All Tomorrow's Cultures

The American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting is over, and, with it, the brief spurt of Twitter traffic that marks the event.  Here's a graph of Twitter traffic over the course of the week, created on NodeXL through a Twitter search for the hashtag #amanth2016: And some statistics on the graph: Vertices: 1746     Unique Edges: 4090 Edges With Duplicates: 6825 Total Edges: 10915 Here are the 50 most popular twitter accounts by betweenness centrality: americananthro culanth biellacoleman omanreagan thevelvetdays cmcgranahan aba_aaa berghahnanthro ericalwilliams7 allergyphd michelleakline amreese07 jasonantrosio fatimatassadiq anthroboycott peepsforum anthrofuentes teachingculture hilaryagro aaa_cfhr dukepress afeministanthro anandspandian anthrocharya aunpalmquist shahnafisa jahkarta nolan_kline elena_sesma savageminds stanfordpress girlhoodstudies transfo...

As I've done over the past 3 years, I ran Twitter searches for the American Anthropological Association Annual meeting this evening.  Unlike previous years, though, the #AAA2016 hashtag seems to be popular with a number of different groups, effectively obfuscating the anthropological voice behind other causes.  My colleague Matthew Durington (@mdurington) noticed that and tweeted yesterday: But, really, much of the damage had been done.  Here's a graph of my search results for #AAA2016: This dense graph (over 10000 edges) is made up of tweets from several events, but it's dominated by one, the "Asian Artists Awards" held in Seoul.  Here's the top tweet by betweenness centrality: 1. "คนอะไรเก่งตั้งแต่เด็ก และเก่งขึ้นเรื่อยๆ แถมสวยน่ารักขึ้นทุกปี #kimyoojung #AAA2016 https://t.co/DZVCDlnsY5" Indeed, all of the connected components are tweets from the Asian Artist Awards, with the twitterverse dominated by Thai fans.  The Ame...

Multimodality describes an anthropology across multiple media platforms--an anthropology that traverses film, photograph, theater, design, podcast, app and game (to name a few) as well as conventional modes of print representation.  But multimodality is a restless, protean concept, one that has already exploded its initial demarcation (modes of dissemination) into a spectrum of engagements.  Multimodality is about the platforms we use as we produce our work (social media, blogs, websites), and the social media that ripples out from it as people share, comment, re-mix and appropriate.  Finally, multimodality is the acknowledgement that people are engaged in anthropologies of their own lives, and that these productions (YouTube videos, Instagram photos) are worthwhile of attention as ethnographically intended media in their own rights.  By multimodality, then, we re-cognize anthropology along 2 complementary axes--a horizontal one that links together phases of eth...