All Tomorrow's Cultures

For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data'' represents a threat.  Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can run sentiment analyses on 40 million tweets in a matter of hours?  Still, I agree with Tricia Wang , who urges us to engage big data and complement that work with our own “thick data.”  In “thick data,” the depths of our insights into meaning and interpretation, “the native’s point of view,” could act as a corrective to billions of data points that may “speak for themselves,” as Chris Anderson claimed, but not, perhaps, for people.  Ironically, this move to “thick data'' was enabled by the gradual choking off of data access to social media APIs.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter - one by one social media platforms began limiting third-party access to their data, under the cover of protecting users from infringements on their privacy.  Well, not all third-party access.  Corporations and sele...

Last July I was using R to do some social network analysis of Instagram tags.  After lots of package downloads, App Developer’s applications, etc., I couldn’t get it to work, only to discover that Instagram had changed its policy the months before.  Like many social media platforms, Instagram had restricted access to data through its API (Application Programming Interface).  For some, this could be welcome news—after all, third party developers having untrammeled access weakens privacy and serves to expose more and more of our lives to commodification. But this isn’t the whole story.  Just because I (a researcher at a mid-tier state university) was having trouble gaining access doesn’t mean that large corporations were having trouble, or the National Security Agency, or Instagram itself.  Rather, what we’ve seen with the rise of Big Data as a research object is the progressive commodification of social media.  The social network analysis that began as a...

An eminently sensible article in today's New York Times from Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI and a tireless advocate for our continuing quest to find intelligent life beyond the Earth.  But not just that: he's also been a leader in the continuing discourse of what each of the terms in the acronym "SETI" should mean: what kind of search?  Where?  And what should constitute "intelligence"?  This time, he's weighing in on a debate over actively courting extraterrestrial neighbors by broadcasting transmissions into space.  What should we say?  And shouldn't we be more careful?  Perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence will be less-than-impressed with the ravages that modernity and capitalism have wrought.  Or perhaps they'll see our various weaknesses, and swoop down to attack!  These arguments, Shostak suggests, have more to tell us about contemporary, Hollywood scripts than about the intentions of aliens, and he counters with another, su...

I did this for the American Anthropological Association last month. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9VDFYemg8

Over the past 2 years, Big Data has worked its way into public consciousness, courtesy of widespread news exposure and a  series of popular books  by Big Data scientists with hyperbolic evocations of the analytic power of their methods.  There seems to be nothing that Big Data cannot do: predict health and wellness, illuminate culture change, stop poverty, foil terrorists.  And, of course, tighten the noose of Foucauldian surveillance from governments and corporations.  But what all of these accounts promise (or threaten) is a transparent window onto truth: our social lives, behaviors, hopes and dreams all rendered transparent through the analysis of vast datasets. Visualization of all editing activity by user. Image courtesy Fernanda B. Viégas and wikicommons Many qualitative researchers—including anthropologists—have sounded an alarm over this drive to datafictaion, where, as  Chris Anderson has famously concluded, “numbers speak for themselves.”...