Francien: About a possible Lorentz blog (for which I promised to develop a pitch in due time):
In the Skype call of Aug 2, I mentioned that what struck me about the Fairness Gerrimandering (FG) discussion was the role that individual, personal backgrounds – aside from disciplinary backgrounds – played in the discussion.
However, over the past year or so (and I wrote this in an email to Maya and Seda before), I’ve also been chewing on a more general observation working with different groups of scholars: different types of research may have different types of objectives. I am going a bit back and forth on an adequate categorization, but this is where I am at currently: analytical (what holds to be true within a conceptual framework; this is where I would classify the math and CS work that I come from, and also the FG-paper;), synthetic (generalizing observations into a conceptual framework) and normative (building arguments for what should be the case).
Pointing out that there are such differences (which is something that Maya also vocalized at the workshop) and how they showed within the discussions at our workshop, could also be a theme for a blog post.