Raphael Susewind

The letter in today's picture almost wrecked my presentation in Oxford last week - and reminded me how easy it is to get quantitative papers spectacularly wrong. What happened? While re-writing my talk two weeks ago (basically extending earlier work from Lucknow to the whole of Uttar Pradesh), I noticed some odd phenomena in my dataset. And freaked out. Oxford is not just any place to be invited to speak at. I had to know quite exactly what had gone wrong. After some fairly tense hours, I discovered it: the "Š", a letter which apparently crept into some electoral rolls of Eastern UP (and no, these are not written in latin script, but in devanagari). I have no idea why they were there in the first place, and there seemed to be no system - but as soon as my name-matching algorithm stumbled across them, it crashed. And left my dataset corrupted. Luckily, I was able to solve the problem (the final dataset arrived literally five minutes before my presentation), and could ditch the "I am truly sorry but my talk just dissolved in a data nightmare" embarassment. Close call!

Similar to earlier data trouble, I thus realized again how easy it is to spectacularly fail in quantitative research. You get one calculation wrong, a data row slips elsewhere - and your analysis is blown. It's much harder to fail equally grand in qualitative research. This is no argument in the quantitative-qualitative debate (which I find silly most of the time anyway). But if you deal with numbers as part of your research: be careful. Very careful. There might be a lurking "Š" around, waiting to destroy your fancy arguments at the most inconvenient hour...

The following book review will first appear in ASIEN / The German Journal on Contemporary Asia (see entry in my publication list) and is reprinted here with permission. The book itself is here.

P. Ghassem-Fachandi: Pogrom in Gujarat. Hindu nationalim and anti-Muslim violence in India

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 335 S., EUR 25,99

Im Frühjahr 2002 wurde die Heimat Mahatma Gandhis, der indische Bundesstaat Gujarat, Schauplatz der schlimmsten anti-muslimischen Ausschreitungen im Land seit den 1970er Jahren; mit staatlicher Duldung und teils Unterstützung wurden über 2000 Menschen ermordet. In den vergangenen Monaten, zehn Jahre später, fielen auf Drängen des Supreme Courts und gegen großen Widerstand in Gujarat selbst erste Urteile gegen die Täter – zuletzt spektakulär gegen eine ehemalige Ministerin im Kabinett von Narendra Modi (BJP), die wegen Verschwörung zu Mord und anderen Delikten zu lebenslanger Haft verurteilt wurde.

Finally, I received my author copies, an actual book, with my text in it and my name on top. Happiness! But: a book is only good when it is being read, and to find readers (as well as catalysts such as reviewers), one needs to engage in some marketing. Which can feel a bit awkward - academe rests on and yet despises selling oneself and one's intellectual produce. So I used the adrenalin and joy of the moment to write this series. And thought about what else to do.

After writing a book, deciding to publish it, submitting a proposal, getting accepted, and finalizing the manuscript, I though I was done with my first book. My publisher disagreed: afte rwriting, editing, submitting, rewriting, and resubmitting followed: editing, copyediting, proofreading, indexing, marketing. It would have been easy to drown in these tasks, particularly as a perfectionist. So what to do?

Congratulations! After weeks of waiting (two for this post, but probably many more for the readers' comments on your manuscript) a press offered to publish your book. You must be delighted. I for sure was.

And then I was frightened. Once the offer from SAGE was in, it dawned upon me that I would now increasingly loose control. Until now, it was only me who read the text, some supervisors, some friends, the publisher, and his external reviewers. But whatever they read was a draft. So far, I managed to deceive myself into believing that all could still change. This time was over now. Now was time to let go - and quickly so...