{"id":4775,"date":"2016-01-22T07:46:48","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T07:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/?p=4775"},"modified":"2016-01-22T07:46:48","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T07:46:48","slug":"r1-response-to-readings-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/r1-response-to-readings-2\/","title":{"rendered":"R1 – Response to Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

In \u201cStorytelling for Oppositionists and Others: a Plea for Narrative,\u201d law professor Richard Delgado makes a wonderfully unpredictable move for an article in a law review: he gleefully spins a tale. The thrust of the article is a presentation, through a carefully wrought narrative of an event from different perspectives, of the powerfully different ways in which people and institutions may view the same sequence of events. The question at the core regards the decision of a fancy law school not to hire a black applicant for a teaching job; we see this from the school\u2019s perspective (broadly self-acquitting and couched in terms of ultimate fairness), the applicant\u2019s perspective (wronged, condescended to, and repeatedly disrespected), the revolutionary student\u2019s perspective (radically angry and permanently untrusting of authority), and finally the \u201canonymous leafletter\u2019s\u201d response (a sort of balanced, careful synthesis of the best of each of the prior arguments). <\/span><\/p>\n

Two interesting points I\u2019d like to address about this piece: 1) The \u201cRashomon\u201d version of the story (n.b. that Rashomon is in fact referenced, p. 2416 n. 24) would have us believe that the different narratives have, ultimately, some equivalent truth value. In this view, there are four different truths, all of them true in the internal honest sense of the teller of that truth\u2014and the fact that they are mutually contradictory is just a quirk of human perception and memory. But Delgado never actually completes this stroke of the Rashomon idea: he does <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> grant that these truths must be permitted to coexist precariously. Rather, and never explicitly, he seems to support the notion that these different narrativizations are perhaps competing for proximity to a final truth. But the real truth, Delgado seems to support, lies somewhere at the nexus of these narrative possibilities but <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> equally distributed throughout them. 2) Regarding this \u201cfinal truth, \u201c I believe there is a funny, albeit subtle, metanarrative to the story. I have no evidence other than a hunch to support this, but I believe the author was speaking to his colleagues through this article, using the voice of the \u201canonymous\u201d leaflet writer as his own. Note the not-so-subtle hint dropped in the footnote of page 2431, \u201cLike all the stories, the leaflet is purely fictional; perhaps it was born as an \u201cinternal memo,\u201d stimulated by Al-Hammar\u2019s speech, in the minds of many progressive listeners at the same time.\u201d In fact this entire article may well be serving as exposition for an internal memo, published to a law review, for the benefit of the author\u2019s colleagues.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMicro Stories and Mega Stories\u201d by Ramesh Jain and Malcolm Slaney serves, in my eyes, as a wonderful object lesson illustrating the failures of standard science\/engineering thinking in the face of social science discussions. The piece is written syllogistically: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the good old days\u2026selecting the best such events was difficult because people cannot remember many events.\u2026Moreover, people only had a vague memory of the event experience so it was important to make those experiences as compelling as possible. Consequently, creativity or imagination is considered one of the most important factors in story creation.\u201d (p. 88)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where did the authors divine this ersatz insight about people\u2019s memories and the values appreciated in storytelling in the \u201cgood old days\u201d? It would appear out of a simple logical progression: in the authors\u2019 narrative style, any peculiar unsupported conclusion is fine so long as it adheres to preconceived notions of story and looks good on the page. This is remarkably irresponsible!<\/span><\/p>\n

The authors also hide behind the smoke of meaningless or unsupported generalities like \u201cnew events are happening at all levels, and these events result in new data,\u201d and \u201c\u2026the difference between real and imaginary in storytelling has started to become stronger\u201d (p. 88). Regardless, the authors do hint at an interesting idea regarding the accumulation of a great deal of \u201cmicrodata\u201d in the form of tweets, location check-ins, selfies, etc. The filtering and analysis of many microdata are then supposedly able to form \u201cmega-stories,\u201d which are never quite defined but seem to be things like trending search terms and estimations of crowd sentiment based on cheering sound detected. Not especially \u201cmega,\u201d it would seem. A further unfortunate example of mega-stories are those told by Hans Rosling\u2026the problem with that being that Prof. Rosling\u2019s data is <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> drawn from the tweets of the masses but rather the same staid organizations that have been reliably producing statistical data for years. If that\u2019s mega-data, then it\u2019s nothing new.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In \u201cStorytelling for Oppositionists and Others: a Plea for Narrative,\u201d law professor Richard Delgado makes a wonderfully unpredictable move for an article in a law review: he gleefully spins a tale. The thrust of the article is a presentation, through<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4776,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4775\/revisions\/4776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teach.alimomeni.net\/2016spring1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}