critique of UKIP statistics in the media

(This post is from 2012)

Ukip benefiting from disillusionment with main political parties, poll finds is an online article written for the Guardian online by Tom Clark, who is a political writer for the newspaper. Clicking through to his profile revealed that the majority, if not all, of his articles feature quantitative analysis and are heavily based on statistics.

The online feature has as its sources the Guardian/ICM poll of 1001 people surveyed by telephone. ICM is listed as a research organisation that, “is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.” A paragraph at the end of the feature explains this. The survey was commissioned by the Guardian online, but the piece was written around the results of the survey. The research is credited as being part of  a 28-year series of surveys on political trends within the United Kingdom carried out by the Guardian/ICM. The full history of these surveys is both mentioned and linked to within the piece and is available for download from the click-through link found at the address found in the ‘works cited’ section of this exercise.

The article itself states that the survey was commissioned in the wake of the police commissioner ballots which saw record lows in turnout and Ukip outpolling the Liberal Democrats which were released the second week of November. However, upon reading the attached history of surveying, I realised that these surveys took place between two and four times per month in those twenty-eight years. It was the apparent shift in response owing to the release of the above ballots that spurned the writing of a separate article for the findings in this particular case. What the data of the past surveys show clearly that cannot be seen in the graph and statistics of the article, is the rise in the other category of voters from 1% in 1985 to a high of 15% in June 2009(where it stands again currently).The article states, “The ICM/Guardian survey showed that Labour’s solid eight-point lead held firm over the previous month, but a growing proportion of voters were looking for an alternative home, particularly at Ukip. The combined total of the assorted minor parties rose three points to 15%, a score that has never been bettered in the 28-year history of the Guardian/ICM series.” This reveals the obvious need for the further division of the survey’s options.

The obvious objective of the survey is to reveal changing attitudes towards political parties within the United Kingdom. Those polled were asked their voting intentions and given the options of the three main political parties as well as a fourth option, “other”. It is this fourth option that is the focus of the article, as it is at it’s highest since the telephone survey’s beginning.

Using Gerry Rose’s model, there seems to be a level of ambiguity within the structure of the survey by limiting the number of voting options available to four. Understandably, what are deemed ‘minor’ political parties and technical groups etc. may not always necessarily be popular enough to warrant a separate option within the survey. However, as the focus of this article points out, one such smaller party (namely the right-wing Ukip) had gained enough prominence within the United Kingdom to vastly alter the results of the survey and render ‘other’ as the choice of a significant proportion of those polled (15%). Therefore, this individual poll was obviously altered to identity the political leanings of those who selected that option. The original poll format includes four options, namely; Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and Other. In it’s present form, as found in the article, the poll has been divided further. It now gives the following options; Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Other and Ukip. The newest poll, the focus of the article, has been amended to include Ukip, which takes up 7% of overall votes and accounts for nearly half of the ‘other’ category. Ukip’s omission from previous poll’s is still notable however, as the ‘other’ category had consistently higher popularity that the Liberal Democrats for more than eighteen months, all of which were polled by Guardian/ICM. Similarly, there is no category for those polled who will not vote or are undecided on party allegiance, their opinions are omitted from those surveyed. This ignores a possibly large amount of those who are in the eligible category for survey (whose only specification is for the surveyed to be 18+ or of voting age in the United Kingdom)

Following Rose’s model once more, we can examine how the operationalisation and field-work of the survey can affect its findings on changing political attitudes. It is important to note that this poll is continuously done by phone to landlines. This, whilst probably the most effective method of surveying the general population at the survey’s inception in 1985, is rather problematic today. Many people no longer have or use a landline phone with the advent of mobile technology. Many of those that do will screen callers for identification and not answer to unknown numbers. Many other people of voting eligibility will not have listed phone numbers available for market research. Many young people do not use landlines, whilst they are still a popular means of communication for many older citizens. Because of this, a consistent poll of 1001 people contacted through telephone will not necessarily represent accurately the entirety of the changing views of the voting public of any given nation.

With relevance to the ‘metaphysical pathos’ of the survey, only one question is structured in order to prompt a positive or negative response. Those surveyed are asked about where their faith lies with each political party’s leader, with the three main leaders mentioned, as well as option for ‘none’ and ‘don’t know’. This question seems to be exhaustive in nature, as it explores what appear to be the most popular choices as well as giving a negative and uncertain option for response simultaneously. The overall tone of the article is overarchingly neutral. The author has used the facts and figures and only expanded upon them to present the argument that Ukip has gained in popularity, which is clear to be read from the statistics, without giving any separate opinion or weighed interpretation of the figures received through the survey..

 

 

 

Word count; 1126

 

 

Clarke, Tom. Ukip benefiting from disillusionment with main political parties, poll finds, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/19/ukip-benefiting-disillusionment-politics-poll.

 

 

Rose, Gerry (1982) Deciphering Sociological Research, London, Macmillan

From Chapter 2, Framework p14

 

Guardian/ICM polls: every one since 1984. No author. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/21/icm-poll-data-labour-conservatives. Accessed 24/11/2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cultural barriers to further education and initiatives for Irish Travellers

Education, at even a mandatory level, is made incredibly difficult  for Irish travellers. Power, at every level, acts as a barrier to equality. As such, the inability of the education system and ‘settled community’ to adjust to incorporate traveller heritage and identities (in addition to many other socio-economic factors) create a near-impossible task of the completion of formal education. In turn, these difficulties can only further compact the multiple difficulties members of the travelling community face it the attainment of further education. This post briefly outlines the extent to which initiatives addressing these  systemic shortfalls have been addressed.

“Education shall aim at developing the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to the fullest extent. Education shall prepare the child for an active adult life in a free society and foster respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, and for the cultural background and values of others.“

Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

 

Irish Travellers are a traditionally nomadic people, who maintain a set of traditions and a distinct ethnic identity. It is a combination of these traditions, their nomadic lifestyles, education policy and a lack of inclusion that prevents many traveller’s from entering third level education. Traditionally Travellers were commercial nomads who traded in the rural agricultural economy. Travelling is a fundamental part of Traveller identity, yet today 77% of Travellers live in houses. (Donahue et al., 2005)

In the late 1980’s, the then President of Ireland Mary Robinson encouraged a greater and wider awareness of Traveller culture amongst the general population. She also implemented the Task Force on the Travelling Community, which called for for the prioritisation of Traveller needs and interests and provided much needed new legislation on equality.

The Traveller Health Strategy identifies Travellers as a socially disadvantaged group, and lists that social exclusion and frequent racism are the causes of this classification. While the Irish Traveller community is specifically identified in Northern Ireland as a particular ethnic group (Race Relations Order 1997), the same cannot be said with the Republic of Ireland. The Report of the Task Force on the Travelling Community (DOE, 1995) recognised Traveller cultural distinctiveness, and recommended that it should be supported by public policy.

In recent years, education for travellers has become more accessible through government initiatives and policy like the adoption of the five-year Local Traveller Accommodation Plans by all Local Authorities in 2000, additional funding from the Traveller Accommodation Unit for building and refurbishment of Traveller specific accommodation, and a scheme of loans and grants for the replacement of caravans for Travellers. That is not to say that this had lead to an overall increase in travellers accessing third level education, as the difficulties experienced by non-settled travellers have only lessened marginally.

For young traveller children, education is an inevitability. In recent years, the Department of Education and Science has released figures that suggest a near 100% registration of traveller children of the appropriate age within primary schools. This dramatically lowers as the child progresses to secondary level where a large portion of travellers make it only to the junior cycle. This dramatic decrease extends even further to third-level, where in 2008, the HEA estimated that travellers make up just 0.08% of the population.

However, many government initiatives over the past decade have been implemented in order to promote the accessibility of higher education for travellers. The removal of university fees in 1996 made third level education a possibility for many disadvantaged travellers because of cost feasibility and the high levels of unemployment amongst travellers. In 1997 The Universities act was implemented, as was the National Anti-Poverty Strategy. The Education Act of 1998 obliged schools to ensure that the education system respects diversity of values and traditions in Irish society.  In 2002 the DES published Guidelines on Traveller Education in Primary and Second Level Schools, laying the grounds for the possibility of entry into third-level. the ‘Report and Recommendations for a Traveller Education Strategy’ was published in 2006, and proposed a 5-year strategy to examine Traveller Education including education in preschool and the early years, primary, post-primary, further and adult education and third-level education.

 

        The ‘Report and Recommendations for a Traveller Education Strategy’

 •  examines existing provisions and supports for Travellers in education at all levels from preschool to higher education

 • identifies objectives for Traveller education, sets out plans of action, with suggested time scales

 • makes recommendations in relation to optimising or reallocating existing resources

 • sets out expected outcomes

 • addresses all aspects of Traveller education taking a holistic lifelong learning perspective from preschool provision to adult and continuing education. (Department of Education, 2006).

 

 

 

 

Despite the implementation of policy in recent years, the number of travellers enrolling in third-level institutes is still notably low. This can be seen as being directly in correlation with irregular school attendance and absenteeism in secondary level education within the Traveller community, which The Irish Traveller Movement cites as being caused by negative experiences of travellers within education in Ireland. The ITM state that there is a large level of bullying against traveller children in education coupled with a low level of interaction with settled children. The outcome of education for travellers is also seen as being relatively poor, because of biased hiring practices after third-level. Third-level is unequivocally less appealing if the same jobs are the only prospects that appear to be available after completion. As it currently stands, no government scheme directly addresses the factors beyond economics that directly effect the enrolment of Irish travellers in further education, and that cannot be read as ‘enough’.

 

 

 

 

 

Equality Authority (2006). Traveller ethnicity: An equality authority report.

http://www.equality.ie/index.asp?locID=107&docID=556

 

ITM (2001). A lost opportunity?: A critique of local authority Traveller accommodation

programmes. Prepared for the ITM by Kathleen Fahy.

http://www.itmtrav.com/pdf/CritiqueHandOut.pdf

 

ITM (2004). Irish Travellers in education: Strategies for equality. Dublin: ITM.

Click to access Education_report.pdf

 

 

Donahue, M., McVeigh, R. and Ward, M.(2005). Misli, crush, misli: Irish Travellers and

nomadism. (A research report for the Irish Traveller Movement and Traveller Movement

(Northern Ireland). http://www.itmtrav.com/pdf/MISLI-CRUSH-MISLI.pdf

 

FIGURES AND EXCERPT FROM; Department of Education and Science (2006). Report and recommendations for a Traveller

education strategy. Dublin: Stationery Office.

 

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Very unparliamentary language ; On multimodality and processes of transcription

For the past two weeks I’ve been spending an untoward amount of time with sixty seconds worth of Paul Gogarty, ex deputy of the now defunct Green Party. Unfortunately for Mr.Gogarty, on a December afternoon post-budget 2010, his ‘unparliamentary’ outburst at another deputy in the Dail survived both his own position in the Dail and the existence of his political party.

The man, the myth, the metadata.

By The Green Party of Ireland Comhaontas Glas (Flickr: Paul Gogarty TD) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Sorry, I realise that image is absolutely huge, but I really think it adds something. Anyway, you might wonder why I’d be re-watching this minute-long clip so many times, and that will be explained after this next section (skip ahead if you have no interest multimodality). I mentioned in my last post that I would be taking a ‘multimodal’ approach in my internship to discourse analysis. But what does that mean?

On crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, it seems, can be quite the dirty word for some within the digital humanities. It is an unfortunate truth that crowdsourcing has become synonymous with outsourcing, a product of a neoliberal agenda in the digital world. Crowdsourcing in academic contexts is quite different, as we will deal with later in this post.

Jeff Howe, who coined the term in an article for wired magazine, describes it in the following way on his blog,“Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.” When we consider the ramifications of Howe’s definition, it is not impossible to imagine how crowdsourcing can easily become a problematic option utilised by corporations and institutions in order to increase capital and minimise spending on labour. This is an unfortunate truth that diminishes respect surrounding crowdsourcing projects that aim to preserve cultural artifacts or involve national and international communities in projects that provide educational benefits and benefit cultural communities on a global scale.

Amazon mechanical turk (https://www.mturk.com) is just one of the more extreme examples of problematic actions undertaken in the name of ‘crowdsourcing’. Mechanical turk is a virtual platform that allows companies to outsource labour online, which is in itself fine. However, these ‘human intelligence tasks’ are advertised as being undertaken by thousands of workers for incredibly limited amounts of money. Tasks include tagging, transcription and many other tasks that usually feature within crowdsourcing projects, but a rudimentary browse of currently available tasks showed me that pay can be as low as $0.01 for ten minutes work (or the equivalent of five european cent an hour, for context). Workers can be sorted by their level of qualification, and must only be paid if the work is deemed satisfactory by the employer. Whilst there does not seem to have been any great level of global uproar about the establishment of this service per se, it is important to acknowledge that the level of pay for labour on this platform is alarmingly low, and largely unpoliced. These sorts of low-paid projects are also traditionally undertaken by workers in vulnerable financial situations and can be seen as a problematic way of limiting workforce expenditure for a company (perhaps hiring a limited amount of highly-qualified staff to oversee and review work, rather than having a traditionally tiered system of employment). The misuse of crowdsourcing in this way is the antithesis of an appropriate utilisation of this extremely exciting and beneficial model of project, as reflected in popular academic and public projects such as FamilySearch Indexing, Galaxy Zoo and Project Bentham.

A useful example of crowdsourcing as a digital humanities project for the ‘public good’ rather than as a source of funding for strictly for-profit businesses is the Letters of 1916 project (http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/), which recently celebrated it’s first anniversary. Emma Clarke, a former student of D.H at TCD, and Karolina Badzmierowska from the Letters of 1916 project visited our class at the start of October to talk us through the various aspects of their project and it’s greater context within the field.

At the beginning of the session, Emma and Karolina prompted us with the question, ‘What is the largest, and best known, example of crowdsourcing?’. As you might imagine, it is the ever popular font of collective knowledge (and oft. ignorance) that is Wikipedia. Lori Byrd Phillips writes on mnc.org that “Wikipedia is often described as the classic example of massively decentralized, peer-produced content on the Web. The site’s success and unwavering tenacity have led it to become arguably the most influential application of the open source software movement within the cultural and academic spheres.”Wikipedia is an example of a very particular type of crowdsourcing, one that relies on collaborative research rather than tagging or transcription activities. This simply means that it expects (or hopes) that contributing users are informed and researched within whatever field they are contributing to, and that their sources are accurate and reliable to greatest possible extent. We can, of course, get into issues surrounding academic work and peer-reviewing here ad nauseum, but Wikipedia does not purport to be an academic source, merely a communal resource.

In contrast to this community-sourcing, Letters of 1916 takes a rather different approach. The researchers explained that the project relies on, and thrives on, what are known as the ‘superuser’, a user who contributes vast amounts of data towards a project, beyond that of an irregular user or one-time user. Superusers are particularly prevalent within projects like letters of 1916 which are based in transcription, although they are not exclusive to these projects. These superusers are usually retired, or work from home, and typically have large amounts of free time to dedicate to a project. These users then can drive projects forwards with quite a limited amount of regular users, providing that rewards and acknowledgements of these users are in place. These superusers are then crucial to projects like letters of 1916 (see also Project Bentham and the Guardian MP Expenses).

Stuart Dunn writes that, “Early successes in academic crowdsourcing can be partially explained in one of two ways: either there is an alignment between the aims of the research group and large sections of the wider public (e.g. in the origins of the universe); or by the application of intelligent means of engaging the relatively small number of people who do the large majority of the work itself (e.g. by allowing them more of an editorial rather than transcribing role; giving them administrative status in project forums etc.) In the former case, the business model form of crowdsourcing happens to work; in the latter it starts to break down, and must be replaced with a more nuanced approach.” Whilst Dunn would describe the letters of 1916 project as falling into the former description, that is not to say that this project adopts an overtly outdated approach to crowdsourcing, merely one that has proven to be effective. This is particularly the case when, like with this particular project, your subject matter is of cultural relevance to your audience.

So how might academically beneficial crowdsourcing projects avoid the trappings of private industries and yet still be both viable and successful? Ruth Holley cites a multitude of tips for creating and maintaining a successful crowdfunding project (which can be found in full here; http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/holley/03holley.html), which includes some of the following ideas;

Tip 2: Have a transparent and visible chart of progress towards your goal.
Tip 3: Make the overall environment easy to use, intuitive, quick and reliable.
Tip 8: Give volunteers options and choices
Tip 9: Make the results/outcome of your work transparent and visible.
Tip 10: Let volunteers identify and make themselves visible if they want acknowledgement.
Tip 11: Reward high achievers by having ranking tables and encourage competition.

What Holley makes clear within this article is that truly effective crowdsourcing projects rely on user’s experience within the project both on a community level and on a level of individual acknowledgement. In this way, users are encouraged to repeatedly involve themselves within the project, rather than using the service intermittently, or even once.

In short, beyond the academic world, crowdsourcing has taken on problematic connotations that are wholly incongruent with the aims of crowdsourcing projects as a whole. In an increasingly digitized and globalised world, it is probable that crowdsourcing in order to limit corporate expenditure and devalue labour is increasingly likely. As it stands, these projects are limited enough so as not to permeate all areas of research and industry, yet, projects like Amazon turk still receive tremendous amounts of traffic, and are legitimate options for companies seeking services traditionally undertaken by regularly paid workers. These same services, which are undertaken by members of the public and academic community for entirely separate reasons, are not to be confused. In order for certain levels of crowdsourcing projects to be successful, labour may need to be paid, but it should be paid fairly and in-line with standards that should be established within the community at large.

Bibliography

Dunne, Stuart (Mar 21, 2013).”More than a business model”.

Holley, Rose. “Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do It?” D-Lib Magazine 16.3/4 (2010)

Howe, Jeff (June 2, 2006). “Crowdsourcing: A Definition”

Byrd Philips, Lori (June 25, 2014). “Why You’ll Never Hear Me Call Wikipedia Crowdsourcing”.