#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.  

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.