#AMANTH2016 WRAP-UP

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
transformanthro
drkillgrove
anthronad
globalsportuva
ruthbehar
kimjunelewis
hacrln
nycnodapl
amethno
salliehananthro
beliso_dejesus
mounia_elk
angelacjenks
apv2600
melaniesindelar
jessacabeza

And, a wordcloud showing the most prominent word pairs:

(from wordclouds.com)

And from this list, some of the most prominent keywords (excluding personal names and Twitter usernames).

NoDAPL (North Dakota Pipeline)

White supremacy

Trump

As in other years, anthropologists tweet their sub-specialties and interest groups, but are likely to re-tweet areas of broad interest that cut across anthropology.  Current concerns about growing fascism, white supremacy in the U.S. together with (related) violence against Native American protestors in cut across interest groups and energize discourse between anthropologists who might normally remain siloed in their own sub-groups. In the graph, these tweets provide connections between clusters.  As in previous years, I note that these moments allow anthropologists to "perform anthropology" at the Annual Meeting and, simultaneously, create moments of coherency across a large and fragmented group of academicians, practitioners and students.

And, yet, last year's AAA spawned twice as much activity as this year's--testament, perhaps, to a decline in attendance this year (although I have not seen an official count) and to continued confusion over hashtagging.