Snurb's blog

The second day at the ACSPRI 2024 conference dawns with a session on social network mapping, and starts with a paper by our wonderful conference chair Rob Ackland. This presents work on an international collaboration around technology and political communication, with a particular focus on social bots. This explores especially the potential for such bots to connect people with different ideas online, with the aim to improve public discourse.

The final speaker in this mixed-methods session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is Alexandra Gregory, whose work is on mixed-methods research with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. In the first place, her work uses surveys with Indigenous populations in remote areas, but this has significant limitations: such populations are unlikely to be included in survey design, misalign with culturally appropriate communication styles, and require further qualitative elements and adaptation.

The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Qian Eileen Yang, whose research used grounded theory. Grounded theory has evolved from its traditional models through an evolved version towards constructivist grounded theory as developed by Charmaz; while original formulations built only on the data gathered for the study, the latter puts the literature review first in order to enable the scoping of the research work against existing knowledge.

The next session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on mixed methods research, and starts with Sara Yaghmour, whose focus is on dementia care. Her focus is especially on Saudi Arabia, where – as in much of the developing world – there is still a lack of awareness, policy, and resources in this field, even though there is an unusual high level of dementia cases in Saudi Arabia.

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Aaron Willcox, presenting work with the Scanlon Research Institute to explore local government-level civic opportunities. For organisations, such opportunities include hosting events, offering memberships, involving individuals through volunteering, and taking action through advocacy and campaigns.

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference is Gia Bao Hoang, whose interest is in the use of LLMs for detecting efficient persuasion in online discourse. Such an understanding of effective persuasion could then be used for productive and prosocial purposes, or alternatively to identify problematic uses of persuasion by bad actors.

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sair Buckle, whose interest is in the use of Large Language Models to detect bullying language in organisational contexts. Bullying is of course a major societal problem, including in companies, and presents a psychosocial hazard: there are several proposed approaches to address it, including surveys and interviews and manual linguistic classification (e.g. in federal parliament), which are subjective and manually intensive; pulse surveys and self-labelling questionnaires (e.g.

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about: unemployment, imprisonment, health issues, etc. But these data are political: they are political artefacts that reflect a specific purpose, and position Indigenous people as hapless, helpless, and hopeless. This is a pejorative portrayal which is simplistic and undemanding of its audience; their presentation never advances beyond frequency tables and simplistic breakdowns (e.g. by gender or age). They define Indigenous people by the race they are not.

Maggie calls this ‘5D’ data: deficit, difference, disparity, disadvantage, and dysfunction. The aim may be to close the socioeconomic gap, but the aim is simply to bring Indigenous populations ‘up’ to a non-Indigenous level. And this pattern is not unique to Australia: the same is true for other (Anglo-)colonised nations, with many of the same deficits and dysfunctions identified – yet without ever acknowledging the underlying source of these patterns, which is Anglo-colonisation itself. This may be well-intentioned, but is nonetheless damaging.

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.