Good evening all right so you are all here for the optional orientation right is there anyone sitting with any other thoughts in mind how many of you already decided and recording in progress like already taken the admission anyone like that here all right okay so the rest of the people are undecided all right fine so I am Rajita and I be handling your entire sociology optional I happen to be one of the first batch students of Shankar sirs and I did my undergraduate in engineering and subsequently my masters in public relation and regarding my UPSC experience I went to two UPSC interviews and subsequently I got selected with the all India 7th rank in CSIR's administrative services examination of 2009 I didn't quite like the job because it was very desk oriented job and I quit my job and then I've been into teaching so initially I started teaching for students who are preparing for personality test for group discussions for CAT that is for the management aptitude test and then for IT Madras there's a humanities entrance coaching it's called as HSE which students take up up for an integrated course soon after your 12 standard doing MA in development studies economics and all that so I started taking classes for that and since 2013 I have been into optional teaching so this is how I started my career with civil services teaching as such so it's been almost 10 years since I started taking classes and so here I am to tell you about the optional subject alright okay so as far as optional is concerned any optional subject for that matter there are usually two papers that you have paper one where you'll have 250 marks on world level and paper two of the same subject will be of India level so any optional you take this is how it is going to be alright so sociology is also very similar to that paper one deals with world sociology and paper two deals with Indian sociology and now we'll go into what exactly is present in this particular option I just go and tell you unit wise what is there alright okay so paper one it's called as fundamentals of sociology and in this particular paper totally there are 10 units and the first unit is about how the subject evolved and exactly what are all the things which had been the background regarding the emergence of sociology as a subject so somewhere in 1839 is when this subject started taking its shape and ever since it has been you know regarded as a social science so it started like that so the first unit deals with it second unit is when initially it was like considered that Europe is where this entire subject got created so there was this idea about how to believe the subject so many theories etc there can I believe it or not and Europe entirely was believing in science they wanted to have proof for everything so then there were these set of people who created the subject who wanted to make sociology also very provable so to align sociology something like how physics or chemistry or biology would get regarded at that time they started creating certain methods and so the second and third unit is about that how did sociology get its prominence how did it become believable how did it become credible as such how to improve the research that we do in sociology etc okay so let's take a very common statement so you would have all heard about something called as the nazi theory right the Aryan superiority theory which was held very strongly by a person called Adolf Hitler he was the previous ruler of germany right so if you look into this particular theory certain things which are there among the people as a theory is it actually true do Aryans actually have that kind of superiority like how Hitler regarded or is it like it is something that he only created or is it that the society had created so when you take something like a theory when you take take something like a statement or you take something like a rumor you start doing research on that to find out whether there is any authenticity in that statement for example we recently saw about a news getting circulated from money some incident which had happened very long back but it's getting viral right now so there was a lot of discussion regarding fake news so whether a news is real or whether it is fake etc the discussions began so how do you verify so there are separate authorities who verify the credibility of a particular news before it gets on to the public but social media as such is not having any regulator so come come to a press come to a newspaper come to a video there is a difference in how you take a news to a person isn't it so like that if I have something like a statement if I have something like a rumor is it true or not I want to verify like that I do in sociology some statements are there is it true or not like that they started creating methods so how will you find out for example you go and watch a movie right you order something on swiggy or zomato at the end of the day there is a feedback which you give as a customer to the delivery agent right to the to the person who had given you the food and the hotel which had served you that kind of a food you give a rating from that rating you kind of identify so when you want to book an ola cab you look into the star rating of that particular driver whether he or she is actually having a very good rating that decides so a person who is having anything about 3.5 only is considered to be more trustable so whenever a person does an ola ride the drivers always have this habit of telling us if you like the journey please do mark me at the end like this they will tell you isn't it similarly when you call a customer care executor say you are making a call to an air tell and then you are making some query and then at the end of the day they will tell you see there will be a feedback thing that comes in the end so please give your comment at the end and which is used for recording purposes for training purposes like that they will say so what am i doing i'm conducting a survey right so survey is a research technique right like i do a scaling i do a star rating that's called as a scaling so we'll use those technical terms which we use practically in how this research work is done so just that your swiggy is going to become some gender studies so instead of swiggy you're going to analyze gender instead of zomato you're going to analyze race instead of any other thing where you have done the rating you're going to analyze some other topic which is here and that all is what we do in the research now the fourth unit is about who are all the main people who created the subject who all contributed to this particular subject so what did they say what are their theories and are their theories actually applicable now or not say for example during the covid time we saw a scenario where a large number of people were doing online classes right so online classes became something like very common till then some people only were doing but then it became very mandatory at that time so when i look into that i'm sitting inside a room or i'm sitting in a space sharing that room with other people how comfortable am i in doing that online classes sometimes what happens i'm not having interaction with any other person like how i had in school so some people they found it very very frustrating so there's a term for this it's called as alienation that that word was given by maths it's present in your syllabus but then when we study alienation first we will study from his perspective and then we will try to apply like currently is there any perspective for alienation right we all wore masks during the covid time so even otherwise we all wear masks isn't it we are not what we are inside outside to all the people we don't show what sort of a person we are so even this mask is just a physical mask even if this mask weren't there we still wear masks we mask up personality we are someone else but we show that we are someone else so the mask actually gave us a huge cover it was like one like how we wear some uniforms and the camouflage our identity you know mask gave that kind of a it made it very easy for some people some people liked it some people didn't like it isn't it because then you smile also you'll not even know whether the person is smiling then we started looking into the wrinkles that will come in the eye as to whether the person is actually smiling or not right so some current applications of what exactly is this alienation is it good is it bad what does it do to the society so like that something on a theoretical base and then we try to connect whether this has any kind of weightage in the present day society okay so here we do have some kind of applicative part as well next all these units that whatever you have it is very highly correlated paper one and paper two we'll get correlated okay so if you take this unit five stratification and mobility so here what we do is we study about a cast we study about class etc okay let me come up with a very practical thing some of you would have gone through competitive exams even before you came to UPSC like in your 12th class some of you might have written neat some of you might have written other competitive exams isn't it so when you gave that there would have been something called as OBC NCL OBC non creamy layer so OBC is based on your cast and creamy layer is based on your monetary position that is it's based on your class right so practically speaking we use this called as OBC creamy layer in general we talk about EWS economically weaker sections right so like this practically whatever we are discussing those things what is the technical word behind it is what is there in the fifth unit okay so we'll be studying some theories and we'll be studying something very practical similarly you would have heard about something called as a decriminalization of homosexuality right and recently also in the supreme court there are some cases which are going on into legalizing homosexuality so as of now we have only decriminalized it right but we have not permitted marriages among homosexuals in India but world in some other parts of the world these things are considered okay these things are considered absolutely normal fine so when I discuss about gender I discuss about gender fluidity I discuss about transgenders all these topics is what you will be studying here in the fifth year okay and the sixth unit is from which all subjects there have been contributions to sociology this is something like a fusion okay so sixth unit is from economics what has come to sociology next unit is from political science what has come to sociology from philosophy what has come to sociology ninth unit from anthropology what has come to sociology and tenth unit is presently how sociology is changing how is technology influencing sociology how is education influencing the society like that so this subject because it was one of the last social sciences to have got created it is something like a little bit of everything is a part of sociology so when you study sociology it is like literally something like general studies wherein you get a taste of little bit of politics little bit of economics little bit of history little bit of anthropology everything is a part of it and what part of it has come that part alone we are studying okay so that's what you have as 10 units in paper one now paper two there are certain specific unit certain units are correlated to paper one okay so specific units is like say for example the entire paper two we will not be telling one two three four we'll be saying a b and c it's divided into a b and c and under everything there are subsections so totally there will be 15 units that we have so in total there are 25 units but practically speaking there are not 25 units because everything will get correlated in paper two I'll tell you how it is getting correlated okay so perspectives of Indian society like we had world thinkers here we are having Indian thinkers so here we are having three important Indian thinkers so there six and here three nine thinkers totally we are having thinkers means who have contributed to the subject who have created or who have added to the subject are called as thinkers okay impact of colonial rulers from history what has come to sociology so here we'll be studying about freedom movements how did it create social reform how did it change the position of the people all that will come as a part of it right caste system already in paper one we studied something called as race like that and all we I told you the word class I told you the word caste there itself so this unit and that unit is actually correlated so here we'll be studying more in terms of Indian sociology right so how is caste and politics getting correlated how are their issues in the society how are their conflicts in this conflict means fights okay then tribes in India this is exclusive this is something from anthropology to sociology and only Indian tribes will be studying we are not studying world tribes and in tribes also we are more studying tribal policy we are not going to study this tribe this is the characteristic this is the feature and all that that will be done in anthro in socio we are more bothered if you become a collector in a tribal region what is the kind of policy that you'll do different between a normal rural area and a tribal village or say you get posted in the northeast so there you have cities which are tribal cities the present problem that's going on in manipur cookies versus mateys so one is a group of people who have a tribal status and another is a group of people who do not have a tribal status and who are aspiring for a tribal status so when I have to talk about a conflict like this some communities presently having a reservation and a new community wants to have a reservation and the existing community is not ready for it right state of Tamil Nadu also had a very similar issue there was a community called as Devendra Kula Velalas they come under SC status they wanted to move out of SC to become OBC but existingly there is someone called as Velalas Velalas are already having OBC so they've created a they had some differences of opinion that if you give the same name it will become confusing so you create a separate name so that if people want let them move out of SC status it is a willingness no if I want I take it up if I don't want I don't know it's like that okay so discussing about all that is what we will do in the practical sense fine next classes there in sixth unit we studied something called as influence of economics here it is again the influence of economics here influence of anthropology in paper two so this one unit and this one unit is the influence and religion and society there we studied influence of philosophy here also it is in paper two perspective Indian society perspective so it is many things are getting repetitive that means I will study a concept that concept example world level example India level that's all that concept thinker world level thinker India level that's all concept is not going to change so half of it is going to be repetitive according to paper one and paper two they are getting interrelated only okay this is the last portion that you have vision of social change so creating some legislations like let us take for example we created a legislation called as mtp medical termination of pregnancy act so in a society we found that over a period of 50 years population we wanted to control so we asked people to do family planning we started this right from 1952 but when people started to do family planning they started killing their girl children and they wanted to have only boy children even economic survey 2019 discussed this scenario called a sun meta concept that is people want to have as many sons as possible and we are killing our daughters so we are facing not just a revenue deficit or a current account deficit or a fiscal deficit we are facing a daughter deficit in India okay so when I face a daughter deficit right what do I do to overcome the daughter deficit I have some law for it and that's called as mtp so finding out the sex of a fetus and aborting the fetus because it is going to be a girl baby or aborting a fetus because it's going to be a boy baby it is going to be an injustice to the either of the child right so you're not supposed to do that we had a legislation for it so how does a society change when you bring a law so we were a society which practiced sati a law came in and over 150 years 1829 1929 1987 three times we had to keep on making amendments today to some extent we know that known instances of sati is not so certain things when you create a law-based change it will take a lot of time to trickle down in the society so like that what change is getting created in the society how did constitution create a change how did education create a change like that what do we want India to be all that is a part of this vision of social change and rural and agrarian transformation so you would have heard about certain things no PM Kisanski in PM Kisanski 6000 rupees directly to the farmer the government is giving in three installments of 2000 2000 2000 so I'm going to launch a scheme like this what is the kind of transformation that is happening in rural India is it creating a rural development is it alleviating or is it bringing down the poverty all that did green revolution actually make us to come out of our bad situation did it show the fault lines in the society did it tell us where we are going wrong can we improve from there all that in terms of our agriculture what is the current status where we have to go what are all our problems all this is covered here as well as in unit B some parts are static some part of okay then already we study politics and society I told you in paper one same thing in paper two also social movements this is a part of this only separately we are having it as a unit but it is a part of politics only population dynamics this is unique I told you about dotted deficit like that you'll keep hearing certain terms no Japan actually is facing a scenario called as deep population so there is a shrinking of the Japanese population age is going higher number of new bonds are reducing in the society so we call that there is a reduction in the population size a reduction in the population rate like these some terms and all we use know all that is a part of population dynamics similarly you'd have heard certain words that during covid time lot of people who migrated they were reverse migrating they are coming back to their villages itself so like this we hear certain things so those terms are all what we have here in population dynamics okay so this is an error it's like uh challenges to social transformation is the word okay so what are the challenges that we are having right so what are all the challenges that we have one big challenge that is there is say some issues like communalism uh issues like fundamentalism violence against women then environmental degradation presently what are all our current affairs related problems all that is what we have but here we'll not be studying it like GS we'll be studying it is in terms of what is the consequence on the society how does it impact the people so I have a okay Chennai declared a day zero a few years back day zero means zero water no new water for drinking purposes supply for water was entirely cut in every part before this we had a day zero declared in South Africa right so like this if I have some situation called a day zero how am I going to tackle so this is a problem of urban spaces similarly Bombay is getting heavily flooded urban flooding is a problem so when I study this in geography I study it as a concept called as urban flooding I talk about tribute trees distribute trees aquifers how we make constructions on top of it and all that that's very technical but what we study here is say there is a problem in terms of urban flooding how does it impact the old how does it impact the children how does it impact the people who are living in slums who gets more impacted like this we start making a sociological analysis about it see usually when there are floods there are also situations when new crimes come up isn't it it becomes very easy to create some you would have never expected such a situation will happen like that right so certain things about that kind of an analysis is what we do here right so these are all the changes that are happening to the two-hour society okay so one part of the syllabus is exclusively for paper one exclusively for paper three 60% of the syllabus is correlated between paper one and paper two okay so this is how you have as the pattern in the syllabus all right okay so now for people who are new to sociology what are the pros and what are the cons okay so syllabus is like from scratch you don't have a background in sociology and you want to start you know to read you can read sociology and you need to have five to six months of time to prepare when you start from scratch you don't need to have any you know proficiency in the subject previously to pick up the subject you can start from scratch subjects like these are easy to pick up because it's very highly correlated to what you read in the ncrt itself so whatever you see around you you try to give it a new dimension and you start writing so from the basics and degree level is what is expected out of here and the syllabus itself is very beautifully correlated okay next is the results i'll talk to you about the results it's very highly clearing 16 to 19% clearance rate is there among those candidates who appear for means right and syllabus syllabus is very limited as i told you because it's correlative half of the time so you study a concept just your examples have to change and one important aspect is you don't need to recreate textbooks that means if you are a person who understands a concept you can write it in your own language in your own sentence you don't need to mug and reproduce it onto your textbook if you want to do it you can do it if you don't want to do it you need not do it so it gives the freedom for any kind of a student to survive in this particular subject just retain the keyword and write it in a way that it is understandable to the evaluator that's more than enough all right and reference books plenty available and of course i'll cover entirely whatever is your syllabus what are the challenges if you are a person who can't create sentences that is you should write simple ncrt language like full sentences if you have a problem in sentence creation no that means you can't write broken broken sentences you're writing for example uh say i want to tell the temperature has risen in the classroom so just temperature is rising alone is not enough i have to say temperature is rising because of this and i have to complete the sentence so you have to complete the sentence you have to write it in a sentenceical format and for this matter any optional subject you have to write it like this gs it's enough if you write half answers that means hanging points are okay in gs hanging points means only keyword is there you're not writing it in sentence it's okay but you can't survive in any optional subject with writing only keywords you have to write it in sentence so sociology you need to write you want to know what level you have to write just pick up the ncrt and see what level it is there that level if you have simple basic level it is there it is more than enough but you should write sentence and down south there is very very less awareness about sociology because science usually dominates if you go to the northern parts of india the arts groups dominate so there is a general more awareness in southern india that is not their professional courses are very highly regarded and so there is definitely which is like half of the time people want to pick up something which is very aligned with what they have studied in school half of the people who didn't have studied these things in school so it's new for them so that's that's something which they don't so they feel scared but there's nothing to feel scared about it but yeah this is the general thing that we have down south okay now whatever whoever tells anything this option is better than that optional please don't believe anything every optional creates equally good results you compete within that optional okay there used to be a time wherein marking patterns of optionals were very different from 2019 onwards all the optionals they are fetching good enough kind of marks you have to do well in that option so you have to find where where you like something where you're able to relate to something and of course where you have some kind of a guidance so there is nothing like this is better than that that's then if you have any doubt in what i say you just take the top 20 rackers and you see the background of their persons you'll find that they are belonging to different optional so i'm not telling this for the sake of it you can just check and see all right and yeah this thing i've already explained okay so what do you get if you do sociology other than this what all does it help you with uh yeah so it helps you with your gs paper one so gs paper one there is something called a society in india and on an average you have six questions so 75 to 85 marks comes from that and essay writing usually you have at least one essay which is based on some particular core subject the content that you build from the optional you can use it in the essay writing as well so that's one and of course irrespective of your background anyone gets only social issues in the interview they ask you about your district issues your state issues your profession related issues all that so everyone has to touch base on social issues because we are going to deal with social issues only in reality so interviews are generally very helpful when we have this background and in state services examination many state services examination either it's a part of a general study so some places like in up in karnataka in west Bengal in all this there is a separate option subject there also it is the same syllabus only that you're having one or two keywords will be different but otherwise you can just keep repeating so many people they clear other public service commissions group one also with this preparation and of course say for example let's be practical we put in some years we are not able to crack the prelims after a particular time say we've given two to three attempts and then after three attempts we are looking for something like a backup because we have the age but after a particular time we can't keep stagnating there so we look for other options which is with whatever we have already studied so that we can create a backup and continue with our preparation so usually students get into consulting policy consulting so they get placed into ipad they get placed into so they do some kind of you know skill upgrade courses for example in aim bangalore there is a rural fellowship program so there it's like a it usually happens in the month of october and you get recruited like as of it is a carder placement only around 600 candidates get placed you get a stipend amount also but the core portions there it is like very similar to how you have a zu upsc preparation so you have a written round you have a you know a discussion round and then you have an interview stage and all that so many people keep that as a backup option they go into that they take one year there and then finally they give the exam so just in case the prillins gets a little delayed your main preparation should be such that whenever you clear prillin you should be in a position to get into the rank list so for that some backups like this in terms of policy in terms of research work right for example you would have noticed two years back gate sociology has come so it is offered a pg program in sociology so the same and the thing that you study for the optional it will help you to clear that entrance examination you can do your masters you can do your phd as well and then partly you can do the preparation so for people in case after a couple of years we feel stagnation at the prillin's level and we are looking for something like a backup this could be some kind of a backup wherein you stay rooted in your preparation and you don't need to be financially dependent on your folks anymore okay so for that this is there is some kind of other avenues which are available but people generally don't talk about it you need to know when you get into something you need to know in and out of what you're getting only then it makes sense all right okay so fine so now after what we'll do with sociology is we'll cover everything from the syllabus and we'll be starting classes from coming Thursday the class time will be five to seven thirty it's not five thirty to eight it is five to seven thirty okay and we'll be classes having classes on all weekdays a few days if in case we have any other extra classes because this means if there is any pattern change I might have to cover that as well so ideally if we start now I will complete by January I'll take time till January to complete so on an average we will have at least 90 classes it might stretch to 100 to 103 classes it depends okay depends is because it will if I have to create results I have to go in depth and you have to be with me you have to just follow the course so after you finish each and every unit we will be having sectional tests so sectional test means say I we do unit one unit two then you will be writing small portion tests out of that and you will be going in a integrated manner that means initially you'll be doing one hour three questions then one hour four questions then one hour five questions then one hour six questions and you will be writing tests till March your exam is on May 26th so till March until you complete the portion so classes will be done apart from your classes you will be having this test so 10 tests will be conducted for you and in these 10 tests all the portions will be covered so that you write and see one round before you go for the preliminary examination so this is this will be the plan so you write your papers will be evaluated there will be separate mentoring for optional and these mentors will be people who are either interview candidates or people who have taken a sabbatical like who have skipped this attempt this year so there will be two to three people from the previous path students who are either posted in Chennai or who are based or who can come to Chennai from the previous you know batches okay so this will be the people who will be your mentors and your papers will be evaluated and your feedback will be given and you will be continuously monitored in terms of like say test one to test four what sort of a progress you're making for example see some people they study but then when you're presenting it on to writing you might not be able to do it so how each person will have some exclusive challenge exclusive problem so that will be monitored and your mentor will be helping you as well so this is the plan okay so writing practice periodical tests and evaluation this is how the UPSC does so we will also be doing it in a similar way and all your feedback will be one to one that means there is no group feedback in all it's one to one that means you write your paper your paper your feedback will be given to you okay so this is how it is going to happen all right so this is about the optional what is the syllabus what is the plan and what are all the challenges that all you are having okay so now for the results so this year's I'll show you till 2019 because there are a lot of candidates maybe once you come to the sessions we interact further okay so there are more than 300 people whose names are there here okay so now I'm open for questions if you have any questions you can ask yeah like I spoke to you already in uh in freelance there is no correlation as such but it means if you take in GS one there is society in India which is exactly a ditto of what you have here in the syllabus but society has more of generic content we go a little depth here in paper to GS two there is something called as social justice which is a part of governance and that has an overlap and in GS three there is no overlap but in GS four in case studies there are at least two case studies from social issues and there are some statements of philosophers which are asked in ethics part so there is some kind of an overlap and of course as I spoke to you already on the essay so this is the overlap that time so if in case you decide to come to sociology we'll be starting from coming Thursday Thursday class will begin at five o'clock so five to seven thirties when you'll be having the classes we usually run it on weekdays uh sometimes we might have class on Saturday but I will never keep a class on Sunday okay so uh again I'll inform to you in prior okay nothing on last minute and all that we'll go as per a regular schedule and there will be a telegram channel and there is a separate student telegram group that we will create after people decide okay so this one group is going to be how the institute is going to communicate to you regarding any any changes or anything whatever and this will also be the official medium of communication for student interactions like say specifically you have any queries like any academic doubts and all that for that students usually maintain a particular group and I participate as a part of that particular group so that I can also help you if in case you have any doubts and so there will be a particular schedule that we are following so once we start the classes initially we'll be starting with what is the focus of each and every part of the syllabus what is the weightage which unit from where to study how they have asked the questions how much marks is coming from every unit and then how to base the preparation from there and how to make best use out of the classes and you will be given proper material you will be given three books and in this book itself there will be everything covered that means all the reference materials that are there usually we follow around the six to seven textbooks from those textbooks whatever is the important portions that has been compiled together and it is given to you as a material so apart from your class if you follow that itself you will be getting up you don't need to go searching for material and all that it will be given to you and any current affairs upgrade whatever we are doing we'll be doing it in the classes itself as and when it happens so usually once we are done with the classes subsequent year when students write the main examination we have something like a you know some set of revision classes and all which we give and that differs so initially students were appearing for the mains I'll complete the revision and then I do it for the students who are writing for the subsequent thing so we have like two phases so that any new upgrade anything that happens you are like staying in touch with it because little bit of what you have in paper two when we write like this know the marks go up like anything because this year people have scored up to 159 so you saw Abhinav you saw you saw all these people they have scored above 290 so five students have scored above 290 and all of them they have like scored above 150 in pay each of the papers and that doesn't come by just like that you know we need to put in some effort and we need to go it go in the basic direction and if we do that we'll be able to so telling that we'll have a magic figure of 300 it is not something which is you know always the case because they have to give 300 only then we can get sometimes the average scores like for example gs3 this year the average score itself is only 67 68 so how will I get 100 when they are giving only 68 there is some kind of a pattern in how so in that subject we have to come within the top 10 percentile of students top 20 percentile of students only then we will stand a chance to go to the interview so that level of preparation when we do we are like irrespective of which center in India we write the exam from we have a higher chance of getting very good marks in the optional okay so we need to base so the people whom you see around you know who who might be in your classes they are not your competitors the real competitors are not just beside you they are sitting in different parts of India so half of the people are whom you don't even know but always from school college and all that no we make comparisons to the people who sit beside us who you know whom we know and all that but here half of our people are unknown isn't it so that way we also need to gear up our preparation all right okay fine so you are very very dull dull what happened you have nothing to tell you have any questions nomas be spoken there's no need to replicate anything just if you hold you understand the meaning and you write it in your own words by just retaining certain keywords so what is the keyword we will be discussing in the class so this topic means these are the keywords you should retain the keyword and the rest of it however you write it doesn't matter because see if you repetitively write same answers the first person who writes that answer will get very good marks but subsequently same answers if it gets repeated in the paper the marks keep going down so it's always better that you retain your originality and just retain the keywords because in UPSC keynote they give only the keywords they don't give you sentences they don't give you thinkers means nothing you can write anyone that doesn't matter any example that doesn't matter so you have the freedom to be on your own provided you just need to write the answer to the question and for that you need to have concept clarity you need to have subject so if you build the subject knowledge this year and you get all your notes everything ready once you finish your prelims you can start with your revision phase and you can start with your writing phase in a full fledged manner so now you have to ensure that the next five to six months you are kind of ready with all the content that you need alright guys if there are no questions I think we can leave


My name is Lee and this is my wife Gabriella and we are the Russi's We've been married since March 18th of the year 2000, but that's 16 years already We have two boys our eldest is Judah youngest is Ezra and The Lord saved us and about eight years ago not just a little bit more and We've been humbly serving here locally in Cornerstone Baptist Church for the past five years and I'm excited to do so. Well, we came to that conclusion In a kind of a practical manner The people that come to mind in scriptures are people like Priscilla and Aquila and Lydia who found themselves in a specific area and perhaps found themselves with the opportunity to serve one in Disciple and Apollos the other one in opening her church or her house to have The brothers and sisters come in and have service there well practically speaking there is a pastor in our church pastor Mark Mudge who has been called to plant the church in Guatemala City and Both my wife and I my wife being from Honduras and me being a Hispanic descent Both of us speak Spanish. We want to serve we Have the means to do so and the and the desire to do so so The really the question is why not, right? So hope because in our church there is no pastor Planting a church in Honduras. There is no pastor planting a church in Bolivia or Argentina Or in a a nice island country, you know There is a path there happens to be a pastor in our church that is planting a church in Guatemala City and Like we said before Because of that opportunity because the Lord works Providentially he is sovereign and was providentially We feel that that is a place that we should go to What's been the most impactful or what's marked me the most about Guatemala City is that there are so many churches and Yet, there are very few churches and what I mean by that is that The prosperity gospel The false gospel of prosperity gospel and many other Schools of thought such as perhaps Getting into heaven by our your own works, even though they may not say it that way But in speaking to people in Guatemala City The majority of the people there even being religious going to evangelical churches The majority of them feel that they're right with the Lord because of their own works because they've been a good person and We know that through the gospel No one No one gets into heaven by their good works It's all by the mighty work of Jesus Christ on the cross and our faith and that and trust in that work and Repentance of our sins And we can be right with the Lord so we want to bring that message to Guatemala City Helping our pastor Establish a biblical church there where He can be and we can be faithful in preaching the word of God To the city of Guatemala the goal really is For me to find work in Guatemala City. So if anyone wants to contribute Monetarily I would want them to do so to our pastor because I Hope to find work down there But they could help with prayer obviously that I'd be able to do so If you want to find out more information on the church plan you could go to missions GUA.org And find out more information by the church plan and how you could donate Both to the Mudge Mudge's family or to our family for desire to do so


Okay, I believe we are now live, but it takes a few more seconds for all the settings to filter through. That closes and then yes. So now we'll wait for a moment. We'll get all the attendees who are in the other session over to this session. Wait on that number to go up, the mid 40s. So that looks like everybody is moving sessions now. So I think we can go ahead and get started. All right. Onward and upward, the fourth talk of the day. Thank you all for being there. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce a really exciting talk from the team involved with the Capture ERC project. So this is Isdouhuvila, Lisa Bergeson, Otis Goldin, and Zana Freiberg of Uppsula University. All of Uppsula University? Yes? Okay. And they're talking to us today on understanding masking in scholarly data publishing and reuse exploratory study of practices relating to securities in archaeological data. So please take it away. Thanks so much. Thank you. So I'll stop by saying that we hope to do a presentation of around 30 minutes and follow that up with some Q&A. And before really launching into the presentation of this exploratory study, we would just like to present some context. So the study we're going to talk to you today is part of the work we're doing in the research project Capture, capturing per data for documenting data creation and use for the future of the future. And this is a project funded by the European Research Council. The switch slides. And as you can probably tell from the title of our project, Paradata is like a central concept for us. And as we understand it is data about processes and tools involved in creating research data. So it's akin to other auxiliary data types like process, provenance and context data. And our overarching research objective is to understand more about how to capture and document enough of these processes to make data truly reusable. And we're coming at this from an information science perspective. And we're looking mainly at cultural heritage data and particularly at archaeological data. And this data could be physical artifacts. It could be drawings, samples, measurements, and 3D models. Why the range of different data sets collected in several different ways by different methods? And this diversity really intensifies the need for explicit information about provenance and processes involved in the data collection. In order to facilitate reuse, you can switch slides again. But it's no easy matter, especially when we come to data publishing. There are no set ways of informing about provenance and process of writing about Paradata. Researcher is always faced with what to add, how much to add. And sometimes adding isn't always better. More information isn't always better. So maybe not add at all or reduce. These are all complexities.  And the resulting adding worth avoiding to add Paradata is a community act. I wish to make the work understood in a correct way. And this could entail wanting to present the data in a way that feels perfect, that will ensure that it's not misunderstood or misused, or that you will face critique for the way you present the data. And understanding of this act is key, both to understanding the origin stories of Paradata and a work towards better support in Paradata creation and dissemination for the benefit of data usability. And it is in this context, the exploratory study we'll talk to you about today fits into our project. And with that, I hope you have sufficient background in the context, and I will leave the next slide to Michael. Thank you, Summer. So the purpose of this analysis of this talk that we're offering today is to provide some insight into how researchers deal with data-related uncertainties in data publishing practices. And this purpose is met by an analysis of what provenance and process information researchers think about should be presented with research data, what they identify as difficult in producing data provenance and process descriptions, and the strategies they use to work around these difficulties. And I think that the kind of connection between the conference theme and our talk here emerges quite clearly. One of the products of science that have been increasingly digital is research data. And there are presently many drivers that push STEM and SSH scholars to publish the research data that they collect in repositories that are not only for a kind of local project group use, but actually enable kind of widespread, large-scale access and reuse of the data that they have collected. And research data publishing is an aspect of the digitization of science and its products that is becoming more and more kind of ubiquitous and more and more impactful, we would argue. But that also is kind of to some extent understudied and under explored. And because every data set has kind of some degree of epistemological uncertainty, getting a better understanding of how researchers think and act when dealing with data uncertainty in the data that they are publishing in digital repositories is kind of a key step towards realizing the offerings of research data publishing to a larger degree. In this talk, I mean, there are many potential aspects we can delve into and this topic that we outlined so far. But in this talk, our particular focus is set on exploring how the twin concepts of masking and unmasking can be used to understand research strategies reducing or increasing the amount of supplementary information that they add to research data. And what is masking and unmasking in the context of scholarly data publishing them? That's a good question. Well, I guess generally put, masking can refer to such things as lessening the degree of messiness, certainty, and guesswork in the data to decreasing the granularity of detail in the data and to black box descriptions of methods and use of methods. And unmasking would be the opposite thing that is to say adding a lot of process and provenance data to a data set too and that can explain all the details of how data was put into being basically. And masking and unmasking of data can be done in many ways for many reasons with a varying degree of deliberateness. But they signify at its core some kind of territorial action that for some reason hides or obscures or that does not approximate the complexity of published data or when it comes to unmasking does the opposite. That is to say highlight the complexity of the published data. So we have, of course, not invented these concepts. They came from psychology originally, I think. But let's delve into two brief examples of how masking and unmasking have been explored in the literature. So here we've got a quote from Turko's book, Evocative Objects, Things We Think With. And Turko uses this metaphor of the front room and back room knowledge to explain the nature of scholarly knowledge production. What is claimed here in this quote is that the back room is pretty messy, a chaotic space. While the front room knowledge and front room knowledge here would be things that we put in papers and books and chapters and publish. Or tidy. But the argument here is that front room knowledge is constructed and that we make a clean story to mask our anxieties about the chaotic state of the literature. Another example here that is kind of less closest to the archaeological data that we are exploring is taken from this paper by Ulla. And they talk about data sets that are old and that many researchers have been using and adding to under kind of a long period of time. So masking here would be, for example, to quote this, subsequent reprojection of coordinates that were initially reported as surrounded by values would mask the fact that they were rounded originally. Yeah, so I give the mic to Lisa. We'll talk a bit about our research design. Yes, thank you so much. We are currently conducting this interview study. And our goal is to include 30 archaeologists covering as many subspecialties as possible. Everything from GIS to music archaeology. The types of expertise present in this subset that we are analyzing for this pilot is classical Mediterranean archaeology, archaeological remote sensing, landscape archaeology, and archaeological data integration. And these are the self-reported expertise of the interviewees. So you see that we are already quite a range. And these are all researchers that in some capacity work to produce, integrate, make available, or use research data as a part of their research work. And they can also have other appointments, such as project manager of database projects or teaching database construction or such other roles. We have analyzed these interviews in vivo and using a ground-up strategy or method to identify what these interviewees experience as challenges in working with data and how they deal with these challenges. And so we're still in the process of grouping and naming our categories, so we're looking forward to have your questions and your input on this. Analysis that we're presenting here. Next slide, please. Yes. So what do we mean by data complexities in this case? Well, we already see quite a variety of different data complexities that researchers deal with. Some of these relate to data content. For example, if you wish to integrate data generated over multiple decades, there might be that the data from the mid-1950s, you have the data, but you don't have any explicit methods description, so you don't really know what the observations represent. But you still want to use it to integrate it to get a full or a large data set to analyze. It can also be the state of data that's complex or uncertain in some way. It can be that you know that there are, in fact, a certain number of investigations undertaken in a certain region, but you can only find, when you search, you can only find that a selection of these has been reported. So you understand there's a backlog somewhere, but you don't know where it is and how to locate it. It can also be such things that we heard in the earlier talk today, questions about terminological uncertainties, that there are terms that are perhaps broad descriptive terms, and you don't really know why they use such broad terms. Is it because there was a lack of time when they conducted the investigation? Was there not enough evidence to pinpoint more narrow find type or time period, et cetera? So in the original title of this talk, we use the term data obscurity, and then along the process we have also used the term data uncertainties, we have arrived that using complexities is a better way of describing all these different kinds of challenges that puts the researcher in a situation where we have to pick a strategy how to deal with it. And just to give one example of such strategy that is sort of makes me smile at least, is one of our interviewees, this person had a strategy that she said anyone actually working with research data knows that it's imperfect and incomplete. And this is sort of a strategy to like, this is how I think about research data and I assume everybody else thinks about research data in this way as well. So it's sort of a generalizing acceptance of complexity. But as we will see now that we proceed to the next slide, we have identified several different strategies for dealing with data complexities in our interview material. And naturally, as we are information science researchers, we look at information and we look at do these strategies that researchers employ result in added information or do they not result in any added information? Like in the background, we're thinking about data descriptions and metadata. That's what we are sort of oriented towards. So when we look at the strategies that result in added information, we see for one part, traditional strategies like increasing metadata, adding textual scope notes of metadata categories, or adding literature references in metadata, for example, like expanding the traditional metadata scheme, also turning to set formats such as data journals to explain more about the methodology. Then we also see some more free form ways of dealing with data complexities, like signposting processuality or incompleteness, for example, on a project main page of a database. So the idea then is that the database user will first go to the project main page before they access the database and they will read on the main page, what's the status of this database and then we'll hopefully remember that when they start looking into the database and extracting information or extracting data for their further use. It can also be such things as trying to explicate and verbalize passive provenance and process knowledge in different forms and formats and also versioning, creating libraries of versions of a data set, for example, in GitHub or other repositories. On next slide, we have an example of one of these free form strategies for explicating a process. So this is an archaeologist working out with multivariate spectral data to identify components in rock material. So he's explaining to me that, well, there's a file on the pre-processing and I portion each step for what I do and I have a more general description of what I do and then I also save the scripts that I'm running and I'm combining these together into one narrative. So what he basically is doing is he's telling about what he is doing and he's telling about what he is telling his machine or his equipment to do and then he's combining this into one narrative that he hopes will inform an eventual data user. So next slide, please. Then we have, on the other hand, different strategies for dealing with data complexities that does actually not add any information and one such strategy was, as I mentioned earlier, just accepting complexity. Another is relying on someone else's knowledge, on a data scientist's knowledge or on re-user expertise. So thinking or arguing like, I don't need to explain all this because I know that whoever uses this data will understand. There are also different practical strategies like changing or limiting focus to a less complex data source, postponing data description tasks or reducing or avoiding specificity in data descriptions and also we see that there is sometimes a hesitance to present data and also tendency sometimes to set unattainable goals for data quality thresholds for publishing. So I will publish this, but not until I have quality checked it for it will be 100% quality checked. That's what I'm going for. So next slide. So this is one illustration of what a strategy not adding information can look like. So it's a database where they have worked meticulously to create one of these 100% perfect databases. But then they have overlooked referencing to where they got the numbers from. Did they get it from lab reports or did they get it from second hand sources, second level sources like reports? So they have overlooked a certain type of specificity. Next slide. So the strategies that does not provide any information could be seen as we mentioned earlier. It could be just interpreted as sloppy research practice and not being explicit enough about what you're doing. But when we interpret all these strategies as communicative acts and put them into this unmasking grid, we see that, well, there are actually strategies that doesn't add any information to the research data that can be understood as communicative acts in the sense that they are reducing complexity to communicate the data in a more effective way. We also note that what counts as masking or unmasking in a certain situation would probably, we would probably need to interpret it in its context because such an act as explaining a particular process or method in a data journal, for example, if it's done the first time as an innovative act and a revolutionary sort of first time description, it can be counted or interpreted as unmasking while if it's done with copy-paste method, this is always how this method is described. We're doing this over and over again as a disciplinary standard. It's likely to be more of a masking strategy. Next slide. What we also see when we interpret these strategies in the unmasking typology grid, we see that certain strategies of data avoidance fall outside of this grid and are actually strategies that steer away from communicating about data at all. So examples of this is like when you're changing or limiting your focus to a less complex data source instead of diving into and verbalizing what's complex about this data source that you were looking at in the first hand. This is a really interesting case, we think, the instances of data avoidance. And we'll pick up on that later on. Ulle. Thank you, Lisa. Excellent stuff. Yeah, so just a brief reflection then on our approach. I'm trying to say something about how people deal with the data uncertainties in the context that they're publishing and reuse using this masking and masking because to me, we found that this dichotomy is pretty useful for interpreting a number of strategies for dealing with data complexities. And these result both in, of course, added information and then those not adding any information. One limitation of this approach, as Lisa said, is that this dichotomy doesn't actually cover these strategies of data avoidance. And it's likely important to going forward and trying to understand how we further can understand these strategies. So basically, the analysis shows that data avoidance is something that is likely worthwhile to pursue for the studies. Important questions to ask can likely be something along the lines of what happens when data is avoided in publishing or reuse scenarios. What are the consequences of avoiding data in this context and what are the reasons underpinning its occurrence and motivating people to avoid data in this sense? Yeah, exactly. I think I move ahead a bit now for the reference to the time. So there are, of course, many interesting things to pick out and put the spotlight down when it comes to this presentation here, or at least what we think. So I'm going to try to delve into a few of them. That seems most interesting in this particular arrangement here. So one thing we could talk a bit about is the social productivity of masking and unmasking in the context of science. Turko, the person that we referred to previously in this presentation, writes that all published or finished knowledge products are basically, to some degree, clean, and that its certainties are constructed, or at least that its uncertainties are, to some degree, hidden. And I think that this leads us to think about what existing masking and to what extent that masking and unmasking strategies are integral parts of commonplace ways of doing science, creating data, analyzing it, and publishing it. For example, can the lessening of complexity of a data set that would be masking, can it be considered to be some kind of a requirement for any type of epistemological work where results are obtained and reported? And something that would be interesting to think a bit about also is to what degree that masking is actually a detriment and a key component of effecting publication and reuse strategies of research data. And it would be interesting to think a bit about what the threshold is, that the term is one kind of productive uses of masking instead becomes illicit once, and that is to say that you kind of strive to hide the limitations or weaknesses of a data set. And something that we have arrived here also is that when kind of thinking a bit about masking and unmasking going forward, it would be potentially kind of useful interpretive access to use is to think about it as an area that is affected by kind of people's illicit purposes, that is to say kind of hiding uncertainties or weaknesses in a data set, productive purposes and uses of masking, and this would be kind of rendering complexities workable and communicable and reporting on the data set. And these two kind of points would then intersect with technical or kind of infrastructural requirements of data publishing, and this would be, for instance, certain data repositories that use preset metadata schemas that can actually be adapted to the specificities of the data set that is being published. Another thing about that is important to consider here is, of course, disciplinary and domain perspectives because science is done in very different ways in different disciplines, and there are surely kind of different ways of dealing with uncertainty by masking or unmasking in different disciplines kind of across the SSH and spectrums. Moving ahead to the conclusions here, we would like to say that it might be kind of somewhat straightforward at least to identify how researchers deal with data-related uncertainties, but it's much more difficult to figure out the role of such activities in kind of the larger realm of digital science. And masking is done with many in underpinning motivations, and I'm asking as well, and it's done by using many different types of kind of approaches and mechanisms. So one question we could ask is kind of to what extent is it feasible to use a single theoretical dichotomy such as masking and unmasking to explain data-related uncertainties. And what we found was that I'm thinking about that is that these concepts, this dichotomy of masking and masking, it's useful to understand data descriptions, how they kind of fulfill different types of communicative intentions and that this dichotomy is kind of potentially useful to explain how data makers and data publishers respond to and interact with regulations, guidelines, and for instance, schemes for data descriptions. And also that it's important to kind of take into account the designing process and method of the schemes and the data sharing systems, how to design these for dealing with data complexities and uncertainties and these strategies of masking and unmasking and unmasking that we know are pretty prevalent in different ways of doing science. And I think I'm going to leave the closing to Sanna. Please go ahead. Yeah, so the next steps for us are within the projects many of course, but for this particular explorative study, we're working towards completely interview study and as both Ulle and Lisa touched upon, delve a bit deeper into strategies for dealing with data complaints that is beyond masking and unmasking, looking at ways and developing analytical tools to analyze such things as data avoidance, for example. And I would also just like to say that additionally, we are conducting a survey on making and using archaeological data. So if anyone in the audience happens to be an archaeologist or no one, we would be very thankful if you would have a look at the survey, maybe complete it or just tell someone about it. We've included a link, but it can also be found on our web page. And with that, we can take the next slide. Where I will extend our combined thank you to everyone in the audience for listening to our talk. And as you have probably noticed, this is exploratory work and we would welcome any input or ideas that you have and are also happy to answer any questions about both this study and our project. So thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much. Questions pouring in. So let me start with one from Stefan Hesbury and who asks, there's an ongoing discussion on using things like Python notebooks for reproducible research. And I wonder to what extent that kind of conversation gets picked up in you guys work and in the leaning in the more digital realm. Well, again, I will stress that this is, we will have a different answer when we have the full data set. But some, like archeology is a discipline where there's quite a lot of researchers who themselves develop programming skills and they are more keen on using those types of technologies for their documentation. But there's also a really strong documentation tradition coming from within the archeology discipline that will not easily give room for new technologies. They will not just hand over the responsibility so to say to new technologies but it has to go together with the established traditions in the discipline. And this also has to do with the fact that archeology is in many countries also quite strictly regulated and bounded by the need to report findings and results to government authorities in different forms. So, yeah, would anyone want to add any other answer? Perhaps just a brief interjection in the kind of realm of archeology which focuses on creating 3D renderings in models of sites and different types of archeological environments. There's been this pretty intense kind of discussion about how to capture the making of these 3D renderings so that people can actually to some degree can reproduce the interpretations and the techniques that were applied to training the final product. So that might be some kind of example that mirrors the one mentioning the question to some extent. Great, the next upvoted question is mine so I'll take the opportunity to self-indulge a little. Have you been able to get an idea of which kinds of publics your various interviewees have in mind when they think about reuse? So I know this is obviously for archeology especially, it's a much more multifaceted question than it probably seems at first to those of us who are less familiar with archeology because this might be a real driver of strategy choice. So what kinds of reuse scenarios are to do the various people have in mind here, do you think? So well, as we mentioned, archeology is a very, very varied discipline. So there are both examples where the reuse imagined is other researchers wanting to do studies on the same region, for example, in the Mediterranean area somewhere, so regional interest. But there may also be, since archeologists integrate their interests with so many other disciplines, there are, for example, archaeologists focusing on volcanic ash data. So they are directing their work towards the geophysical space and discipline and again, different topical publics, so to speak. So there's a real range, or certain materials like ceramics, like the ceramics community is a huge thing.  Very briefly, in the interviews that I've met, please, the only time that the publics that were considered when publishing data were something else than other archeologists within basically the same kind of area of archeology was in the public find scenario. And these are repositories where if you find a sword in a lake, you send it to the public finds office and then they document it and then they are not only geared towards other archeologists, but rather people inhabiting that part of the country in a more general way. That's really interesting, that's cool. OK, next up, question actually, two related questions coming in, a question from Beckett Sterner who asks, so do your interviewees talk about the value of masking and unmasking in connection with data or modeling standards? So he says here, he's thinking about Miliran's work on making private troubles into public issues as part of the ecological metadata language. So how do data or modeling standards interact here? You'd like to start or let? Yeah, I can start, I think this is a very good question and it's very complex, and I think the people that we talk to also consider this to be very complex as well. So I would say that my impression is that standards are understood to be something that is very, very useful in a general sense, but perhaps less useful when it comes to the particular data set that people are actually talking about. And there is definitely this kind of discrepancy between what people are willing to do in terms of curing, curating their data set to kind of fit the standard and to what it's kind of actually done. And this kind of connects to this example sometimes to kind of the idea of kind of perfect data publishing approach actually comes in the way of actually publishing the data. So that's how we can kind of look at it. Lisa, do you have anything to kind of tie onto that? Well, it's a little difficult with the interaction here and clarifying the question, but really something that I could add is that sometimes archaeologists, sometimes they take help from other people doing sort of the data modeling work. So sometimes it's lack boxed in terms of the division of responsibility between different persons. So the data scientist knows what we did with the data and I know what we know based on the data. So that's also sort of how standards play into how things are done with data in this type of work. So that's actually a nice segue into the last question that I have here from Sarah Davies, who has a super interesting presentation. I wonder if there are parallels with data practices in other disciplines like, for instance, in bioinformatics or bio curation. So have you looked into comparisons with other fields and how do you see that working in your project? Would you like to think that one, Listo? That's the project lead? Yeah, sure. I can obviously do that, yeah. Our focus in this project is on archaeology and that's kind of a sort of an empirical lens to look at data reuse and data documentation practices. And what we're going to do in the future is to do a few excursions to other fields as well. At the same time, we chose or I chose archaeology for the reason that it's a certain kind of an interesting field in a sense that it's so interdisciplinary. So we can kind of get part of those other fields as well. We're working with people who are interacting with science data and very kind of textual humanities data and so on. But kind of comparing to what we know about other fields. So yes, there are definitely many similarities, although there are also many differences and there may be the kind of the differences. What is key to many of them is precisely the kind of the interdisciplinarity of the archaeological research enterprise in a sense that with a certain kind of data you are a part of a specific community, but then as a part of kind of when you are using the data in an archaeological context, so then you have to take into account other archaeological communities. So it's sort of a kind of a balancing act between different communities. And that's quite apparently something that pertains to other fields as well. But there are similarities and kind of people deal with data in similar ways. But then at the same time, there are differences depending on the context and situation. Fantastic. Great. That's all our questions and we're full on time, so thank you.