Publications, recordings and other outputs

An overview of what I have written and published (as sociologist) or recorded and released (as musician). Simply, all public "outputs" of my work. When technically feasible and legally possible, I will add full texts and, in respective parts of the musical section of this web, musical samples in mp3.
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Zátory (2011): Zátory. CD. Polí5 [EPP 027-2]

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Zátory, the least known legend of music rooted deeply in 1970's, but performed in the midst of the first decade of the millennium. The band was headed by Vladimír Línek, the veteran of alternative music, who has, among others, collaborated with Mikoláš Chadima. This is a post-mortem compilation of home-recorded songs.

KONOPÁSEK, Z. / PALEČEK (2011): The principle of symmetry from the respondents’ perspective: Possessions, apparitions and mental illnesses in research interviews with clerics. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, , 12 (1): Art. 12, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101129

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We study how experiences such as hearing the voice of the Lord or having a vision of Virgin Mary are dealt with in psychiatry and catholic pastoral practice. How the status of these phenomena is negotiated by the participants? Under what conditions they become an instance of legitimate religious experience or, alternatively, symptoms of mental illness? We approach the study of these issues “symmetrically” - we do not prefer a priori medical or spiritual explanations. Some time ago, we demonstrated and explained such an approach (which is common, e.g., in contemporary sociology of science), and its relevance for our research, in an analytic paper on the movie “The exorcism of Emily Rose” (2005). The paper discusses a highly ambiguous relationship, pictured in the film, between medical and spiritual interpretation of the story of a young girl who was considered possessed by demons and who died after unsuccessful exorcism (Konopásek & Paleček 2006). Now, the question is: can such a symmetrical approach be of any relevance also for people we are studying? In an attempt to give an answer, we have interviewed four catholic priests on this issue. The priests had been asked to watch the movie on Emily Rose and read our paper on it in preparation for the interview. Based on these discussions (and also on our current research in general), we would like to shed some light on whether and in what ways our specific epistemic perspective coheres with the views and positions of our respondents; and also, how this reflexive research experiment contributed to our own understanding of the role of the symmetry principle in our current research project.

KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2010): Co znamená "sociální konstrukce"? [What is the meaning of "social construction"?]. Zdenek Konopasek's blog, 3. 11. 2010. Available at http://zdenek.konopasek.net/index.php?m=151&i=1490&b=151

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KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2010): V čem spočívá pravda náboženské skutečnosti? Sociologický pohled na mariánská zjevení a démonické posedlosti [Where does the religious truth comes from? A sociological view on Marian apparitions and demonic possessions]. Biograf (52-53): 89-101

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In this paper I summarize the background and results of our three-year research project "Religious realities in the making: Apparitions and possessions as practical and collective accomplishments" (GAČR 403/08/1758). All our analyses emphasise the polymorphic nature and diversity of what we call religious faith. Inspired by theoretical-methodological approaches from contemporary science studies we try to pursue a kind of non-reductionist sociology of religion. As subjects of study we have chosen weird, rather rare and in many respects controversial situations (apparitions and possessions) that allow as to grasp "in action" and cleavage even the long and perfectly sediment reality of religion.

SLANINA, F. / KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2010): Eigenvector localization as a tool to study small communities in online social networks. Advances in Complex Systems, 13 (6): 699–723

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We present and discuss a mathematical procedure for identification of small "communities" or segments within large bipartite networks. The procedure is based on spectral analysis of the matrix encoding network structure. The principal tool here is localization of eigenvectors of the matrix, by means of which the relevant network segments become visible. We demonstrated our approach by analyzing the data related to product reviewing on Amazon.com. We found several segments, a kind of hybrid communities of densely interlinked reviewers and products, which we were able to meaningfully interpret in terms of the type and thematic categorization of reviewed items. The method provides a complementary approach to other ways of community detection, typically aiming at identification of large network modules.

KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2010): Věda, každodenní skutečnost a "přirozený svět" [Science, everyday life and the concept of life-world]. In: B. Velický, K. Trlifajová & P. Kouba, eds.: Spor o přirozený svět [A controversy over the life-world]. Praha: Filosofia. Pp. 173-196

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In this paper I discuss the concept of life-world from two specific sociological perspectives: from the perspective of contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and from the viewpoint of classical social constructivism. It is explained, first, why STS have only a weak links to and do not develop the Husserlian critique of science (from the perspective of life-world). Second, I try to elucidate why the phenomenologically inspired idea of social construction of reality is, in fact, transcending and abandoning the original notion of the life-world. It is argued that the concept of life-world does not refer to a livable reality, but rather to a highly abstract idea that is not of much help when answering the basic questions of the two sociological fields, i.e., what is the specific nature of scientific work and how scientific facts are produced; and how everyday reality is constructed.

KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2009): Co by nás prý na vědě nemělo šokovat...? [What should not shock us about science?]. Zdenek Konopasek's blog, 21. 11. 2009. Available at http://zdenek.konopasek.net/index.php?m=151&i=1215&b=151

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V/A (2009): For Semafor. CD. Klíče [key01]

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Petr Nikl, Jaroslav Dušek or Tata Bojs took the challenge to record coverversions of unageing songs from the work of Prague's theatre Semafor. The result is a CD entitled "For Semafor", which brings the hits by Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr into the 21st century. The album has been released to celebrate 50th anniversary of this legendary theatrical scene. Besides cold electronic, the album offers garrage rock sound as well as accoustic blues, genuine hits as well as less known songs." (Source: CT24.cz) (My favourite coverversions from this CD are by Dva, OTK, Jan Štolba Band)

KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2009): Zapomeňte na pouhé transkripty: Atlas.ti, šestá verze [Forget the work with transcripts only: Atlas.ti, the sixth version]. Biograf, (48): 95-113

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A new version of Atlas.ti, the superior programme for computer assisted qualitative analysis, was released at the very end of February 2009. In this extensive review I discuss mainly two key innovation brought by this sixth version: (1) the support of PDF files; and (2) the possibility to associate and synchronize audio or video recordings with respective textual transcripts. The former of these innovations provides the opportunity to directly use vast amounts of scholarly sources available in PDF for analytical purposes in Atlas.ti. The support of PDF also allows practically any kind of document to be used within Atlas.ti, since anything that can be printed from our computers can be easily converted into PDF, with all the graphics and formatting, by means of so called virtual PDF printers. The latter innovation is important because it offers an opportunity to reshape our habits related to transcritions of recorded data. In fact, now we can produce transcripts that speak. This feature of the new version is related to the possibility of making transcriptions directly from within the programme.

KONOPÁSEK, Z. (2008): Making thinking visible with Atlas.ti: Computer assisted qualitative analysis as textual practices. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9 (2): 62 paragraphs, art. 12. Available at http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0802124

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How is a new quality of reading, which we call "sociological understanding", created during the process of qualitative analysis? A methodological (conventional) answer to this question usually speaks of mental processes and conceptual work. This paper suggests a different view—sociological rather than methodological; or more precisely a view inspired by a contemporary sociology of science. It describes qualitative analysis as a set of material practices. Taking grounded theory methodology and the work with the computer programme Atlas.ti as an example, it is argued that thinking is inseparable from doing even in this domain. It is argued that by adopting the suggested perspective we might be better able to speak of otherwise hardly graspable processes of qualitative analysis in more accountable and instructable ways. Further, software packages would be better understood not only as "mere tools" for coding and retrieving, but also as complex virtual environments for embodied and practice-based knowledge making. Finally, grounded theory methodology might appear in a somewhat different light: when described not in terms of methodological or theoretical concepts but rather in terms of what we practically do with the analysed data, it becomes perfectly compatible with the radical constructivist, textualist, or even post-structuralist paradigms of interpretation (from which it has allegedly departed by a long way). (Reprinted from Historical Social Research 2007)

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