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Merging Columns in Excel

I am cleaning up an Excel spreadsheet that holds the values for a morphology of twenty treasure legends collected in Louisiana. Building the table (and perhaps future matrix) has been an interesting exercise. As a giant table, I have constantly juggled with adding and subtracting various dimensions or components of the texts: examination of one text will spark a realization that something needs to be included and then, with that refinement, one needs to go back and double-check the other texts to see if the refinement applies to them as well. (It usually does.) As an Excel spreadsheet, it has the benefits of being faster to work with than a Word table, and that’s about it. (The person who invents the truly human-friendly spreadsheet will, I hope, make a decent sum of money — rather like Kevin Brown did with Scrivener.)

At the moment, I need to merge data that’s in two columns into a single column, as I realized that go to and location() were really one thing, what folklorists might call a function and what computer scientists might call a narrative state. Excel doesn’t make it easy, but here are notes on how to do this next time:

First, merge the data without doing disturbing it by inserting a column and then entering the following formula in the topmost cell:

=A1&" "&B1

If that gives you the results you want, fill down. While all the relevant cells are still selected, copy them and then paste values.

If you have a series of cells, then the syntax is =A1&" "&B1&" "&C1 etc.

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On Favoritism

So, what do you do when you discover your child’s teacher plays favorites? My wife and I are torn about it. On the one hand, our daughter is going to encounter favoritism at some point in her life, and so she might as well get used to it and learn not to let it get to you. On the other hand, she’s only eight years old, and, dammit, at five figures a year for tuition, we think we should have some expectations of a level playing field at the very least.

I want to put aside all other concerns I have had with my daughter’s school and think a minute about the nature of favoritism, and the kind of effect it can have on an organization.

First, let me establish that we have seen it. The first time we witnessed it was in a public outing when her teacher had, quite nicely, turned up to see our daughter and her friend perform in a play. The two families were standing with the two kids out in the lobby after the performance, and the two kids were ecstatic to see their teacher, who greeted and congratulated both of them and then proceeded to turn and hold an entire conversation only with our daughter’s friend. It could not have been more rude. The look on our daughter’s face was as if someone had slapped her, and so we rushed her out of the lobby and home.

We reported the incident, trying to put the most generous spin on it that we could, to our the principal of our daughter’s school, with whom we were trying to figure out why our daughter was slipping both in her grades and in her attitude towards school. We understood the principal’s loyalty to her teacher, we were frustrated by it as parents, but as teachers ourselves we also knew the folly of being sorry for having rushed to judgement. But it put me off, and so later when the school counselor chided me for not being part of the team, I got with the program and once again assured my daughter that her teacher was really trying to teach her and that she would just have to deal with the teacher’s performance expectations.

And then it happened again. I was at school to pick my daughter up from school, and I was hanging out with my daughter, her friend, and her friend’s family, and the teacher came up and talked only to my daughter’s friend. Again, my daughter turned and smiled at the approach of her teacher, and again it was as if she had been slapped in the face. It was so awful, and obvious, that her friend’s father proceeded to get goofier and goofier as we walked away in an attempt to distract my daughter. (Later, a few days later, I asked her how she felt about what had happened, and she told me that she was okay, that she simply started singing a song in her head. Does that happen a lot? I asked. Not that often, she said. Besides, she said, it’s not just me. It’s everybody but my friend.)

Whoa, what?

I got confirmation later in the week when I watched the teacher, after a choir performance, station herself by my daughter’s friend’s family, and ignore the stream of kids also in her class as they walked out past her. (I think she patted one kid on the head.) The next day I was hanging out at a birthday party for a boy in my daughter’s class — a nice mix of girls and boys which was great to see — and I got to talking with one of the boy’s mom. How’s your daughter doing, she asked. Okay, I said. It’s been a tough year: she and her teacher just don’t seem to have made a connection. Oh, the mother said, you mean her favoritism? And then poured forth a litany of complaints drawn from a host of third grade boys: incidents where my daughter’s friend kind of holds everyone else hostage because he can do things to them, they feel, and they cannot, even accidentally, do anything to him.

This is school yard stuff, right? And I can see why the teacher feels protective of my daughter’s friend: he had a rough start to the year. He’s not a naturally very social kid, but, and this is where it gets important, playing favorites isn’t making it better. In fact, it’s making it worse. (This is a sweet, sweet boy who spends recess playing around where other kids are playing. Not playing with them, but around them.)

I think the good news here is that this is an overwhelmingly good bunch of kids. Really good kids, with really good parents. (It’s why we keep our daughter at the school.) And so I don’t think any permanent damage has been done to the social fabric of the group, but some damage has been done. This group, in the hands of their second grade teacher, was an ebullient, high-performing bunch. A little too high energy at times, but that’s not a bad thing. In the current situation, if my daughter is any indication, there is a whole lot of energy being poured into extracurricular activities where they feel some emotional reward awaits.

Now part of the problem is that my daughter’s school is increasingly focused on academics at the loss of everything else — we, unfortunately chose it to get away from an academic-only focus and standardized tests, but it appears that that paradigm now also dominates the private school scene. That’s good for her friend, who is very academically focused, not so good for my daughter who is not. (And, hey, if two academics can be okay with that, then I think the school can be, too.) This particular teacher is very academically-oriented, and so I think there is a convergence of a number of things to make what appears to have happened happen.

But all of this is good for my daughter’s friend, right? Maybe he needed to feel special. I don’t know that I agree. What happens next year when he’s not a favorite? Or the year after that? At some point he’s not going to be a favorite? Will his response be to maneuver to be the favorite? Let’s say he gets good at that? Is that what you would want your child to learn? Wouldn’t you want your child to learn to be themselves and then bend when they need to, not to bend first and then figure out who they are?

Don’t get me wrong. I work at a place that is rife with favoritism, or it’s southern collective variant, good-old-boyism. And it has done a world of good to a number of people across the university and within my own department. But in the end that favoritism is only good for the favorites, it’s not really good for the organization. The favorites only do what it takes to remain a favorite, which is often not really in the long-term interest of an organization as future-oriented as a university. What’s worse is that favoritism not only encourages the wrong kinds of behaviors in favorites, it also encourages a wide variety of inappropriate behaviors in everyone else left out the spotlight. People begin to save their best ideas and energy for projects that benefit only themselves, and perhaps they begin to look elsewhere for things to do or places to work. Or, if they remain, they either check out or become negative in their response to practically everything.

And I don’t know that I blame them. Favoritism is personal, and people who aren’t favorites are going to take it personally. My wife and I have had a variety of reactions ourselves over the years, but mostly we have come the realization that favoritism is institutionalized where we work, part of the organizational culture. We can either play the game, and probably be unhappy with ourselves for doing it, or we can do what we love and hope it will make a difference some day.

But we’re adults. Some day is a hard thing for a kid.

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“My Old Man and the Sea”

The new media horizon is at its best when people make beautiful films about things they know and love. “My Old Man and the Sea” is a perfect example of just what can be done: the video and audio are quite good; the editing keeps thing moving along; and the subject matter is allowed to shine in, this case, his full glory, which includes the occasional rough edge of a word or two.

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She’s so mad…

A student passed this onto me last semester:

She’s so mad she’s about to shove a milk bone down your throat and a hungry dog up your ass.

He heard it on a local radio show. It’s not clear if the host is especially good at making some of these sayings up or if he simply has an extremely good ear for picking up on colorful sayings he hears around town.

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Graduate Seminar Design

As I have noted previously, recent events, some good and some bad, have convinced me to revise my research and professional agendas, returning to my first love, which was understanding how the structure of language and the structure of the imagination interact and reveal each other. In an effort to move my own thinking along as well as to gauge interest for narrative studies in my home department, I decided to offer a seminar on the topic this semester. And I think I made a mistake in how I designed it.

The course’s design, to some degree, was predicated upon the nature of the English department in which I work, which houses concentrations not only in my home field of folklore studies but also in literary studies, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, and linguistics. Given such a diversity of interests, I decided to keep the reading load relatively light, the assumption being that students would pursue relevant citations, topics, etc. in their own fields of interest and bring those readings and explorations back to the seminar table. The mistake I made, I think, was not in formalizing this assumption into some sort of structure of assignments or moments during seminar discussions that made it possible for disciplined students to share and made, er, less-disciplined students aware of the work involved in being a successful scholar.

This was a foolish mistake on my part, and one as a mid-career academic and pedagogue I should not have made. It was, in other words, a rookie mistake. My defense of such a rook move is that I was so excited by the work I am doing and the things that I am reading that I assumed others would be, too. And there were, to be clear, a number of students who embraced the open design of the seminar, but it did not serve all students equally well.

Now, some will maintain, quite rightly, that those students it did not serve well are probably not going to make it very far in graduate school, nor in the profession, and you will probably be quite right. And I generally don’t have a problem with such things taking their natural course. But it does feel like a waste of time both on my part and on their part. Look! You want to cry. Look at all the cool stuff all around you! Just look down, pick something up, and play with it! It fascinates me that people can want to be in graduate school and not be intellectually curious, not want to understand the nature of scholarship (of science), and not want at least to try to do the kind of work that scholars do, if only for the sake of trying it out.

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Go Big Red (2)

You gotta love a university with a can-do spirit: Indiana University has a home-built supercomputer that will do 1 petaflop. One petaflop was the computing sound barrier broken by IBM back in 2008, but there are still relatively few supercomputers capable of processing this much this fast. Why is its “home-built” nature so important? Because it isn’t beholding to any particular funding agency, which means it “will be used by IU, for IU to support IU’s activities in the arts, humanities, and sciences, and to support the economic development of Indiana — without any constraints from an outside funding agency.”

You know, I never realized how great it was to work at a place with a fundamental sense of its mission and that that mission bubbled out of an ethic of always trying to do the right thing until I was no longer at a place that worked that way. Oh, how I miss the Midwest…

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Network Representations

Network Representations

Three ways of describing a network. Captured from a Rice University web page. I captured it as a way to remind myself to follow up on the notation used in the righthand column. (Is that NetworkX, what’s that called.) I need to decide on a network notation for my work, and then learn how to manipulate it for various applications that want different formats.

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/ PURL / status /

Eh, what’s that MacPorts?

Note to self, run port upgrade outdated more often. If you run it every few months, that’s a lot of stuff that needs updating. Also, I got this note:

XeTeX is built without support for Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging
(ATSUI) or Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). To enable it, build texlive-bin with
the +atsui variant. Note that this will force texlive and all of its
dependencies to be built 32-bit.

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Twinned Movies

Someone has done a fantastic job of pairing the posters of movies that came out at the same time, often in the same year, that would appear to be on much the same topic. The pairings are:

  • 1986: Top Gun and Iron Eagle
  • 1989: Abyss and Leviathan
  • 1989: Turner and Hooch and K-9
  • 1993/1994: Tombstone and Wyatt Earp
  • 1993/1994: Rookie of the Year and Little Big League
  • 1995: Babe and Gordy
  • 1995/1996: Powder and Phenomenon
  • 1995/1996: Showgirls and Striptease
  • 1997: Volcano and Dante’s Peak
  • 1998: Antz and A Bug’s Life
  • 1998: Armageddon and Deep Impact
  • 1998/1999: The Truman Show and Ed TV
  • 1999/2001: Centennial Man and A.I.
  • 2000: Red Planet and Mission to Mars
  • 2002: Stealing Harvard and Orange County
  • 2003/2004: Finding Nemow and Shark Tale
  • 2004: Chasing Liberty and First Daughter
  • 2005: The Cave and The Descent
  • 2005/2006: Wild and Madagascar
  • 2006: Capote and Infamous
  • 2006: The Prestige and The Illusionist
  • 2006: Open Season and Over the Hedge
  • 2006/2007: Happy Feet and Surf’s Up
  • 2008/2012: Taken and Stolen
  • 2009: Observe and Report and Mall Cop
  • 2010: Megamind and Despicable Me
  • 2011: Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached
  • 2012: Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman
  • 2013: After Earth and Oblivion
  • 2013: Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down

Given such a history, the question then is how much of this is zeitgeist and how much is the fact that scripts probably circulate somewhat widely and people see something in a script on which they pass that then gets them thinking about a version of the story on their own. We don’t need to assume outright copying at all. Or, alternatively, if we assume copying, it’s still the case that there is something larger, be “the times being what they are” or the marketplace, has increased the viability of certain projects / topics over others.

And, yes, I can even see being this objective in my own recent experience of discovering a parallel project to my own, but I’ll have more to say on that a little later — I’m working on a post tentatively entitled On Credit.

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Academic Work

I was in the middle of re-reading Joel Spolsky’s 2002 essay “Strategy Letter V” and thinking about how the microeconomic notion of “commoditizing your complements” applies to the current academic situation, when I wondered what he had written about in the last few months. One of his essays is about the nature of inventory management for producers of software. (The essay is titled “Software Inventory.”)

Software inventory? you ask. What, there’s bits lying around the floors of cubicles?

Okay, bits don’t lie around floors, and they don’t cost anything to store on your hard drive, but storing them on your hard drive and not actually sending them off to your customers does cost you something, and that’s Spolsky’s point. The same is true for other content creators: that idea for an essay or article you have lying around doesn’t do you any good if it’s not under consideration at a journal and/or getting published somewhere.

Scholars have a more difficult time with making this particular metaphor work fully: unlike scientists and software producers, our products are far less iterable — in the sense that software can undergo multiple releases and/or updates and scientists often produce multiple reports out of the same research project. Scholars in the humanities often have to let one essay or book be their single output for a given project — the market isn’t necessarily keen on having multiple outputs on the same topic. One person who divided up his outputs successfully, both for himself and for the market, is Henry Glassie. His work in Ireland resulted in four distinct publications, each of which stands on its own and does not duplicate the other works in a way that the market rejects: All Silver and No Brass (1975), Irish Folk History (1982), Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), and Irish Folktales (1985) — and this list does not include his later revisitation of all this work in The Stars of Ballymenone (2006).

Another way of saying this is that Glassie, it seems like I am always concluding this, got it early in his career and has consistently stayed ahead of the changing academic scene.

Getting back to Spolsky, he compares software production to the factory floor in the following way:

Think of product ideas as the raw material. Depending on your process, product ideas may go through several assembly line points before they are delivered as finished features to the customer:

  1. a decision-making process (should we implement this feature?)
  2. a design process (specs, whiteboards, mockups, etc)
  3. an implementation process (writing code)
  4. a testing process (finding bugs)
  5. a debugging process (fixing bugs)
  6. a deployment process (sending code to customers, putting it on web server, etc)

Fortunately, scholars tend not to work in teams, and so we don’t face the kind of delays, aka choke points, that others do when trying to steer an idea through the process that leads from conception to publication. Unfortunately, we do not work in teams, which means we do not have others to poke us when we are ourselves the delay and/or choke point in the process. You win some; you lose some, even when you work alone. Or, maybe especially when you work alone.

We could transform the list above into one for academics, and that might be worth doing at some point, but I think Spolsky’s larger point is really the one worth dwelling upon here: “In between each of these stages, inventory can pile up.” Every scholar knows this, I bet. Almost everyone I know has folders, paper or electronic, full of stuff that might make for a future course offering or publication. Some, like me, are intellectual handymen / packrats, who find a myriad of topics interesting and sense a larger synthesis is possible … if only they had the time.

Well, let’s face it, that time rarely comes — if you work at an institution that has a reasonable (any kind of) framework for sabbaticals and/or course releases, then this probably doesn’t apply to you, or it applies to a lesser degree. And so you need to find some way to just get stuff out and move on. Spolsky’s response was to develop Trello, which is a card-based task management system for individuals and groups that allows you to see the clutter which you attract by making you confront the number of cards you deal yourself and others.

His original idea for Trello was, he notes, something he wanted to call Five Things: “It was going to be a project manager where everybody was allowed to have five things assigned to them: two things they were actively doing, one thing that was “up next”, and a couple more that they were planning.” That’s a nice division of things. How would I apply it to my own research? Like this:

  • ACTIVE 1: drafting paper for ISCLR conference
  • ACTIVE 2: writing new sections for boat book
  • UP NEXT: revising older sections of boat book
  • PLANNING 1: book on “everything is not a story”
  • PLANNING 2: second essay on AFS intellectual history with Jonathan Goodwin

Two things are about the boat book, and I’m okay with that, given how much the deadline looms in my life, and, just as importantly, it reveals my own recent willingness to hack off intellectual projects for which I had no time.

There’s a host of projects that I would like to address, but I think it’s time to let them go. Lean and mean, indeed. I don’t think I will ever be the disciplined thinker and writer that others are, but I think it’s time to get more discipline. I sense some real possibilities here. (I have to agree with my wife that even two books probably won’t be enough to get us out of our current situation, given the overall job market, but we can’t know that until we both get there. There’s always hope!)

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Speaking of Legend Corpora

Working with these texts for my paper at this year’s meeting of ISCLR (International Society for Contemporary Legend Research), I remembered that I have an entire inbox dedicated to emails sent to me by friends and family that struck me as “net lore” (which is the name of the mailbox, by the way). I just checked and the archive reaches back to 2003. (And I think I have an older archive somewhere on disk.) My goal in the months to come is to find a way to slice the 56MB text file into individual text files that are appropriately named, perhaps by subject line and date. My guess, and it’s only a guess right now, is that making these files available in plain text, with something like the following filename as a primitive form of metadata is going to be the most efficient form of sharing:

2013-04-18-A-Bridge-To-Hawaii.txt

I think I can figure out how to write a Python script to do that. While I know that a better set of metadata might include who the texts were from and the trace route for them, I am unwilling to imperil the privacy of my correspondents. Plus, I think most folklorists are going to be chiefly interested in the texts. (We’re still playing catch-up to the notion of social graphs. Sigh.)

Once I’ve got the collection put together, my best guess is that I will make it available through something like GitHub or BitBucket. Neither is really designed to support this kind of thing, but they are oriented towards public repositories and they do make forking projects very simple, and it would be interesting if researchers interested in this material, folklorists among them, could find some way to have projects remain connected in some fashion. Both GitHub and BitBucket make it possible to follow the chain of forked projects and also for users to “follow” those projects and make comments or even, fold those advances back into their own projects. (How cool would that be?)

In case you are wondering about the actual texts involved: they are an admixture of jokes and legendry. Some of the materials are quite topical (and racist):

It seems that once again,

all us white folks have missed

a great opportunity.

While all the black people attended

Obama’s inauguration and parades,

we should have broken into their homes

and gotten all our shit back.

And some of the materials, like the joke referenced in the file name above, have been around for quite some time on the internet and probably in oral circulation before that:

A man was riding his Harley along a California beach when suddenly the sky clouded above his head. In a booming voice, the Lord said, “Because you have tried to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish.” The biker pulled over and said, “Build a bridge to Hawaii so I can ride over anytime I want.” The Lord said, “Your request is materialistic. Think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking; the supports required to reach the bottom of the Pacific and the concrete and steel it would take! I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of something that could possibly help mankind The biker thought about it for a long time.

Finally, he said, “Lord, I wish that I, and all men, could understand our wives. I want to know how she feels inside, what she’s thinking, why she cries, what she means when she says nothing’s wrong, and how I can make a woman truly happy.”

The Lord replied, “You want 2 lanes or 4 on that bridge

(Please note that the period and the closing quotation mark are missing in the original.)

Any feedback on how to proceed is quite welcome.

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/ PURL / note /

Rebuild Launch Services!

The actual title of this post should probably be something like If the Open with… contextual menu has duplicate entries in it, then do this.” But that seemed overly long. The problem with mentioning *Launch Services is that most people don’t know it’s there and that it’s responsible for such things. Here’s a better way to do this, if you get a contextual menu in the Finder which looks like this:

Screen Shot 2013-04-18 at 08.33.06

And you want to do something about it,
and you want to attend to the fix yourself,
and you aren’t afraid of the terminal…

Then, you can do this: open up a terminal window (look in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder [CMD + SHIFT + U]), and paste the following code in the command line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

It’s long, but it needs to be just that way. Press return. Wait a second or two for the command to complete. You will know it’s done when the prompt comes back, indicating that it’s ready for another command.

Then simply re-launch the Finder. (Under the Apple menu, go to Force Quit… and you will see Finder listed as one of the apps that can be quit, or in the Finder’s case, re-launched.) You do not, as other instructions around the web indicate, need to log out and back in, nor do you need to re-start your machine. Running the command above and re-launching the Finder is all you need to do.

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/ PURL / note /

Towards a Treasure Legend Corpus

Thanks to the organizers of this years meeting of the International Society for the Study of Contemporary Legend, which thankfully has the acronym ISCLR, I have a reason to explore text analysis on objects to which I am more accustomed. And so, for a moment, on the one hand, the work on the intellectual history of folklore studies using topic modeling and other forms of algorithmic / quantitative inquiry is paused. On the other, the necessary revising of the boat book manuscript is not yet cranked up, as it will be in two weeks, when the semester ends and my editor starts counting down the days to my self-imposed deadline of May 31. (Okay, Craig, that’s really going to be June 31, just so you know.)

This study of legendary is something of a bridge. It’s addressing a topic that I thought would be a part of the book, an examination of traditional folklore materials for an understanding of how people in south Louisiana understand the landscape, but using methods that I have learned since starting that project and that really point to the next chapter in my research and the next phase of my career, wherein I plan to focus on narrative studies, especially computational / quantitative / whatever forms of narrative studies. (And I’m especially thinking about looking into doing some work with science fiction, because it could be a lot of fun, and I think some of those authors would be more amenable to such things.)

I am, in particular, interested in legends about treasure, since they would seem to focus our attention on where a bounty might be collected from the landscape. I am drawn to these tales because in collecting a few narratives of my own, and then looking at published legends, I realized that a number of them located the treasure at the intersection of land and water, which seemed a really compelling point, given that I was (am) writing a book about boats that go on land and water, which is really about trying to understand how people think about the Louisiana landscape from a practical point of view.

Thanks to the generosity of Maida Owens, who copied to a thumb drive her collection of texts from the Swapping Stories books, I had a nice collection of legends with which to begin. Ten texts, numbers 157 to 165, to be precise.

(Please note that I cannot, at any time, make these texts available. I was able to get this copy from Maida, with the generous permission of Craig Gill to make the transaction, with the proviso that I would not make the texts available — I can run any kind of analysis you might imagine on them and report those results, but not the texts themselves.)

I picked up four more legends from Barry Ancelet’s Cajun and Creole Folktales. And, following some suggestions based on what Ancelet chose to include in his work, I have about two or so tales (narratives) to contribute from my own work.

That makes 16 folkloric legends.

Where do those other texts come from? Well, it turns out that there is a fairly diverse community of treasure seekers and thus also an interesting collection of websites serving the treasure-hunting market. Most of the stories I have chosen to include were found in posts in treasure-hunting forums, like the ones hosted at TreasureNet. A few of the stories were seemingly front page items from such sites. That is, these stories had more of the authorial framework of “I wrote this.” I would not have considered them at all, but so much of what appeared with a byline looked exactly like the kinds of things that were found in the forums: which themselves were, in most cases, coped from elsewhere. In a number of instances, as a matter of fact, the material in the forums appeared to be things transcribed out of old newspapers or locally-published books that were no longer otherwise accessible.

And so 16 of those texts.

Overall, the current collection stands at 32. Not a huge number, but it’s a start.

What am I going to do next? A couple of things.

On the computational side, I want to:

  • run word frequency analysis on both the individual texts as well as comparatively across the two groups. (I want to call them something like “folklore” and “digital” but that’s a terrible distinction.)
  • perhaps do some form of PCA, to see if I can’t find some clusters (I think this is too small a collection for topic modeling, but I might give it a try).
  • use something like Wordij to compare word collocation across the whole collection as well between the two groups.

On the narratological side, I want to:

  • break all the texts into component clauses to see if time and space are managed in a similar fashion and to compare the amount of description, narration, and exposition contained in each text and across the collection and the two groups.
  • see if there is any kind of reliable morphology.

I’ve given myself until the end of the semester to do what work I can. Once the semester ends, the race is on to get the boat book wrapped up and off its publisher, the University Press of Mississippi.

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