How to protect your spaces from breaking

Working with all kinds of different colleagues over the years, I’ve picked up a lot of practical knowledge on word processing, layouting, formatting etc., as you have yourself probably. But did you know about non-breaking spaces? I only learned about this possibility recently and remembered it just now because I needed it. Thank goodness I did (drama, drama!) or else this in-text enumeration would not have looked like this:

I ‘protected’ the spaces after a) and b) so that they wouldn’t fall victim to automatic line-breaking by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + space bar. That’s all! Word wanted to insert a line-break between the ‘a)’ and the subsequent text. How silly that would have been! Avoiding undesired line-breaking is very easy and also very important, especially when you’re using measuring units, currencies or percentages (although not leaving a space at all as seems to be the custom also solves the problem – but it’s only half as clever).

Righty-ho, geeky girl is over and out.

 

Piles of books

A few weeks ago, we gave my sister’s room a new coat of paint and rearranged the furniture in my dad’s room which required taking all his books out of the shelves and piling them up in an unused corner in the lounge. Visiting my parents again this past weekend, my dad asked me if I could help him sorting his books back into the massive new bookshelf. I was instantly hooked: rummaging through my dad’s books, for hours on end! What larks! Acquainting oneself with someone else’s library is like looking at their old photos, and having the owner of the books there with you means that you’ll likely learn a lot about the books (mini-synopses, yay!), the role they’ve played in the owner’s life and the way the owner thinks about books and knowledge generally. And you get to witness genuine excitement as the owner beholds brilliant (whatever that may mean for them) books they had thought lost or that they never knew they owned in the first place. Hence my ‘intrigue-intrigue’ reaction to being asked to help with the books. (And I didn’t know about the dust then.)

I wanted to get started right after breakie. But it wasn’t so simple, for, as dad rightly pointed out: “There are several ways to do this. Do we want to sort them by genre or by date of acquisition or alphabetically?” True; I geekily added that we could use Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress, too, haha. (‘Dork!’ my sweetheart would say right now.) Or sort them by size as they do at Oxford. I always wonder how they do this and why this would make sense. Can’t be a library for generally browsing through. Same as libraries sorted by date of acquisition: what a stupid idea! Also doesn’t allow for browsing…ANYWAY.

We opted for the very simple genre approach and against any further categorising (no alphabetical ordering either), sat down cross-legged next to the big piles and started working our way through them. The categories we came up with are listed below. They immediately gives you and idea of my historical background and my dad’s literary preferences, so treat them carefully, this is personal. I list them from ‘contains most titles’ to the categories that are comprised by only a handful of books:

• science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature
•             extra categories: Stanislav Lem
•             the Dune saga
•             Greg Bear’s books
• GDR novels incl. children’s literature
• FRG novels and children’s literature
• political non-fiction
• crime
• antiquarian books
• general non-fiction

My dad is obviously a science fiction reader. This I have always known. He has influenced the rest of the family in this way, too, and by that I don’t only mean the whole LOTR thing. My sister and I have each of us had phases during adolescence in which we read heaps of science fiction, too. Both of us still talk about reading Lem’s The Invincible because for both of us this was a formative reading experience. It features the best of Eastern bloc sci-fi lit: brilliant engineers, a journey into outer space, a complicating action which requires a scientific expedition and the saving of comrades’ lives, camaraderie with said comrades, weird creatures on strange planets, and vivid skin-crawling tension and action. AND a hefty dose of social and political criticism. Great stuff! I am super glad my dad decided that Lem should have his own category. My mum always says I’m my dad’s mirror image, and in terms of literary preferences there is some truth in that (in other ways, as well). My science fiction/fantasy corner is full of Jasper Fforde though. Different generation.

I was surprised my dad wanted to keep all of the GDR novels and our old children’s books. Some of them we had several copies of. The GDR classic Käuzchenkuhle which I always thought was pretty frightening – the story revolves around several men competing to catch an old and mysterious pike in a dark pond at night time and I think one of them men falls in and drowns – we had in paperback as well as hardcover. The hardcover was my dad’s and it bore the inscription: ‘In memory of our class trip ’67 to the Baltic Sea coast’; the paperback bore my primary school library seal, so clearly either my sister or me have ‘forgotten to return’ it back in the day, hehe. I took ‘my’ copy home with me.

Classifying books from the GDR era wasn’t easy for me, partly because I only knew some of the books by title and content, but partly also because I sort of wanted to sort the books according to ‘before the wall came down’ and ‘after the wall came down’. This would have meant that all the GDR titles would have landed in the same pretty undifferentiated pile which really doesn’t make sense. Instead we sorted them by origin of author regardless of the wall (one of them many ways in which we keep the boundaries alive I suppose…) and by genre. GDR novels have to do with GDR society, that’s what we decided. Because I didn’t know all these authors I would take a small pile from the big pile, hold each book out to my dad and ask him which group to put it in. There were only a very few books which my dad didn’t instantly recognise, and most of those clearly belonged to my mum. The story of an Australian GP’s journey of self-discovery among the Aboriginals in the outback would sit uneasily next to all the Polish sci-fi, eh.

The best-best-best thing was to hold up some dusty tome to my dad (they were all of them very dusty!) and his face lighting up in recognition of an amazing book. “Wow, I own this book? How great is that!” This happened often. There was one book I help up to my dad for categorising which baffled him especially. This is how it went: “Gargantum! _ _ _   _ _ _  _ _ _ (all along gobsmacked look) Gargantum! What a great book! I own this? I had no idea!” Dad was truly happy about this one and i was allowed to borrow it.

What did I learn about my dad in sorting through his books? First of all, it’s truly impressive how he remembers book contents. I mean, we were dealing with some 300 books there, and not only did he seem to remember most of the contents, he had even read all the books! I can’t say that this would be true for me was I to go through my little library today. I love books – obviously – and by that token I would buy books which I won’t have time to read for a little while yet. Or which seem to require a special mood for being truly enjoyable. ‘Their time will come, no doubt’, I tell myself. For my dad’s books, it’s already been there because he’s always liked reading. I also liked that he kept the GDR books even though we all of us have become very critical of the country we grew up in and sometimes have a hard time abiding by that strange social-realist tone of socialist literature. Nonetheless, the books tell us who we were, and my dad’s books tell him who he was and maybe who he is, too. And it’s the same for me in relation to my dad. I like knowing that he’s always been as quirky as he is now. You can tell these things from seeing booklings interacting with their books.

On the topic of booklings: My dad owned two copies of Walter Moers’ Rumo and gave me one of them. Moers is the creator of the creature known as bookling.

Intro to qualitative research

So I started writing today…on the aims of qualitative research! Whoohoo all the geeks in the house!!!! I know, people think methods sections suck but we know better, eh. We know that the world’s not simply out there for us to be like ‘oh aye, that’s how it is’ and then we write up our research reports. It’s a bit more complicated and a lot more exciting at the same time! Here are my first baby steps towards explaining qualitative research and what it aims to achieve.

Qualitative research covers a vast array of approaches and methods. Close reading of printed material, life-history studies, structured interview studies and participant observation studies carried out by researchers living amongst those they research all form part of the qualitative research methods tool-kit. In some studies researchers therefore become very familiar indeed with the research participants, whilst in others the contact is a one-off for the purpose of conducting a research interview.  What is considered as ‘data’ can range from the printed word to detailed observation protocols to interviews which are ‘mined’ for specific facts or biographical accounts which are interpreted word for word. Amidst all this variety there are common trends which define all qualitative research, however. First of all, the decision to pursue a research question with the use of qualitative methods depends on what we want to find out. Generally speaking, qualitative methods are useful when we want to find out ‘why’ and ‘how’ individuals engage in specific activities or think about a specific topic; when we are interested in the research participant’s subjective view; when describing the many facets of a social or cultural process and their meanings to individuals is what we are after rather than a generalising theory. Secondly, qualitative research projects consequently tend to be ‘small n’–projects conducted with a non–randomly selected group of people who are best suited to include in the research given its specific topical focus.

For instance, if finding out how farmers in rural England react to the increasing numbers of Canada geese on their fields who decimate their crops every spring, our initial target group would naturally be farmers who possess any kind of field and who have already been affected by flocks of geese. To begin with (and probably subsequent to reading everything on this phenomenon which research libraries and online sources granted access to), qualitative structured or semi-structured interviews which focus on farmers’ connection to the land, the meaning of farming and related aspects might be conducted. Participant observation in the form of accompanying farmers in their day-to-day work would yield additional information, aid comprehension on the part of the researcher and might therefore also be considered useful. Concerning the current heated debate between environmentalists and farmers resp. farmers’ lobbies about solutions to the ‘geese problem’ the researcher might then begin to wonder why the respective interest groups hold the positions they do. This might spark off further research questions about the life histories of farmers and environmentalists or about similar controversies (involving, for instance, the re-introduction of golden eagles in the Scottish Highlands and their reputed preference for the farmer’s lambs) which have occurred in the past.

The researcher ideally uses the research method which seems most promising for obtaining answers. In practice, not every researcher is skilled in all qualitative research methods, however. It may also be the case that further methodological development is one of the research foci, in which case particular methods may have to be used in specific ways. Still, as William Foote Whyte, the author of the famous ethnographic study of Boston street gangs Street Corner Society (1943) remarked on the research process, ‘the planning process is begun but not completed before the researcher enters the field’ (Whyte, 1984, p. 35).

The aim of qualitative research is to reach a ‘deep understanding’ (Verstehen) of the phenomenon under inquiry. Collecting material and interpreting it in order to grasp the meaning the phenomenon has for the individuals involved in it are key characteristics of qualitative research. For this reason, qualitative methods can also summarily be referred to as belonging to the ‘interpretive paradigm’ (Rosenthal, 2005).

River morning

It was a quiet Sunday morning, with more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the fall of man, and still preserved a heathenish integrity [...] But the impression which a morning makes vanishes with its dew, and not even the most ‘preserving mortal’ can preserve the memory of its freshness to midday.

—-

H.D. Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Thank you for the…dentist

Yes, the dentist, not the music because: My dentist is a very sweet and special person! She cleans my teeth and makes them look all nice again but every dentist does that. No, my dentist truly enriches me and my life every time I see her for the little stories she tells. I have learned about her truly wonderful back yard which looks like a secret garden full of wild white roses (hm ok, maybe I added a bit to that image…); I have heard the story of the unique vase in the practice which is carved out of a big tropical root and which was sold real cheap at a local flee market; I know my dentist gets up at 5 am and goes to bed after midnight because there are so many things to do – one of them being a one-hour bike ride in the middle of the night “because the air was so lovely”.

Today I heard shocking and amusing anecdotes about her neighbour and the neighbour’s many dogs (who sometimes sneak into her practice, the bunch of them). I’ve seen my dentist smile again but only with her eyes as the mask covers the lower part of her face. She has lovely wrinkles around the eyes, laughter lines from many a kind conversation and observation. I heard about the sparrows outside the practice windows and how they raise their chicks right out there. So in between dealing with patients’ teeth when she goes to the ‘tool table’ to get filling material or whatever, the dentist can always look out of the window and watch the feathered parents teaching their young ones important lessons – and she will smile to herself about the little guys. This is why I am grateful for my dentist: she sees beauty in small things and she enjoys it with her heart. And she sometimes tells me about the things she sees.

(Naturally, I don’t get to say quite as much as she does.)

When will the professional ‘I’ cease to be?

I identify as a sociologist. Many of my friends are theologians. My sister is a healer. When will we all of us seize to be able to identify by these labels? What is it that makes one identify with them in the first place? I can identify as a sociologist even though no-one around me is like me. Why is that? I sometimes think that it’s not so much the feedback-loop from others that constitutes my identification but the activities I do. A bit of doing-being maybe. I read sociological books and articles and I am writing a book myself. But if no-one ever appreciated my work, i.e. reflected recognition along the lines of ‘you are one of us, we see what you’re doing, we understand your lingo’, would I not begin to think that I am somehow misidentifying myself? I’d still have my education and the skill set that comes with it; but would I be able to appreciate my skill set if it does not lead to some kind of recognition of my work?

Perhaps these are very German (and frivolously hypothetical) concerns. Germans identify by their work more than other people do, they say. This would mean that being longterm unemployed in Germany would probably create identity issues that unemployment in other societies wouldn’t. I hope to be able to find out more about this soon as I have applied for a research position on this topic. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Economy and beauty

Good writers and gifted speakers have a way to paint full vivid images in our heards with the use of only a handful of words. The wonderful thing in working with qualitative data is that, like in good literature, every now and then you come across such material that evinces the beauty of life in a few words. Like this passage in which a young man wants to explain how he grew up:

I come from a small town and my childhood setting can be characterised as rural. My town was right on the edge of the forest and we lived on the edge of the town. You know, where you get up in the morning and you see deer by the hedges. That’s what it was like.

Can you see what it was like? I think I can