Reading Willa Cather\u27s \u3cem\u3eThe Song of the Lark\u3c/em\u3e

When Willa Gather sent her publisher the manuscript for The Song of the Lark in March 1915, she wrote him that unless he had lived in the West, he couldn’t possibly understand how much of the region she had put into the novel. It expressed the “My country, ’tis of thee” feeling that the West always gave her, and, she concluded, when she grew old and couldn’t explore the desert anymore, all she need do to recapture the sense of place would be to lift the lid of the novel (Willa Gather to Ferris Greenslet, March 28, 1915—I paraphrase here because a stipulation to Gather’s will prevents the direct quotation of her letters). While ostensibly Gather’s book is about the rise of Wagnerian opera diva Thea Kronborg to stardom at the New York Met (hardly, one might think, the stuff of “real” Western literature), the book is indeed suffused with Western dreams of pioneering, Western values, Western heroics. In more than just the desert landscape of early chapters, The Song of the Lark is a Western book that asks questions fundamental to Gather’s thinking in the first half of her career: Can the highest aspirations of art find their genesis in the West, a place seemingly so hostile to high art? Can someone with the imagination and drive of a Thea translate her Western experiences into a meaningful artistic career that finds an audience outside of that region

Review of Land in Her Own Name: Women as Homesteaders in North Dakota and Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940

Much of the work studying women\u27s role in the American West has served to establish the significance and celebrate the contributions of women to Western American history. Lindgren\u27s book is such a work. Strikingly handsome, it portrays the lives of homesteading women in North Dakota from 1870 to about 1915 by providing excerpts from diaries, memoirs, and from personal interviews with homesteading women and their families, as well as a wealth of photographs and comparative statistics from land records. Lindgren\u27s goals are to dispute the stereotypes of women pioneers and to argue that women must be recognized as main characters in the settlement drama (233), a view too often overlooked, she says, because women have been thought of only in secondary roles (iii)

Mary Clearman Blew

Defying the Welch family edict to “Never speak aloud of what you feel deeply,” Mary Clearman Blew has garnered national recognition as an eminent writer in the American west by choosing to write candidly about the riddle of her family, their deeply felt losses, and her sense of “the contradictions of double vision, of belonging in place and being out of place” (Balsamroot 4; Bone Deep 174). Unsparingly honest and accessible in eight books of fiction and nonfiction, in person Blew is, nevertheless, a quiet, dignified, and reserved woman who still thinks of herself as a bookworm, the girl who barely managed to escape from the Montana ranch

Review of The Home Plot: Women, Writing and Domestic Ritual

In entitling her book The Home Plot, Ann Romines refers not to a literal territory or the locus of domesticity, nor even to the Aristotelian, linear movement toward a denouement. Plot, in the sense in which Romines uses it, is rather an on-going process akin to the daily routine of domestic ritual. The home plot is the rhythmic movement of the fiction as it is inspired by the nonprogressive, static, repetitive, non...linear domestic rituals of women\u27s traditional lives. The term domestic ritual, then, is especially significant because Ritual implies repetition because the repeated act has or creates meaning, which becomes tradition through its continuance. Domestic implies an enclosure, somehow sacralized, which is both the house and the perceiving self (p. 29)

Review of \u3ci\u3eRedefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather\u3c/i\u3e By Sally Peltier Harvey

Harvey\u27s book will be of interest not only to Cather scholars, but to an audience more widely concerned with literature as an expression of culture. By citing some of Cather\u27s contemporaries (Andrew Carnegie\u27s exegesis of the Gospel of Wealth and William James\u27s identification of success as the country\u27s bitch-goddess, for instance) as well as her literary peers (Howells, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck among them), then complementing this with more recent cultural studies of the early twentieth century (such as Jackson Lears\u27s examination of intellectual transformation and Warren Sussman\u27s study of the changing perceptions of the individual), Harvey gives us a solid framework for understanding Cather\u27s personal redefinition of the American Dream within a wider cultural and intellectual context

Body Counts: Counting Aylan Kurdi

Chapters published in the following report: Vis, F., & Goriunova, O. (Eds.). (2015). The Iconic Image on Social Media: A Rapid Research Response to the Death of Aylan Kurdi

Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics

Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production of data for statistics if they are to be trusted by citizens. We outline an approach that involves co-producing data, where citizens are engaged in all stages of statistical production, from the design of a data production platform to the interpretation and analysis of data. While raising issues such as data quality and reliability, we argue co-production can potentially mitigate problems associated with the re-purposing of big data. We argue that in a time of ‘alternative facts’, what constitutes legitimate knowledge and expertise are major political sites of contention and struggle and require going beyond defending existing practices towards inventing new ones. In this context, we argue that the future of official statistics not only depends on inventing new data sources and methods but also mobilising the possibilities of digital technologies to establish new relations with citizens

Citizen Data and Official Statistics: Background Document to a Collaborative Workshop

This working paper was written in preparation for a collaborative workshop organised for statisticians, social scientists, information and app designers and other participants inside and outside academia. The autumn 2017 workshop aimed to develop the main principles for a citizen data app for official statistics. Through this work we sought to conceive of a new regime of data collection in official statistics through different devices. How can we capture citizens’ meanings and intentions when they produce data? Can we develop ‘smart’ methods that do not rely on cooperating with, and data generated by, large tech companies, but by developing methods and data co-produced with citizens? Towards addressing these issues we developed four key concepts outlined in this document: experimentalism, citizen data, smart statistics and privacy by design. We introduced these concepts to facilitate shared understandings of their meaning, provide a background to discussions about them and the questions they raise for official statistics. Through then jointly working on the practical development of a citizen data app, the objective was to reflect on and reshape these concepts and to identify other concepts that might aid our understanding of the possibilities of citizen co-production of data for official statistics

Transcending Methodological Nationalism through a Transversal Method? On the Stakes and Challenges of Collaboration

This paper reflects on the challenges and pitfalls of doing collaborative ethnography in a research project (ARITHMUS) that studies the enactment of populations through statistics. Successful collaboration is essential in order to translate the idea of a transnational field of statistical practices – the conceptual starting point through which the researchers of the ARITHMUS team seek to overcome methodological nationalism – into a corresponding methodology and research practice that transcend nationally bounded case studies. Hence, the question arises as to how we make collaboration work in practice. In the first part of this working paper we explain why we seek to transcend methodological nationalism and why the conceptual starting points of the enactment of a European population and a transnational field of statistical practices require what we call a transversal method. In the paper’s second part we reflect on five interrelated pitfalls and challenges of collaboration in order to tease out possibilities for negotiating these to make collaboration work in practice

Review of Homesteading Women: An Oral History ofColorado, 1890-1950

Julie Jones-Eddy has compiled her interviews with forty-seven women from northwestern Colorado into a work that preserves the women\u27s perspective of homesteading. Like many oral histories, this one divides excerpts of the interviews thematically into subjects such as Home and Family, Marriage, Pregnancy, and Childbirth, and Working Women. The excerpts address a range of women\u27s homesteading experiences, from the art and precision of soap-making to the sorrow of nursing children during the 1918 flu epidemic. Although this format does not always allow the reader to see the pattern of an individual life, such groupings do recreate the pattern of women\u27s lives more generally, and individual voices blend into a chorus of women who, despite the difficulties of homesteading, succeeded at this kind oflife and lived long enough to reflect on it (p. xi)