"The future" (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than 2017 . But while I was content to just list the different panels in 2017, this year I decided to construct a semantic map of the session abstracts. First, I created a text document with each of the 28 session abstracts that explicitly concerned the future as an object of research (rather than something like "the future of graduate education"). Then, I loaded up the file into Cowo , which spit out 55 words by frequency of occurrence (minus all of the stop words like "the"). Then I loaded the file onto VOSviewer, and created a semantic map of co-occurrences between terms (nodes) in the same sentences. Here's the visualization from VOSviewer: And here it is again in Gephi: We can identify several semantic clusters here, but I want to highlight a few: 1). urban resistance to the neoliberal (right); 2) environmental disaster a...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.