Method and Its Undoing: Research Methods, Fall 2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the field of communication, method is typically treated as belonging to one of two categories — qualitative or quantitative. Even mixed method approaches take these categories for granted. But this dichotomy hides as much as it reveals, and other modes of inquiry, responding to other concerns, are not only possible but desirable. This book is the record of a doctoral-level methods seminar at the University of Ottawa in Fall 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors ran the seminar through email, preserving their messages here. The readings challenged familiar methodological paradigms by questioning their epistemological and ontological bases. The first half of the seminar asked about language and persuasion, which are not neutral tools. Indeed, they actively shape our encounter with the world we claim to be studying, and their methodological implications demand sustained reflection. But these approaches, too, hide as much as they reveal: the philosophy that grounds them is subject to politics and, in some cases, the bald assertion of power. Thus the second half examined challenges to Western methodological hegemony, in particular from Indigenous perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".