All Tomorrow's Cultures

I did this for the American Anthropological Association last month. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9VDFYemg8

Small Big Data? Of the many hyperbolic predictions in bestselling books devoted to big data, none is more astounding than  Mayer-Schönberger’s and Cukier’s  claims that big data will eliminate the need for sampling (why sample when you’ve got all the data?). But here’s the thing. We don’t have all of the data. Let’s look at Twitter. First, people who tweet are not a representative sample of the population. Second, like most commercial platforms, Twitter has moved towards more proprietary policies on the data they have mined from us. Most of us can only access up to 1% of relevant tweets for a given query. That can still be a lot of tweets, and that data is, for the moment, free.  But is that big data?  In other words, we’ve got sampling bias. If you can detect it, though, you can correct for it— Morstatter et al  recommend bootstrapping the data in order to correct for the biased sample. But it may not be so easy with some of the work we do. For example, t...

Moving Across Scale and Platform in Seoul Walker, Rider, Smartphone Talker In Ryu Shin’s 2014  Seoul Arcade Project,  the author, in the persona of the “walker” (구보), explores Seoul through Benjamin’s “Arcades Project,” focusing on the phantasmagoria of Korean capitalism and spectacle over the course of a day’s travel from Gangnam to Gangbuk and back again.  That said, there are some significant differences between Ryu’s project and Benjamin’s, notably in the presence of two technologies altogether absent from Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece: the smart phone and the subway. More than just communication and travel, Ryu’s subway and smartphone combination fuels his narrator’s journey across multiple forms of transit to Seoul’s diverse spaces.  Here, the project is a renewed call for analyses of urban mobility systems, but not only that—it’s a call to look into the ways urban practice involves this assemblage of movement, technology and communication.  Th...

Here's my 2009 review essay for Science Fiction Studies on some interesting secondary scholarship on Ursula K. Le Guin.  

Congrats to Samuel Gerald Collins for winning the 2014 Battisti Award for best article in 'Utopian Studies' (2013, 24:1)! #susmtl14 — SUS (@utopianstudies) October 25, 2014 Goes to an article I published in Utopian Studies: Train to Pyongyang: Imagination, Utopia, and Korean Unification Samuel Gerald Collins From:  Utopian Studies Volume 24, Number 1, 2013 pp. 119-143 | 10.1353/utp.2013.0013 Abstract Abstract: This essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent “master symbol” with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of unification in textbooks for the tensions and co...

We discuss our new book, and the potentials for networked anthropology in general.   Here, by the way, is the wonderful cover (with a design inspired by Kelly Brady).  

The Spatial Practice of Online Social Networks What are the relationships between the city and the social media used in the city?  I assume that social media have had an impact on the ways we relate to the city.  This, after all, was one the goals in utilizing Twitter in #Occupy protests—to organize people in space.  During those protests, social media helped evoke alternatives to hegemonic spaces structured by capital flows.   On the other hand, I also assume that social media is shaped by historic and contemporary urban practice—by flanerie, by different systems of mobility, by contemporaneous technologies such as books, newspapers, earphones, and by the history of media in the city. But how do we understand this give and take?  Many of the analyses of Twitter in the city have been variations on Big Data: that is, work has tended to answer questions about large-scale movements of ideas and discourse.  In the process, many of the small questions...

My colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have just finished our final iteration of a 4-year collaborative project,  Anthropology By the Wire .   From the outset, we sought to produce YouTube Video from this year’s Anthropology By the Wire, “Clean and Green Superheroes”. Photo courtesy Samuel Collins counter-narratives to David Simon’s “The Wire,” alternative representations that contest urban imaginaries of Baltimore premised on crime and drugs.  Through collaborative productions shared through social media, we have tried to challenge the directionality of these representational regimes by making local media disseminated on YouTube, Tumblr and Flickr. But what we have realized is that the urban imaginary (as  LiPuma and Koelbe describe it), is constituted not only by representations of urban circulation, but the imagination of the circulation of those representations of circulation (and it may be circulations all the way down).  In other words, it ...

Over the past 2 years, Big Data has worked its way into public consciousness, courtesy of widespread news exposure and a  series of popular books  by Big Data scientists with hyperbolic evocations of the analytic power of their methods.  There seems to be nothing that Big Data cannot do: predict health and wellness, illuminate culture change, stop poverty, foil terrorists.  And, of course, tighten the noose of Foucauldian surveillance from governments and corporations.  But what all of these accounts promise (or threaten) is a transparent window onto truth: our social lives, behaviors, hopes and dreams all rendered transparent through the analysis of vast datasets. Visualization of all editing activity by user. Image courtesy Fernanda B. Viégas and wikicommons Many qualitative researchers—including anthropologists—have sounded an alarm over this drive to datafictaion, where, as  Chris Anderson has famously concluded, “numbers speak for themselves.”...

A couple of decades ago, social network analysis was a fairly recondite branch of sociology and anthropology applying mathematical matrices to social relationships.  And then there was Facebook.  With the widespread adoption of social networking sites (SNS), several things happened.  First, these social networks utilized the same graph theory and matrices that social network analysis had applied to social relations.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking services are analyzing your social network data constantly, mining your information for friend recommendations (and to better sell you to advertisers).  Second, courtesy of the enormous popularity of SNS, we now initiate and maintain social relations based on those same matrices.  In other words, from an abstract representation of social relations, social network theory becomes generative of actual social relations; we relate to each other according to matrix logics of tie ...