“Some decades ago, William Safire wrote about the then current acceptable usage of the words, “more important” and “more importantly.” Thanks to search engines, I located the article in the April 25, 1982 edition of the New York Times Magazine without getting out of my chair (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/magazine/on-language.html ).

In 1982, I was repelled by Safire’s accommodating attitude to those who would connect the words “more” and “importantly”.  How could the Prince of Grammar adopt such an unaesthetic, auditorily painful position. My response was not unique. Safire was aware that his (somewhat hesitant) acceptance of the usage would inspire an adverse reaction in some readers, and his discussion was both generous and humorous. Since that article, “importantly,” has gained prominence at the beginning of a phrase. As can be seen in the Ngram charts below, the “ly” camp has overrun the less gaudy “More important.” My distaste is more visceral than intellectual, and it has remained with me.

For this visualization assignment, I attempted to look at how the words “important,” “importantly,” “more important,” and “more importantly” appear over time in print.  

I used Google’s Ngram Viewer to seek the single words and bigrams (two-word sequences) as listed above (but without quotation marks). I thought I would get more traction if I specified their function as adverbs (This can be done by pinning “_ADV” to a term).  That, however, did not produce meaningful results. Dropping “important” from the competition–it really functions as an adjective–helped clear up the purpose of the search. The default for the Ngram Viewer is a distinction between upper and lower case letters. I searched first without distinguishing cases and then again with the default. I capitalized all of the first words, hoping that this approach would cause the search engine to focus on the beginnings of sentences. It seemed to improve the quality of the search somewhat, but I could not find a way to limit the search to this approach. The charts below show the word “Start” preceding the bigrams. This application permits the search engine to look for modifying words that are closely related to the main term, for example, to count “Most importantly” as well “More importantly.”

The charts below represent the same search in English language materials spanning different time sequences, from 1969-2019 and from 1999-2019. They illustrate the consistency of the trend and show that when used as an adverb, alone or with a modifier, ‘importantly’ overtook ‘important’ around 2010.

As I was looking at possible approaches to this topic, I found further confirmation of the trend and discussion of usage. For example, dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2021, includes the following note:

The Merriam-Webster online site devotes an article to the subject: “We Know You’re Concerned about ‘Important” and ‘Importantly.'” Nineteenth century examples are provided for both ‘More important,’ and ‘More importantly.’ https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/we-know-youre-concerned-about-important-and-importantly To my surprise, the graph depicting usage trends from 1800 was produced by the Google Ngram Viewer.

Before I came upon the Merriam-Webster graph, I thought I would have to trash the Ngram Viewer and start from scratch. The more I worked with it, the more I felt an ambiguity about how the search decisions were made and what I could reasonably conclude from the results. For example, was I double dipping by asking the search engine to find both the single word ‘important’ and its appearance with a modifier? I did not see a way to control for that. Nor did I understand what it might or might not mean for the search to take place in a massive collection of undifferentiated material. Google describes the Ngram Viewer’s corpus as “the scanned books available in Google Books.” Would I have obtained a sharper depiction if I had searched only newspaper articles or research articles? How would such selections affect an interpretation, and for that matter, what can be interpreted from this information? If I could tighten the search either by using a program that offered more choices or by developing enough skill so that I could tweak the Ngram search, what possible differences might be obtained? By now, I’m about saturated with this topic. I going to believe that Merriam-Webster, by example, gave me permission to use the Ngram Viewer as a visualizer. My sense of a historic trend corresponded to the trends found by the Ngram Viewer, and articles from dictionary sources confirm the feelings and the findings! Questions about the corpus, how searches are conducted, and what kinds of conclusions may be drawn from the results will continue to be an ever-present and fascinating part of this work.

Mina Rees Library Workshop Series

Presenter: Jill Cisarella- [email protected]

Review co-written with Nelson Jarrin

This workshop was conducted by Jill Cisarella on October 26, 2021. Jill is a very organized and dynamic speaker who shared with us her excellent PowerPoint presentation:

http://bit.ly/oa-explained-2021

The objective of the workshop, she said, was to show us how to publicly share our work and how to find the work that others share.

Here are some aspects of OA that she elaborated upon:

1. Background:

Not too long ago, most journals were printed and available in a physical form. Now, in the digital age, many journals and scholarly articles are primarily or exclusively online. As for books, publishers used to charge a hefty fee to print and distribute physical books with hundreds of pages. Now, publishers prepare and distribute books and journals online, but this has not brought access prices down. Selfishly, publishers do not share any of their savings and profits from digital publishing with the consumers, writers or reviewers. To the contrary, certain publishers have created a new form of lucrative business in which they place journals, books and articles behind paywalls.

Our presenter shared with us some stark numbers: the profits of publishing companies such as Elsevier and Spring have surpassed those of Apple, Google and BMW!

2. What is Open Access?

Jill landed at the definition of OA by way of contrasting the traditional system of scholarly publication (“outmoded, expensive, and exploitative”) and the OA publication system (“community-owned, scholar-led, values-driven”).

There is a debate between whether Open Access is defined by cost-free, public-access publishing that is legal and available online or by public access plus open license, that is, the right for anyone “to reproduce, make derivative works, distribute, display, perform, etc.”

For this workshop, our presenter used the first of those two definitions.

3. Open Access standards:

Green OA: This label refers to journals that allow authors to post their articles in OA repositories. These journals might actually operate with copyrights, but they give rights to authors too.

In this category, you may find institutional repositories (such as CUNY Academic Works), disciplinary repositories (such as Humanities Commons CORE) and authors’ personal or institutional websites.

Hybrid OA: This label refers to journals that are not OA, but will make an article OA if the author (or their institution) pays an article processing charge. (Imagine! You actually have to pay to be free!).

4. What about Academia.edu and ResearchGate?

They are not OA venues. In fact, these platforms are monetizing the work of scholars that publish on their sites. To make matters worse, they are incurring copyright infringement. Frictions with publishers have resulted in these platforms having to take down up to 40% of their content.

5. Finding OA:

• Google Scholar. This is one way to search across many different Open Access repositories. On the right side of the articles in a given search, there will be information about whether they are “free” (available in PDF or within a website). In Google scholar, you can also configure your settings to add links to libraries (up to five). In this way, when you are searching, you will get information about whether those libraries have those items. With Google Scholar, it is easy to distinguish between free and paywall materials.

• Unpaywall.org and Openaccessbutton.org. These tools are similar to Google Scholar in that they harvest Open Access content. They will also tell you whether the article you’re searching for is behind a paywall. Occasionally, you will be able to find the latest version of an article in a manuscript form (before going to the press). Although you might eventually need the published version, these final versions will provide the content you need while you wait for, say, an interlibrary loan request.

6. How can Jill and other librarians help?

Most journals will grant copyrights to authors a few years after their article has been published –an important piece of information most authors don’t have. Librarians at Mina Rees have lists of journals and their policies in this regard. If they don’t have information about the journal in which you have published, they will help you contact it and ask for permission to go OA with your work.

7. How can researchers help?

Researchers can contribute a great deal to the OA movement by uploading their articles into these repositories and let other scholars and students find their work in a “free” and Open Access way. By allowing information to be accessible, we can create a world in which this is encouraged –a culture shift in which the norm is to have access to information for free and not behind paywalls. It is not ethical to have these articles behind a monetary system in which no  one but the gatekeepers is being compensated.

Important: Jill Cisarella invited us to stay tuned for upcoming workshops about understanding journal publishing contracts and exercising our rights as authors!

Workshop Summary, Felicity Howlett

I attended the video storytelling workshop, part of the Carnegie Educational Technology Fellows series, led by Mike Mena on Monday, Oct. 25. Mike is a Ph.D. candidate at CUNY in Linguistic Anthropology with a particular interest in institutions of higher education, racialization, and bilingualism/multilingualism. An experienced video producer with many YouTube videos available online, he worked for years as a high school teacher. This background, in combination with extensive research and an intense interest in looking beneath surface glitter and behind generally accepted stereotypes, makes for a dramatic experience. He has a website: “The Social Life of Language: Theorizing Language/Critical Race Theory,” and many clips on YouTube. He explained that although his audience is composed mainly of undergraduate and graduate students, his compositional focus is on high school students, and he summons his high school teacher “persona” for his YouTube presentations.

During the hour, Mike provided a tremendous amount of information through explanation and illustration, including his belief that narration about an event is less effective than demonstrating a conflict from a character’s point of view. He discussed using entertainment to foster engagement, and he identified two critical elements as character development and conflict. The question for this workshop: “How do you take a social theory and turn it into a story?” His answer was entertaining, engaging, carefully structured, enlightening, and fascinating!

The topic today was “Interest Convergence Theory,” an aspect of Critical Race Theory developed by Derrick Bell. It speaks to the potential success of black interests as long as those interests converge or are mutually beneficial to the interests of powerful (white) interests. To illustrate the theory, he chose the characters of Derrick Bell and Abraham Lincoln.  Before moving into an argument, and to establish the legitimacy of his video, Mike offered three references:  1) “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” 2) Silent Convenants, a book by Bell about the court case, and 3) the Derrick Bell Reader (biographical).  He chose incidents from Derrick Bell’s life that would develop Bell as a character rather than provide a list of chronological achievements. (For example, Bell was hired to work for the government in the Civil Rights Division, but when he refused to resign from the NAACP, his desk was moved into a hallway. Later, having become the first tenured black professor at Harvard, he resigned to protest Harvard’s hiring practices, specifically until such time as a black woman was hired.) 

To illustrate Lincoln, Mike chose “The Emancipation Proclamation,” lesser-known quotes and put them into the context of the Civil War. When Interest Convergence Theory is applied to the Emancipation Proclamation, its language demonstrates that Lincoln’s priority was to maintain the nation. When freeing the slaves served that purpose, it served both black and white interests. Accordingly, emancipation was a strategic tactical matter, and, later, the 15^th Amendment may be seen in a similar context.

When selecting details that might best serve a successful story, Mike offered three requirements: Details must 1) develop the character(s) and the story; 2) serve the purpose of the video essay itself (to teach); 3) prioritize details that are more interesting than factual (i.e., memorable events rather than a list of dates).  

This was an invaluable introduction for me to the idea of story-telling online. It provided an overview of intention, a working structure in which to design a story, positive and negative approaches, maintained a rhythm between the speaker and the story line, photographs, and historic materials. The story was a powerful illustration of Interest Convergence Theory, powerfully delivered.

Please tap URL to open link to Part 2

bhttps://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5de76cf7c1484fc3a06d357e9b723dea

Please tap URL to Open Part 1 of this post.

fhttps://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/71c8feccdf9b43368de54ee0ec4f1930

Caitlin has provided a fine review of the information covered and the specific exercises we attempted during the session.  I would just like to add a few notes and observations to her thorough summary. 

Chelsea Lane had prepared her material thoughtfully and well. Of the three workshops I’ve attended to date, her delivery was the most successful:  well-paced, lively, with clear enunciation, poise, and a friendly presence. That was a blessing.  There was only a small glitch in her volume for the first few minutes of the session.  Once noticed, it was easily corrected.  There were some ups and downs in volume during the session, but there almost had to be, as different microphones were applied, the speaker was at varying distances from the mike, etc.  All in all, she handled the challenges of delivering and demonstrating audio equipment on Zoom exceptionally well.  I was surprised at how effectively she was able to demonstrate changes in audio quality as well. She sent out a sheet at the conclusion of the session that mentioned sites she had recommended during her talk. I found that especially valuable as I had scrambled to try to catch the references as they were made.

Learning about how Audacity can capture the residue (low level white noise, I think) of an ambiance was fascinating.  Once it is trained to pick up the “residue” when there is otherwise silence, it can remember what it is looking for, discriminate that unintended sound in a recording and remove it. 

To demonstrate splicing, Chelsea performed the same phrase sequences two times, creating a glitch in the first phrase.   Then she cut the error out of her first recording and spliced in the alternate take to show how an error on a live recording could be corrected. She did this pretty much by eye-balling the sound waves and matching them. That was amazing. I expected that such a procedure would require something like nanometer measurements!   

Meeting up and making friends with Audacity is not exactly simple, although Chelsea certainly presented the software, so that it seemed accessible. In advance of the workshop, she sent us sites for downloading the program and several examples that we would use during the session.  Without wanting to create additional work, it might be helpful to send out an outline of topics to be included in the discussion as well. Sometimes when many new concepts are introduced at once, it is hard to take them all in.   

The following is slightly off topic, but it’s a problem that others may have noticed:

During these workshops, we are often asked to fill out a survey monitored by Eventbrite at the end of the session. For our session, the form we were asked to fill out did not include the name of the workshop. I attempted to send a reply back in my email to ask what name we should fill in, but Eventbrite does not accept email replies.  It only accepts filled-out forms. No other information was provided. I finally looked in the GCDI listing and found Chelsea and sent her a note.  She had not known of that omission, and she immediately re-sent the corrected form to attendees. As I filled out the form, I skipped over another question that I found impossible to answer properly.  At the end of the form, I was not allowed to submit it because I had left a response blank.  That was it for me. I hope that this kind of survey might be made a little more user friendly.  I do not believe that forms should insist on specific responses or refuse to accept any that have an omission. This is a problem that people in DHUM may find of interest as it is a direct example of the need to reach a balance between the efficiency of automation and the human element involved.