This week in ENVS 220, we dove into statistical analysis with a program called SSPS, building upon our spreadsheet analysis and our globla data from the Lewis & Clark Overseas countries. My natural disposition is not to statistics or quantitative analysis. I am also majoring in English and I like qualitative analysis. I like descriptions, essays, persuasion, rhetoric, stories. Convince me with your words, not your numbers. Or so I thought as my mind resisted the statistical quantitative computer program of our Monday lab.
However, as I ruminated on the lab and wrote the write-up, I remembered why I wanted to take this class in the first place. Statistics are important. Statistics make sense. Statistics are believable. Stats is a tool for me to use to make meaning out of observations where poetry falls short. You can’t guarantee correlation or prove something is significant with a poem or an essay. You can try and you might convince someone with superior prose and grasp of language and some really solid concrete evidence. But that concrete evidence might pave the way for you if it consists of numbers. Moral of the story: stats are powerful tools to create meaning. Just like writing poems or essays or reading novels critically, stats and numbers take practice and patience, and after meditating on SSPS, I feel comfortable, even accomplished with how much I learned.
Although stats in lab thrust me out of my comfort zone, the discussion of my area of interest i.e. the overlap of English and Environmental Studies as disciplines as Lewis & Clark College has gotten me beyond stoked. I thought about what I love in English and what I loved my ENVS 160 Project on the Grand Coulee Dam and what I love about where I’m from and the places I’ve seen and the legacy of water I inherited from my mother’s environmentalism. Water in the West. The Colorado River. The Columbia River. Redfish Lake, Idaho. And the stories. Lewis & Clark on the Salmon River. Ernest Hemingway in Idaho. Whitman. Books & Brooks. I’m so excited to develop this more and read incredible iconic literature that creates this landscape of the West.