-59.png 722w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-59-221x300.png 221w"
sizes="(max-width: 722px) 100vw, 722px" width="722" height="981" /></a>
</figure>
:::

I didn't know it was even possible to do a PhD dissertation in graphic
novel style. And yet here we are. This is a mindblowing work that (my
colleagues can attest) I keep raving about. From the back blurb:

> Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to
> offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious
> inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. *Unflattening* is an
> insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse
> ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and
> mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that
> perception is always an active process of incorporating and
> reevaluating different vantage points.

The title, "Unflattening" reads as a reference to the famous
mathematical allegory by Abbott, *Flatland*: the two-dimensional world
where one day A. Square is visited by a being from another dimension.
Just as A. Square learns to "unflatten" his world as he gets to know the
three-dimensional Sphere visiting him, so the readers of Sousanis' work
are invited to venture out of their conceptual comfort zones and explore
a multiplicity of perspectives.

(Update: Sousanis
[notes](https://mastodon.social/@nsousanis/109849138889348761){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}: "I came up with the word Unflattening early
on, and in my planning, figured I should use Flatland -- originally at
the end, but moved up to front...")

The published version of this work is a book to have lying around on
your desk. It's always a pleasure to leaf through and there's always
something new to discover.

## *The equidistribution of ... number fields*, by Piper Harron {#the-equidistribution-of-number-fields-by-piper-harron .wp-block-heading}

The full title of this work is "The Equidistribution of Lattice Shapes
of Rings of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields: an
Artist's Rendering", and if this makes you glaze over, you should skip
right to the prologue where it says:

> Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude.
> Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency
> towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and
> even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good
> grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed
> the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on
> the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of
> self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of
> betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support
> system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not
> know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second
> thought: but what about the others like me, who don't do math the
> "right way" but could still greatly contribute to the community? I
> combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. What
> resulted was a thesis written for those who do not feel that they are
> encouraged to be themselves
>
> Harron 2016:1

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full">
<a href="//ideophone.org/files/image-60.png"><img
src="//ideophone.org/files/image-60.png" class="wp-image-5922"
loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/image-60.png 707w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-60-300x203.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-60-443x300.png 443w"
sizes="(max-width: 707px) 100vw, 707px" width="707" height="479" /></a>
</figure>

The whole thing is written in an irreverent, cool and clear writing
style, smoothly segueing from "laysplaining" sections aimed at a general
audience to more technical parts aimed at mathematicians. No wonder that
Harron's thesis went viral, winning coverage on Mathbabe, [Scientific
American](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/contrasts-in-number-theory/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} and even getting [its own Wikipedia
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equidistribution_of_Lattice_Shapes_of_Rings_of_Integers_of_Cubic,_Quartic,_and_Quintic_Number_Fields){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}. Even for readers without the requisite background in
mathematics, this thesis is a wonder to behold and a joy to read.

## *Swarmpunk* by Jonny Saunders {#swarmpunk-by-jonny-saunders .wp-block-heading}

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<a href="//ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card.png"><img
src="//ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card-1024x576.png"
class="wp-image-5920" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card-1024x576.png 1024w, https://ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card-300x169.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card-768x432.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card-500x281.png 500w, https://ideophone.org/files/swarmpunk-card.png 1455w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024"
height="576" /></a>
</figure>

Swarmpunk! The name alone is a reason to check it out --- and be sure to
have a look at the [corresponding
website](https://jon-e.net/dissertation/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}. There are many things to admire about this
thesis. Content-wise, it is hard to summarise (the mark of a good thesis
to my mind). Here's the author's own attempt:

> Drawing from decades of digital infrastructural history within and
> beyond science, I will sketch a path by which we might build systems
> that empower, rather than control us. I will argue a better future for
> science is not utopian, nor solely dependent on funding and
> administrative agencies, but something we can organize ourselves.
> Woven together with my work in ill-defined phonetic categories and
> distributed experimental systems, I have written a love letter to the
> power of swarms: how by embracing heterogeneity and rough consensus we
> might make science more boisterous, creative, and *human.*

I love the wide-ranging nature of this work all the more because the
swarm metaphor does pull things together in a compelling way. Who would
have thought that the neuroscience of phonetic categorization in mice
could come together with a technical description of peer to peer
protocols and trenchant critiques of academia's infrastructural woes.
And yet it all makes sense.

The sheer breadth of topics covered evokes Bruno Latour's sprawling
Actor Network Theory framework and also shares a lot of insights with
current approaches to collective intelligence (e.g., [all intelligence
is collective
intelligence](https://psyarxiv.com/jhrp6/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}). What's also impressive about this thesis is the way
it combines a hard-hitting critique of the current state of academic
workflows with concrete tools and constructive proposals to make things
better. This makes it a truly excellent example of [what Ivan Illich
calls *counterfoil
research*](https://ideophone.org/monetizing-uninformation-a-prediction/){data-type="post"
data-id="5734"}.

And then I haven't even discussed the type-setting (in lovely
Tufte-style), the anarchist easter eggs (like figure captions that say
"taken without permission") and the sharp-witted writing throughout.
[Read this
work](https://jon-e.net/dissertation/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"} and let it broaden your conceptions of how to build a
better academia.

## Real life is gnarly {#real-life-is-gnarly .wp-block-heading}

Here's another thing I love about these three theses: they all show
something of the making process. They don't present a fully polished
surface; they have rough edges and that is entirely okay (especially for
a thesis --- but I think this holds in general for the scientific
process).

Sousanis' *Unflattening* was revised for publication with Harvard
University Press, so I imagine some of the loose ends have been tied up;
but it includes, at the end, a set of sketches that document the very
beginning of the work, dated to April 14, 2011. Why don't more theses
have this?

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<a href="https://ideophone.org/files/image-62.png"><img
src="https://ideophone.org/files/image-62-1024x804.png"
class="wp-image-5939" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/image-62-1024x804.png 1024w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-62-300x236.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-62-768x603.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-62-382x300.png 382w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-62.png 1248w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024"
height="804" /></a>
<figcaption>First idea map for Unflattening, April 14, 2011
(Sousanis 2015:194)</figcaption>
</figure>

Meanwhile, for Harron, working on the thesis had to find a place next to
other momentous life events. In the Acknowledgements, there is a
parenthetical aside "I would thank the children, but frankly, they've
been no help.". One reason for this is found on the opening page of
Chapter 5: a cartoon of the author working on "THESIS (draft)" followed
by a panel with an inset where the author says "OW", and contractions
start...

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<a href="//ideophone.org/files/image-61.png"><img
src="//ideophone.org/files/image-61-1024x537.png" class="wp-image-5927"
loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/image-61-1024x537.png 1024w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-61-300x157.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-61-768x403.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-61-500x262.png 500w, https://ideophone.org/files/image-61.png 1194w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024"
height="537" /></a>
</figure>

Saunders' *Swarmpunk* moves from work on phonetic categorization in mice
to an unfinished chapter of musings on the topic of language games, and
from there even more abruptly to work on a software infrastructure for
scientific experimentation and collaboration (check out
[Autopilot](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/807693v2){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}). As they explain:

> I had intended to finish my dissertation with an experiment that was
> the next logical conclusion of the mouse model of phonetics, doing
> longitudinal mesoscopic calcium imaging of auditory cortex as the
> phonemes were being learned in order to model the changes in network
> activity. (...) It comes out of chronological order in the spring of
> 2021, after my work with Autopilot and a covid-induced awakening of
> the possibility of public engineering with the People's Ventilator
> Project\[72\]. I was restless and not ready to return to basic
> research while the world was still so broken, and so it was abandoned
> in favor of the last piece on digital infrastructure. Accordingly, it
> ends relatively abruptly, without satisfying conclusion. I include it
> here in its unfinished form, roughly edited, warts and all, as
> something I intend to pick up perhaps one day when basic science is
> more possible.

And yet the end product is amazing. Perhaps precisely because of the
abrupt transitions, it invites the reader to fill in the gaps, to create
those conceptual linkages, to contribute the cognitive work that makes
all of science a collective enterprise.

More importantly, it reminds us that we are humans first and foremost,
and science is a human enterprise in which the neat plans we may make
can be greatly affected by real life events --- as they should.

## A plea for serendipity {#a-plea-for-serendipity .wp-block-heading}

Dissertations like these may be rare. But they exist. And by existing,
they show that true creativity is still alive in academia. For me
personally, this kind of work strengthens my convinction that as
supervisors, we need to be serious about ideas and open-minded about
form and content. (Perhaps this is why I have always liked my PhD
student's Gwilym Lockwood's mad MS-Paint skills --- and the Harron-like
irreverent style of the opening pages of [his 2017
PhD](https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Talking_Sense_The_behavioural_and_neural_correlates_of_sound_symbolism/4872866){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}.)

Today's PhD projects tend to be considerably less free-form than even 5
or 10 years ago. Today we ask graduate students to write full-blown
project proposals, force them to specify their planning in gantt charts,
and herd them through series of checkpoints. I understand why this is
done, and that it is helpful to some. But I cannot ignore that it is
also a machinery for control, arising from management processes built
towards verification, certification, and standardization. It is, at
base, a stark form of risk-aversion.

But here is the thing about science: it thrives on
[serendipity](https://ideophone.org/the-role-of-serendipity-in-shaping-fundamental-research/){data-type="post"
data-id="5764"}. If all risks had been averted and all processes duly
followed, it is unlikely that we would have seen these three mindblowing
dissertations. Here's to an academia with room for serendipity!

Update: turns out Sousanis has a wonderful overview page on [alternative
forms of
scholarship](https://spinweaveandcut.com/comics-alternative-scholarship/){target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer noopener"}.

## References {#references .wp-block-heading}

- Harron, P. A. (2016). *The Equidistribution of Lattice Shapes of Rings
 of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields: An Artist's
 Rendering* (PhD thesis, Princeton University)
 <https://www.theliberatedmathematician.com/thesis/>
- Saunders, J. L. (2022). *Swarmpunk: Rough Consensus and Running Code
 in Brains, Machines and Society* (PhD dissertation, University of
 Oregon) <https://jon-e.net/dissertation/>
- Sousanis, N. (2015). *Unflattening*. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
 University Press.

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage
bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a
digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during
writing.

This tutorial introduces Zotero ([www.zotero.org](http://zotero.org)),
an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars.
The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting,
organizing, citing and sharing research. Zotero automates the tasks of
managing bibliographic data, storing and renaming PDFs, and formatting
references. It also integrates with widely used text processors, and can
synchronize your library across devices. There is no more need to search
through disorganized file folders full of inscrutably named PDF files,
to copy and paste references across documents, or to manually deal with
pointless differences in citation styles. **Ultimately, the point of
using a reference manager is to free more time for real research.**

Note: these are slides made for a hands-on workshop. They may not work
well outside the context of a live Zotero demonstration. I share them
because they may still contain some useful information.


::: {.wp-block-image}
<figure class="alignright is-resized">
<img src="https://ideophone.org/files/giphy.gif" class="wp-image-4824"
style="width:194px;height:auto" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
width="500" height="500" alt="giphy" />
</figure>
:::

A while back some low quality citations started showing up on Google
Scholar. They had titles like "CHAPTER 2 draft --- email xyz@ab.edu" and
it was hard find actual bibliographic metadata. Google Scholar seemed to
have scraped random PDFs uploaded on Academia.edu and decided it was
worth counting the citations in them even in the absence of proper
metadata. I shared this on Twitter and promptly forgot about it.

Then I got an email from someone asking me to say a bit more about my
concerns with poor metadata. I decided to write it up in a blog
post. I'm afraid it turned into a a bit of rant about how Academia.edu
seems built not so much for sharing scientific information as for
playing to our vanity. Sorry about that. Let's start with the poor
metadata issue, which turns out to be rather pervasive.

## Academia.edu has a massive metadata problem {#academia.edu-has-a-massive-metadata-problem .wp-block-heading}

- *Academia.edu doesn't record any metadata except title and author for
 the bulk of papers, and doesn't expose any metadata using standard
 formats like RDF/unAPI.*

Ever tried to figure out how to cite a paper on Academia.edu? This is
hard because most of the metadata is missing. Reference managers like
Zotero or Mendeley cannot detect and save papers for citing. For those
hoping to cite works uploaded there, this makes life more difficult than
it needs to be. For users of academia.edu, this hurts citability. Yes, I
know academia.edu touts a 69% citation advantage. See [here for a
discussion of
some concerns](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comment?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2Fdb79cd8e-ce5a-4c28-a270-069509b36272){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} about that study.
^[1](#footnote_0_4816 "The most important criticism is that the advantage doesn’t hold for just Academia.edu (if at all) but for findable and freely available PDFs more generally, including those from OA repositories indexed by Google Scholar."){#identifier_0_4816
.footnote-link .footnote-identifier-link}^ My point here is simply that
whoever wants to cite papers found on Academia.edu currently has to get
the metadata from elsewhere.

- *Academia.edu doesn't comply with [Google Scholar
 guidelines](https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html){target="_blank"
 rel="noopener"} for exposing metadata. *

Google Scholar has started to index the heap of PDFs on Academia, but
has to resort to scraping only the most superficial info available,
usually from the PDF, because there is no metadata. This is the number
one reason for the junk citations in Google Scholar that started this
story. It means people's work is misrepresented and makes it harder to
figure out how to cite it  --- bad news, because Google Scholar is very
widely used. For users of academia.edu, this hurts both the findability
and the citability of their work. For users of Google Scholar, this adds
more noise in an [already noisy
system](https://ideophone.org/some-things-you-need-to-know-about-google-scholar/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.

::: {.wp-block-image}
<figure class="alignright">
<img
src="https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36-1024x208.png"
class="wp-image-4855" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36-1024x208.png 1024w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36-300x61.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36-768x156.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36-500x101.png 500w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-26-09.30.36.png 1499w"
sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="208"
alt="Screenshot 2016-08-26 09.30.36" />
</figure>
:::

- *Academia.edu is built for single-authored papers, and its handling of
 multi-authored papers is surprisingly poor. *

The default way of scraping author names leads to many errors and they
can only be fixed manually. Take [the paper Academia.edu staff
published](https://www.academia.edu/12297791/Open_Access_Meets_Discoverability_Citations_to_Articles_Posted_to_Academia.edu){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} on 'discoverability' --- the authors are all jumbled
up. Only the original uploader owns the item and can add or
fix bibliographic metadata, and for other authors, it's hard to see
who's the owner. There is no system for duplicate detection and
resolution. It is too easy for multiple authors to upload the same paper
with slight differences in bibliographic metadata. It is too hard to
clean up the mess and make sure there is only one good  version of
record. This affects people's profiles and has undesirable knock-on
effects for the points above.

- *The process of adding papers is geared towards enriching Academia.edu
 content rather than towards promoting the sharing of correct and
 complete scientific information.*

After Academia.edu gets your PDF (and that's a requirement for adding a
paper), there are very few opportunities for providing metadata, and the
primary upload interface cares more about fluff like 'research
interests' than about getting the basic bibliographic metadata right.
There is no way to import via DOI or PMID (which would prevent many
errors), or even to record these identifiers --- a fatal lack of concern
for interoperability which is quite surprising. [Essentially, a user
interface should make it easy for people to get things right, and hard
to get them wrong. The current user interface for adding
papers ]{style="line-height: 1.625;"}[does the exact opposite (see
annoted screenshot).]{style="line-height: 1.625;"}

<div>

<figure>
<img
src="https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35-1024x882.png"
class="aligncenter wp-image-4817 size-large" loading="lazy"
decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35-1024x882.png 1024w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35-300x258.png 300w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35-768x662.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35-348x300.png 348w, https://ideophone.org/files/Screenshot-2016-08-25-10.19.35.png 1113w"
sizes="(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px" width="584" height="503"
alt="Screenshot 2016-08-25 10.19.35" />
</figure>

<div>

</div>

</div>

- *It is surprisingly (and needlessly) hard to add
 crucial bibliographical information like journal, DOI and URL.*

More details can only be added after importing papers, which simply
means most users won't do it. As far as I can see, the only way to do it
is to go back to your publication list, hover over the Edit button, and
find other fields to edit. Even here, there appears to be no place for
identifiers like DOI or PMID. Page numbers and so on are hidden in an
"Other" field.  Any user interface designer will tell you that stuff
buried this deeply might as well be left out: only a negligible amount
of users will find and use it.
^[2](#footnote_1_4816 "This is reminiscent of the backward way in which Facebook designs its privacy UIs, but confusingly, there seems to be little reason for Academia.edu to make it so hard to get things right."){#identifier_1_4816
.footnote-link .footnote-identifier-link}^ Anyway, if you've succeeded
in adding some of this metadata, congratulations for completing a futile
exercise. The information you painstakingly entered is nowhere exposed
and so cannot be reused or exported, except, again, manually. Quite
remarkable in the age of APIs and interoperability.

## How Academia.edu nudges us towards narcissism {#how-academia.edu-nudges-us-towards-narcissism .wp-block-heading}

My conclusion from these points: *Academia.edu seems not to care
about promoting the curation and sharing of correct and high quality
metadata of scientific publications.* One might counter that this is not
the goal of the network, and that the *content* of the papers is what's
most important anyway. But peer-reviewed publications are still the main
vehicle for advancing scientific results, and citations are still the
main currency of cumulative science. So getting bibliographic metadata
right is key to promoting science as a cumulative enterprise. Nor should
this be hard in the era of DOIs and PMIDs, making it all the more
surprising Academia.edu doesn't care about them.

If there really is a problem, why do relatively few people complain and
why are so many users seemingly happy about the service? There are
several reasons. Not every academic has access to personal website or an
open academic repository, and Academia.edu presents itself as one of the
easiest options to make one's work visible online (never mind the fact
that it doesn't actually make it easily citable, and laces it with ads
to boot). It may be a  way to keep up with colleagues. Also, I've heard
people are happy with its "sessions" as a way to get interactive
feedback on a paper. But there's one important reason that I haven't
seen commented upon often: **Academia.edu plays to our vanity. Many
elements of its design are built to satisfy and amplify our craving for
external validation.**

Judging from the navigation menu, "analytics" is one of the most
important elements of Academia.edu. Upload papers, tag them with
research interests, and they generate paper views. Follow people and
they'll follow you back, generating profile views. Tomorrow your paper
may be in the top 5%! Next week you might be crowned as the 1%! Look,
your paper was just read by someone from Vienna! Your work is being read
in 27 countries! You're being followed by someone you barely know! All
those things are nicely presented in spiffy graphs --- evidently a part
of Academia.edu that a lot of design resources have been devoted to.
^[3](#footnote_2_4816 "Digression: this is also what Frontiers gets absolutely right, which makes it highly attractive to a generation of researchers craving for immediate external validation."){#identifier_2_4816
.footnote-link .footnote-identifier-link}^

And note some of the design here is cynical. The only two time windows
offered are 30 days and 60 days, inviting you to come back at least this
often to keep up with the stats (yes, you can download a CSV for more,
but once again that is one of those power user features that will rarely
be used). Views are promoted over actual downloads while bounce rates
(basically, how many people are gone after a quick glance, usually the
majority) are concealed. The most important metadata for papers (again,
just taking the design as a measure of what Academia.edu promotes as
important) is this mostly meaningless view count. Not where it was
published, not how to cite it, certainly not where to find it off
Academia.edu --- just how many people had a look.

## Academia.edu doesn't take academia seriously {#academia.edu-doesnt-take-academia-seriously .wp-block-heading}

Does this mean everybody on Academia.edu is a narcissist? Of course not.
My point is not about users; it is about the design of the service. User
interface design is not innocent: as a recent Medium essay noted,
[technology hijacks
our minds](https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, constraining our options and nudging us in ways that
often elude our awareness. Not everybody on Academia.edu is a
narcissist, but many aspects of its design make it easy to become one.
(The emails! Don't get me started about the emails. By default,
Academia.edu will send you an email whenever someone stumbled upon your
profile or one of your papers. Just look at [this Twitter
feed](https://twitter.com/search?q=academia%20%22searched%20for%20you%22&src=typd){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} to see how creepy people find that feature. You might
even spot a few who have come to like it, Stockholm syndrome-style.)

On balance, I feel Academia.edu doesn't really take us seriously as
academics. It takes our work to make a profit (for instance by [putting
advertisements around
it](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advertising-academiaedu-eva-smagacz){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}), totally botches the metadata and tries to appease
us by offering stats and social rankings that promote constant
comparison. And nothing in its design suggests a regard for getting even
the most basic bibliographic information about our scientific work
right --- even though that would be one way to turn page views into
citations. This is one of the reasons [the only paper I've uploaded
there](https://www.academia.edu/2125018/Where_to_find_my_papers){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} for years has been one pointing people to where they can
find all my papers freely and without hassle.

To end on a slightly more optimistic note: at least the poor metadata
problem can be solved. As far as I can see, nothing in Academia.edu's
business model turns on proliferating poor and incomplete metadata. The
citation advantage it likes to claim could significantly increase if it
started exposing metadata in ways that are compatible with widely used
tools like Google Scholar and Zotero. It still won't be a service I'm
keen on using, but I do hold hope it will become better at
promoting cumulative science rather than cynically playing to our
vanity.

::: {.footnotes-made-easy-header}
## Footnotes
:::

1. [The most important criticism is that the advantage doesn't hold for
 just Academia.edu (if at all) but for findable and freely available
 PDFs more generally, including those from OA repositories indexed by
 Google
 Scholar.[[\[]{.fme-pre-backlink}[↩](https://ideophone.org/academia-edu-poor-metadata-vanity/#identifier_0_4816 "Jump back to text"){.footnote-link
 .footnote-back-link
 aria-label="Jump back to text"}[\]]{.fme-pre-backlink}]{.footnote-back-link-wrapper}]{#footnote_0_4816}
2. [This is reminiscent of the backward way in which Facebook designs
 its privacy UIs, but confusingly, there seems to be little reason
 for Academia.edu to make it so hard to get things
 right.[[\[]{.fme-pre-backlink}[↩](https://ideophone.org/academia-edu-poor-metadata-vanity/#identifier_1_4816 "Jump back to text"){.footnote-link
 .footnote-back-link
 aria-label="Jump back to text"}[\]]{.fme-pre-backlink}]{.footnote-back-link-wrapper}]{#footnote_1_4816}
3. [Digression: this is also what
 [Frontiers](http://frontiersin.org){target="_blank"
 rel="noopener"} gets absolutely right, which makes it highly
 attractive to a generation of researchers craving for immediate
 external
 validation.[[\[]{.fme-pre-backlink}[↩](https://ideophone.org/academia-edu-poor-metadata-vanity/#identifier_2_4816 "Jump back to text"){.footnote-link
 .footnote-back-link
 aria-label="Jump back to text"}[\]]{.fme-pre-backlink}]{.footnote-back-link-wrapper}]{#footnote_2_4816}