I used to imagine putting together a presentation where a person and a computer program competed to see which could perform better at qualitative coding. There were a lot of problems with this including the need to define "perform better." But this idea was motivated in part by learning about some of the auto coding functions. I have never used any of these functions in a qualitative software program but assume they are based on some version of a "keyword in context" code and search process (that can be done with basic programs like AntConc. My presentation was also motivated by an old folk tale and/or folk song John Henry about a man who competed against a machine. The man won, sort of, although he also passed away from the exertion, in most versions of this story. Wikipedia (follow my link) suggests instead he died from dust inhalation, which sadly, seems more realistic although is less dramatic.
The thing that made me think about all of this this was the KFC promotion that I read about in the news last week. The link I used actually says "KFC blames its bot" for an inappropriate product promotion in conjunction with Kristallnacht - an anniversary having to do with Holocaust related events. Clearly, I thought, when I saw the first report, KFC has relied on some type of algorithm to search out holidays throughout the countries where they have locations, so social media posts can be generated automatically. As an aside, this makes me consider how impressive it probably was for the first people who received customized form letters with their name(s) and other details, sometime around the early days of word processers in the 1980s. My parents certainly got letters like this: "Dear Robert and Bonnie: Have you wondered how to improve the quality of your lawn where you live at 3678 Bryan Road, Obetz, Ohio...." (these are all approximations of real names and places.) I assume the fonts for the placeholder text were all a little bit off. I use a lot of mail merge myself for data management (moving things from Excel to Word) and it is pretty much seamless these days, as long as you are careful in where you put the placeholders. This whole KFC things last week also reminded of a prompt I had in my Amazon account, in the early 2000s.
0 Comments
|
AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
Categories
|