winterbadger | (no subject)

Considering I'm taking a class on anaytical methods right now, I really enjoyed this (http://vowe.net/archives/005632.html) very much. One of the many things I love about Nora is that she shares my distaste for convoluted analyical methods (or methodologies, as their promoters always insist on referring to them) that seek to somehow endow qualitative judgments with "more legitimacy" by turning them into quantitative data and then manipulating it extensively to notionally show that it "proves" something or has some characteristic of consistency or correlates to some other quantified data. All of which totally obscures the orignal analytical judgment and any issues about its validity or grounding in reality.