On Monday, I downloaded #AmAnth17 tweets. This proved in many ways elusive and piecemeal. First, the conference hashtags continue to
shift. Last year, the AAA finally
discovered that the #AAA hashtag had other meanings and other audiences, among
them AIDS activism in Japan and a pop music awards program in Korea (both of which
prompted lively Twitter conversations this year). Their efforts to promote alternative hashtags
resulted in confusion, with people tweeting at #AmAnth17 (the ‘official’
hashtag), along with #AmAnth2017 (which would have been logically consistent
with previous years) and, for the hell of it, #AAA2017. So the graph below includes tweets with any one of the three, with the top 50 Twitter users (by in-degree centrality) labeled.
Here are the general metrics on this network.
Graph Metric
|
Value
|
Graph Type
|
Directed
|
Vertices
|
426
|
Unique Edges
|
649
|
Edges With Duplicates
|
0
|
Total Edges
|
649
|
Self-Loops
|
145
|
Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio
|
0.047817048
|
Reciprocated Edge Ratio
|
0.091269841
|
Connected Components
|
100
|
Single-Vertex Connected Components
|
63
|
Maximum Vertices in a Connected
Component
|
245
|
Maximum Edges in a Connected
Component
|
445
|
Maximum Geodesic Distance
(Diameter)
|
12
|
Average Geodesic Distance
|
4.810299
|
Graph Density
|
0.002783761
|
It’s not an enormous graph, nor particular
connected. In many ways, it's similar to other graphs I’ve run in 2015 and 2016 (see. For example, we see the same, prominent Twitter
users. Here are the top 50 accounts by
in-degree centrality:
americananthro
profsassy
womenarchys
anthrofuentes
aprilmbeisaw
culanth
julielesnik
aba_aaa
sonyaatalay
hilaryagro
valorieaquino
altmetric
protest_matters
drtomori
jennyshaw011
lesleybartlett_
aunpalmquist
archyfantasies
twitatreyee
dukepress
stemethnographr
lauraellenheath
aaas_doser
pottershousedc
diane_tober
susangsheridan
blackfeminisms
afburialgrndnps
geekanthro
anthrosciences
stelynews
dcanthro
archpodnet
yarimarbonilla
oceaniajournal
beccapeixotto
mcclaurintweets
cvans
soclinganth
police_worlds
illinoispress
machristofides
anthroboycott
hildallorens
ratnagiri77
anthromuxer
tikabakic
camee_maddox
This is a great bunch of anthropologists and institutions,
but, compared to previous years, Twitter traffic has diminished and, with it,
topics have proliferated along lines of subdiscipline and sub-specialty. That is, anthropologists (at least in their
Twitter traffic) have retreated to the specifics of their panels and
papers. Here’s a word-cloud of the most
frequently occurring 500 words from the 2017 AAA:
Now here’s another wordcloud from the 2015 meeting.
The prominence of activist causes in 2015
(#BlackLivesMatter, BDS) stimulated tweets across subdisciplines in a way that
is conspicuously absent from this year’s conference with some notable (and welcome) exceptions (thanks, @yarimarbonilla, @aba_aaa and others!).
Of course, these causes are still with us, along with a
dumpster fire of authoritarian politics, fascism, rampant misogyny, ascendant
white supremacy and environmental apocalypse.
But, in all of this, where does anthropology matter? And if we can’t represent our united
opposition to, say, fascist policies in the U.S., then what hope do we have of
demonstrating the relevance of anthropology to anyone outside of this conference?
In her critical summary of this year's meeting, Emma Louise Backe notes in Geek Anthropologist:
the exclamatory nature of Anthropology Matters feels ineffectual. Are we trying to signal to the broader intellectual community and American public that anthropology does indeed matter? Or are we instead convincing ourselves that our choice of discipline was legitimate, necessary?Well--those are the questions. What will we--as anthropologists--do in the face of the palpable evil around us?
