All Tomorrow's Cultures

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...

The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out.  As in previous years, I have identified future-oriented or science fiction-oriented panels that I would love to attend (including two I'm on). This may not be a complete list, and I apologize for panels I've missed.  But even this, incomplete as it might be, is an impressive collection of a robust future-orientation in the work of anthropologists.  Thursday, November 21 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM   –   Decolonial Belongings and Futures: Creating Spaces of Belonging thru Epistemic Disobedience - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 7 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Biofutures - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 122 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM   –   Haunting Toward the Future: Colonial Durabilities and Temporalities - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 13 2:00 PM – 3...

"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...

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 ...