joshhansen.net

Category: school

Things pertaining to my education.

  • Prof. Mark Davies’ ouster at BYU

    Mark Davies was a professor of linguistics at BYU who created tools for analyzing large collections of text, a method known as corpus analysis. He ran a website, corpus.byu.edu, where these text collections were available for anyone to use.

    The site, now at english-corpora.org, and Dr. Davies’ website, describe a process of administrator mismanagement that led to Dr. Davies’ departure in 2020, along with the corpus project and website. See here and here.

    I did my B.A. in linguistics at BYU, and remember watching with interest as the the corpus page developed. It’s disheartening to see that such a valuable academic resource doesn’t have a permanent home at BYU.

    Removing the name-naming text and links, I will quote thus:

    This permanent loss of funding support was a punitive action … after Mark informed the university of serious “financial malfeasance” by the College of Humanities regarding income from the English corpora. Subsequently, administrators at BYU refused to help resolve the issue, which is part of a culture of ignoring whistleblowers and “closing ranks” and promoting “yes men” at BYU.

    It is not overly surprising that BYU would pay such little attention to academic productivity, since the primary mission of BYU is religious in nature, rather than academic. In certain respects, BYU is more like a religious seminary than an actual university. As a result, some people at BYU don’t really understand how to support and protect projects that have real academic importance and significance.

    Of course, there are two (or more) sides to every story. Part of why I unlink the specific callouts is that I have no way of knowing beyond Dr. Davies’ own words.

    But the critique leveled against the university rings true for me. I’ve long since come to feel that BYU did me a disservice by shielding me from critical information about the LDS church, which was not at that time covered in any of the many religion classes I took, or any other class for that matter. It seems unconscionable to have so many professors of such high qualification, and none mention any potential issues with the church they represent, except obliquely, after hours.

    “The glory of God is intelligence; or, in other words, light and truth” – it was all over campus. But the glaring exception is casting light on, and discussing the truth about, the church itself.

    EDIT: The word “ousted” may be too strong – Dr. Davies chose to retire, but the withdrawal of funding was strong pressure on him to do so.

    NOTE: I originally posted this on Reddit, check the discussion there, including a response by Dr. Davies, also seen on his blog.

  • Hubris

    hubrisWhen I saw that the various things I was working on and talking about with people brought a Tennyson poem, Doctrine and Covenants 45, a book about pre-Columbian civilizations, and my own poetic musings together in one place, I was filled with intellectual vanity.

    At his request, I started telling my professor my thoughts about a thesis topic. He started to seem bored and anxious for the conversation to end—I guess he just doesn’t dig computational approaches to decipherment? Well, he asked and I answered so he can only blame himself, I suppose.

    Sometimes I think I have a real contribution to make. Other times I feel like the poor, freaked-out kid in PhD Comics who is always getting dumped on and put in his place. Maybe both are true.

  • Fall Semester

    I blame my lack of blogging in recent months on being busy with my first semester of graduate school. In the interim before I start the next semester, I want to let you—oh loyal reader—know what was going on in my life during that time.

    1. Per my stake president’s counsel given more than a year ago and which I sadly only barely got around to heeding, this semester I went on a date a week. This was a fabulous experience. Going on more frequent dates made me less nervous about going on any particular date. It gave me more opportunities to get to know some really amazing girls. I’m often amazed at how such excellent girls are willing to give me some of their time. It’s been a pleasure learning about them and getting better at letting them learn about me.

    2. I worked really, really hard doing data mining for the BYU bookstore as part of a class project. I got to be really passionate about this, as boring as it might sound on the surface. The bookstore gave my group a large amount of sales data from their website over nearly the past decade. Our task was to turn that dry data into actionable knowledge about the bookstore’s customers. That challenge is somewhat akin to an archaeologist being trying to reconstruct the daily lives, beliefs, and values of an entire civilization given a site full of pot shards and millennia-old garbage. The only way to make the bookstore data really useful, it seemed to me, was to leverage every possible datasource in existence. To that end, I augmented the bookstore data with the following datasources:

    I also worked on using weather data to determine what the weather was like at the place and time an order originated from, but this was too time-consuming so I had to drop it. Yet I still think it would be interesting to see what correlations you would find between weather conditions and people’s desire to shop online. If the NOAA would make their historical observation and model data available via their web services this would be trivial.

    Anyway, our final report is here. It’s not the best-written thing, but the pictures are at least interesting!

    3. I kept up a fairly full schedule with my dinner group, poetry club, Institute classes, some running, tennis, one game of racquetball, hiking, camping, helping at a school, playing trombone in a pit orchestra, occasional family history research (that has certainly suffered since returning to school), reading about all kinds of random things in the library, and generally being really bad at replying to phonecalls.

    Overall it’s been a really happy time. School’s stress has usually been manageable, the projects and homework often enjoyable, and the material just plain cool. Dating, for perhaps the first time in my life, became more enjoyable than overwhelming. Things unmanageable became manageable because there was usually somebody to talk to when life was perplexing me. My bishop has provided sound counsel and inspired blessings, helping me feel more connected to God by means of one of his servants. And, as if things couldn’t get any better, the price of cheese went down, small children kept on bravely facing the world, and the sun returned from its absence every day. Boy, life is good!