I recorded a video lecture on the subject of family violence and abuse, including intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual abuse, with some discussion of the COVID pandemic implications.
The 24-minute video is on YouTube here:
Two related pieces came out today after I recorded this:
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On March 2, I opened up my Social Problems class to questions on the emerging coronavirus epidemic. One of the things I did was show them a graph of worldwide cases on a log scale, and told them that it implied the world would have a million cases a month later. We hit that number to the day two days ago. Here are my notes from that day:
A month later, with school indeed canceled (which I had given only a 10-20% on March 2, I recorded this 28-minute lecture for them as an update. Feel free to use any part of it any way you like*:
* Two notes, having watched it over myself and gotten some feedback:
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Updated March 25.
Although I’m not an expert on pandemic analysis, I am naturally following the COVID-19 data as best I can. And because I always understand data better when I make the figures myself, I’ve been making and looking at COVID-19 trend data, and sharing it as I go.
The figures below are the latest I made as of March 18 25 29, but you can click on the images to link to the current version. The figures, as well as data files and code, are in an Open Science Framework project, here: osf.io/wd2n6/, under CC0 license (free to use for any purpose). The project updates automatically as I go, but these figures won’t (because this is an old fashioned blog).
First, across countries:
For this one, to put the diverse US in perspective, in included US states in addition to selected countries. These are deaths.
State cases and deaths, per capita:
Finally, one with commentary: The first month, in numbers and Trump’s winning words:
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I had the privilege of interviewing Judith Stacey for the Annex Sociology Podcast.
Joseph Cohen asked me if I had any ideas for guest hosting the podcast, and this had been on my mind for a while — the cohort of women who brought feminism into academia in the 1960s and 1970s. In the ongoing conversations about the relationship between activism and sociology among early career scholars, we can learn a lot from this earlier generation. I have a little list of dream interviews in this vein — or something like an oral history project — and the podcast gave me a chance to explore it.
For my generation of gender researchers (whether we recognize it or not), the connections that she and others made between patriarchy and family structure were foundational. Most people today don’t realize how important research on China was to that development (see also Kay Ann Johnson and Ruth Sidel). In the U.S., this fed into the battles over welfare, welfare reform, and intersectionality in the U.S. And in academia, the formation of the Council on Contemporary Families, of which Stacey was a co-founder (which I have worked with as well).
Stacey already had a background teaching history in high school, and a masters degree in Black history, when she decided to switch to a PhD program in sociology, and immediately took on the world-historical question of patriarchy, feminism, and socialism, and traveled to China in the late 1970s. I said to her (lightly edited):
I want to just pause a little bit on this, just to — you know, one of the things I want to bring us around to is the discipline today, or feminism and academia today — but I just want to pause a little and just think about you as a graduate student in a time when sociology was about one-third of the people getting PhDs in the seventies were women in sociology, it’s a lot more now, over 60 percent. And the idea of, “I’m going to travel all the way around the world to a country where I can’t speak the language, that’s going through a tremendous revolutionary period” — I mean, you use the word ‘chutzpah’ to describe this, but I think it’s a certain kind of courage.
On the question of feminism and sociology, I asked, about her work in the 1980s:
So do you feel like, from that period and the momentum that you and your cohort brought into academia from the energy outside, when we look at the discipline of sociology now — is what we have now that we have established a feminist pole within the discipline, has the core of the discipline been changed, or has it just opened up to allow sort of a feminist section?
Her answers on this, and everything else, are super interesting and inspiring.
Here is some of Stacey’s writing, which I’ve been reading (and teaching) for about 30 years, that we reference in the interview:
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Yesterday I gave a talk at a teaching and learning workshop at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Philadelphia, sponsored by the AKD sociology honor society and Norton, my publisher. “Diversity, Inequality, Social Change: A Framework for Family Sociology” is my attempt to describe my approach to the course, and the book I wrote for it.
The talk includes some of the graphics I use in the book and lectures, so I posted the slides here. They’re all free to use.
UPDATED to include Sci-Hub data from six months: September 2015–February 2016, and correcting a coding error that inflated download counts.
Well, they might not have lost the downloads, but they didn’t get them.
Sci-Hub is a pirate operation that uses stolen university login credentials to harvest, store, and distribute for free virtually every academic article published anywhere. It is a simple, if criminal, solution to a very big problem: the lack of access to published research for people who can’t pay for it. When someone goes to the Sci-Hub site and requests an article, by simply pasting in the DOI or URL, the system either serves them the paper, or goes and steals it for them and then keeps a copy for the next user. For us university people who are used to dealing with the maze of logins and forwarding and proxies that come between us and the information we seek, it’s unbelievably fast and almost never fails.
Their most recent claim is an archive of 76 million papers and 400,000 users per day.
Currently available at sci-hub.se or –.tw, it sometimes moves, but this site always lists where you can find it now. Naturally, both civil and criminal authorities are trying to shut it down, preferably by catching its mastermind, Alexandra Elbakyan, the elusive student programmer from Kazakhstan.
That picture is from the excellent (free streaming) documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. Chris Bourg, the Director of Libraries at MIT (and a sociologist), also interviewed in the movie, said of Sci-Hub:
Those of us who work in scholarly communications, writ large, really have to look at Sci-Hub as sort of a poke in the side that says, “Do better.” We need to look to Sci-Hub to say, “What is it that we could be doing differently about the infrastructure that we developed to distribute journal articles, to distribute scholarship?” … I think we need to look at what’s happening with Sci-Hub, how it evolved, who’s using it, who’s accessing it, and let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.
Sociology’s stolen papers
Science magazine writer John Bohannon reached Elbakyan in 2016, and she turned over to him a 6-month cache of Sci-Hub server logs for a piece titled, “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone.” He analyzed 28 million downloads, and Science made the data available for analysis, here. Eight million of those hits were from India and China, and the busiest location was Tehran.
The data archive includes only the time and date, the DOI number of each paper downloaded, and the location of the user. I’m not expert in DOI analysis, but Bohannon included a guide that shows the prefix 10.1177 is associated with Sage Publications, which publishes the American Sociological Association’s journals. Looking at the entire six-month series, September 2015 — February 2016, I found 171,000 Sage items, downloaded 377,000 times. Of those (if I got the DOIs right), 805 titles downloaded 1628 times came from the ASA research journals (my Stata code is here).
| ASA / Sage downloads from Sci-Hub, Sept 2015 – Feb 2016 | |||
| Articles | Downloads | ||
| American Sociological Review | 239 | 693 | |
| Teaching Sociology | 221 | 269 | |
| Journal of Health and Social Behavior | 94 | 188 | |
| Social Psychology Quarterly | 77 | 152 | |
| Sociology of Education | 73 | 157 | |
| Sociological Methodology | 57 | 76 | |
| Sociological Theory | 44 | 93 | |
| Total | 805 | 1628 | |
On an annualized basis, that would be 750,000 Sage downloads, and 3,200 from ASA journals specifically. For comparison, the most popular article in ASR in 2017 was downloaded about 10,000 times from the Sage site, so it’s a small share of the legitimate traffic. So over the life of Sci-Hub it cost (and saved) ASA thousands of downloads, probably a few tens of thousands. [Note in the first version of this post, I had a coding error that multiplied the counts, and this read “hundreds of thousands”. I regret the error.]
The most-downloaded ASR paper for the entire period was:
Mears, Ashley. 2015. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent.” American Sociological Review 80 (6): 1099–1122. (downloaded 33 times)
The most-downloaded from a different journal was:
Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2010. “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent:” Social Psychology Quarterly, February. (29 times)
I looked at a couple of them in more detail, and found, for example, that Paula England’s 2015 ASA Presidential Address was downloaded by users in Seoul (South Korea), Durban (South Africa), New Delhi, London, Chicago, Washington, and Virgie (Kentucky).
Interestingly, at least one of the popular papers, Lizardo et al.’s introduction to their editorial tenure at ASR, is already ungated on the Sage site, so you don’t need to use Sci-Hub to get it. This suggests, as Bohannon also noted, that some Sci-Hub users are just using the site because it’s convenient, not because they don’t have access to the papers.
Do you Sci-Hub?
I use Sci-Hub a lot, often for things that I also have subscription access to. (I do not, however, contribute anything to the system; I free-ride off their criminality.) Why? I’m not in the paywall game business, I’m in the information business. I am always behind on my work, and adding a few seconds or minutes of hunting for the legitimate way to get each of the many articles I look at every day is not worth it. (And when I find my university doesn’t subscribe? Interlibrary loan is wonderful, but I don’t want to spend more time with it than necessary.) Does my choice cost the American Sociological Association a few cents, by reducing legitimate downloads, which somehow factors into the profits that get kicked back to the association from Sage? I don’t know.
Of course, one of the dumb things about the paywall system is that it’s expensive and time-consuming to manage who has access to what information — it’s not a small task to keep information from reaching millions of determined readers from all around the world. (I assume one of the reasons my university recently introduced two-factor authentication — requiring me to click a pop-up on my phone every time I log in to university resources [even when I’m in my office] — is because of Sci-Hub. Ironic!)
Chris Bourg is right: “let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.” Elbakyan may have committed the most efficient product theft in history, in terms of list price of stolen goods per unit of effort or expense on her part. Her archive has been copied and distributed to different sites around the world (it fits in a large suitcase). And it was made possible by the irrational, corrupt nature of the scholarly communication infrastructure. Her success is the system’s failure.
For more information, read my report, “Scholarly Communication in Sociology.“
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Blogging is dead. Long live the blog!
At 268,000, visits to this blog are now down 37% from the peak year of 2015. At the same time, this year I had the fewest number of new posts, just 39. On the other hand, this year I had 25 million impressions on Twitter. Whatever that means.
In my case, and probably many others, the role of the blog has changed with the growth of Twitter. A lot of what the blog did was provide an immediate outlet for daily chatter and work in progress thoughts, a way to get feedback, check in with colleagues, learn new things and meet new people. That’s a lot of what I use Twitter for now, more efficiently (if more noisily).
The other squeeze on the blog is the imperative to do open science more systematically, for which I use the Open Science Framework to post data and code — in projects, which may include multiple files, and quick files for single documents. And of course I use SocArXiv for more formal working papers, reviews, and preprints (mine are here).
So what is the role of the blog? It’s the place for official news and announcements about new work — including notifications of stuff I’m publishing elsewhere — longer arguments, and informal work. It’s a way for people to subscribe to my news via email (it also goes on Facebook, which a lot of sociologists use).
In several talks I have tried to illustrate the total information strategy in something like this pentagulation:
For a wider perspective, I also wrote a report on Scholarly Communication in Sociology, which is intended especially for grad students and early career scholars.
I’m happy to hear suggestions (on any platform) for how to handle communication strategy.
Book aside
The tricky relationship between platforms and different media came home to roost in my book, Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible. That book was inspired by the success of this blog, which is what enticed University of California Press to consider it. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of my readers on other platforms, I worked pretty hard on it, selecting the best blog posts, and then combining, updating, and adding to them to make a collection of essays, with data. I don’t know how successful the book is compared with other academic books generally, but, with almost no marketing beyond my social media platforms, it has generated basically no buzz for me (media, invitations, etc.). That’s in contrast to working papers, tweets, and blog posts, which continue to bring in wider attention. I know other people have done amazing blog-to-book projects, but this experience definitely showed me that the successful translation is far from automatic. Live and learn! Maybe in the long run the book will be what persists from the first decade of this blog.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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