#AmAnth17 Wrap-Up: Anthropology Matters?

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?  

Hashtag Chaos: #AAA2016 vs. #amanth2016

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 American Anthropological Association, on the other hand, is relegated to the violet component on the far, middle-right of the graph.

Changing my search to the new hashtag, "#amanth2016", we get a much smaller graph with a few hundred edges:  

Here, the top tweets are from @AmericanAnthro, @JasonAntrosio, @culanth and @mdurington, and they revolve around the Melissa Harris Parry address on Wednesday night, the usual announcements of book vendors and paper presentations, and some self-referential discussion of the hashtag confusion itself.  

So, what's the lesson?  There's a lesson for marketing in here, certainly, but also a broader and more obvious one for the American Anthropological Association: know what's happening in the world you purport to study.  After all, there was the same collision of hashtags last year (the Asian Achievement Awards and the Act Against AIDS concert in Japan), albeit not the complete eclipse the music awards has meant for anthropological twitter content.  More than anyone else, we should know that we join a crowded field of representation, and that the digital content we produce may flow into networked connections we never intended.  If we fail to attend to these other sources of digital content and meaning, then anthropological voices are effectively silenced. 

Defining anthropological community through #anthroboycott

Back on my pc--and here's my whole visualization for #AAA2015.

It's the largest set of tweets I've ever mapped from AAA: 21, 879 edges, 3543 nodes.  I ran it when I got to my office on Monday, November 23 and it covers the whole 8 day window that includes some pre- and post-tweets.  I used the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm to group the tweets--said to be particularly effective in revealing community structures in large networks.  Finally, each identified "group" is arranged in its own box, courtesy of the Harel-Koren Fast Multiscale layout algorithm.  Nice!  That said, it's hard to beat Marc Smith, who mapped out the network on Saturday, November 21.  He's got a neater graph than mine--it's his software, after all!  But I still wanted to work through my own data.

In many ways, the graph is typical of associations.  Marc Smith et al (2014) might call this an example of a "tight crowd": "highly interconnected people with few isolated participants."  And yet, there are some definite clusters here, suggestive of what they call a "community cluster": "Some popular topics may develop multiple smaller groups, which often form around a few hubs each with its own audience, influencers, and sources of information."  Let's look at the individual clusters themselves.  Each has been identified with its own color.

Here are some of the larger "groups":

1. Dark Blue: Boycott resolution.
2. Light blue: Panels discussion.
3. Forest green: Tweets from the AAA, their re-tweets and their discussion.
4. Light green: Discussion around medical anthropology, associated panels and events.
5. Orange: The anthropology of education, associated panels and events.

On the basis of this, I would argue that the AAA conference is stuck somewhere between the "tight crowd" (typical of organizations) and the "community cluster"; in other words, the AAA conference combines homogeneous groups of people mostly concerned with their particular topics and communities with larger interests that span different clusters.

Next, I ranked the Twitter accounts by betweenness centrality, which measures the importance of a node (or vertex) based on the number of times it falls "between" two nodes on the shortest path between them.  "Importance," here, then, is different than just simply popularity; instead, betweenness centrality measures some of the importance of a node to the flow of information.

1. americananthro

2. anthroboycott

3. palestinetoday

4. benabyad

5. omanreagan

6. pacbi

7. cultanth

8. cmcgranahan

9. jasonantrosio

10. socmedanthro

Nodes with high betweenness centrality may act as "brokers" or "gateways" for flows of information and influence between different clusters.  It's worth noting that associations and group Twitter accounts (americananthro, cultanth, socmedanthro) are represented as well as the Twitter accounts of particular active individuals (omanreagan, cmcgranahan, jasonantrosio, etc.).  

But I want to concentrate on a few: anthroboycott, palestinetoday and benabyad.  These Twitter accounts have high betweenness centrality, and they serve to connect these different clusters that would, otherwise, lack even their comparatively modest connectivity.  

This is readily evident in this graph, where I filtered to include only tweets that contained the hashtag #anthroboycott.

Here are some of the top tweets (measured by the in-degree centrality of their associated node).  Much of the traffic concerned a few themes: 1) the historic vote, and the clear majority of the pro-boycotters.  2) solidarity with various pro-Palestinian groups.  3) discussions of the procedures during the boycott vote.

1. VICTORY at #aaa2015: @americananthro Clears the Way for Final Vote on #AnthroBoycott https://t.co/GSWdohHWeQ

2. RESOLUTION 2 PASSES! #Anthroboycott #BDS #AAA2015

3. Over 1500 people at #AAA2015 for the #Anthroboycott! https://t.co/by3QWTqAsp

4. RT @OmanReagan: Everyone who stays to vote on Resolution #2 can have a free drink @WennerGrenOrg party after! #Anthroboycott #AAA2015

5. #AAA2015: Congratulations to the organisers of the #Anthroboycott! https://t.co/vra6uc0BG4 https://t.co/eXAVKkI7Pe

6. I reported on2014 #Gaza war, when #Israel bombed universities. Tel Aviv U released statement gvg support for army #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015

7. E. Williams and J. Pierre discussing #anthroboycott @aba_aaa members to attend @AmericanAnthro #aaa2015 #abapanels https://t.co/SiaiQEfoQW

8. Now: motion to DIVEST from Israel. #BDS #Anthroboycott #AAA2015 https://t.co/hg1xUeXRFI

We could conclude many things from these graphs, but I want to suggest that these say something about anthropology and anthropologists in the American Anthropological Association.  Divided into subfields and sections and, generally, communicating with others in their specializations, anthropologists at the annual meeting may have little in common with others who also identify as anthropologists.  Most of our tweets are variations on live-tweeting that summarize themes we've picked out of papers and panels--in other words, tweets that are tightly coupled to our own, narrow interests and specialities.  And yet, certain issues (and their lively discussion) serve to cross these different clusters.

Are these issues, then, defining moments for anthropologists in the AAA?   If we go back to earlier AAA conferences where anthropologists were asked to take a political or ethical stand on issues (e.g., last year's #BlackLivesMatter), we can see similar patterns, with the protest against police violence spanning multiple groups.  Here's a graph from Marc Smith (again!) from last year:

From the Nodexl Graph Gallery

Would it be too much to suggest that these ethical and political orientations are what brings anthropologists together?  That it's not just a "public anthropology" (in the abstract), but a concrete politics?  It's certainly something for the AAA to contemplate--these critical moments of public anthropology are performed amidst the American Anthropological Annual Meeting, but they are not orchestrated by the AAA.  Indeed, they seem to proliferate despite (or because?) of the efforts of the AAA to quell the emergence of this kind of public anthropology in the association.  Indeed, despite predictions that the politicization of the Association will "break apart" the AAA (something I heard several times from different people in Denver), the exact opposite seems to happen.

#anthroboycott in medias res

I'm on my Macbook at the AAA conference, so NodeXL isn't happening for me, so I'm using socioviz instead.  It's a java-enabled, web-based Twitter network visualization--but it's quick and dirty (especially in its free form).  Here's the #anthroboycott traffic over the last few minutes, with close-ups of the main components.

So--there's a great deal of Twitter traffic now (it's not SXSW, but not bad!).  Socioviz will only pick off the latest 100 tweets.  Even so, we can see effort to bring people into the assembly . . .

And here are the top tweets by degree centrality

1) Doors to the #AAA2015 business meeting open at 530PM! CCC Mile High Ballrooms 2 +3. Vote NO on 1, YES on 2 #Anthroboycott

2) 2.5 hours until #Anthroboycott vote. Mile high Ballroom 2&3. #AAA2015 https://t.co/FARzNSLZ0Q

3) RT @PalestineToday: Mick Taussig: The issue seems not so much why support; but how could you not? #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015 #BDS https://t.co?

4) RT @anthroboycott: To ensure that your voice is heard and vote counted, come early and tell your friends! #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015 https://?

5) RT @PalestineToday: 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers since the beginning of October #AnthroBoycott #AAA2015

6) RT @AMReese07: E. Williams and J. Pierre discussing #anthroboycott @aba_aaa members to attend @AmericanAnthro #aaa2015 #abapanels https://t?

Those Who Can't Tweet, Analyze: early Twitter traffic at #AAA2015

I won't be rolling into AAA until tomorrow, but I wanted to check the conference traffic before I left.

At this point in the game, there's not much going on--one large component (in blue) where people (and institutions) are publicizing their papers and booths.  So far, there's not much commentary on papers and presentations.

Let's look at the top tweets by in-degree centrality.

1. RT @AmericanAnthro: Headed to #AAA2015? Make sure you download the mobile app through iTunes (https://t.co/80rZY5CR6O) or Google Play (http…

2. Conference Chic, or, How to Dress Like an Anthropologist https://t.co/GFWOIA1dFd What are YOU packing for #AAA2015?

3. Blizzard warnings in effect for Denver tomorrow. Take note #AAA2015 attendees, bring warm clothes!

4. If you're in Denver this week for #AAA2015, please stand with us in solidarity. Spread the word., https://t.co/kHmoxjIXVM

5. Two...more...days...#AAA2015 https://t.co/62eb20zOhX

6. NEW: The Anti-Boycott Resolution: Entrenching the Status Quo, Denying Justice #aaa2015 https://t.co/C8dFXvWFxz https://t.co/XthvibLvqb

7. Savage Minds at #AAA2015 https://t.co/vC2VREjdaS

8. Looking for short thought pieces on #medanth panels at #AAA2015 for 2nd Opinion, the SMA newsletter! @somatosphere @culanth 

An interesting addition to the usual tweets from AAA, Wenner-Gren, etc., are tweets on the boycott resolution--it's encouraging that they've been re-tweeted multiple times!