All Tomorrow's Cultures

The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination of uneven face-to-face/online hybridity and a buggy app meant continued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the multiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source of ambiguity that I have chronicled on this blog over the years. This year, #AAA2021Baltimore was joined by numerous, other hashtags: #AAA2021, #AAABaltimore, #AmAnth2021. Here’s a sociograph of different hashtags: In the lower left of the graph, you can see #AAA2021Baltimore, the “official” hashtag, mostly deployed by @AmericanAnththro--accounting for the “hub and spoke” pattern of that cluster.. The largest clusters, though, belong to the AAA--that is, the Asian Artist Awards--and, in particular, the popular vote category, which generated at least 80 percent of Twitter traffic around AAA2021 (congratulations ...

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...

      A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of new connections and communities in a COVID world.     Quarantine re-makes the city around us, re-defining “inside” and “outside,” “home” and “neighborhood.”   “Staying home” means complying with a socially and politically constructed bubble that delimits not only who or what can move from one side or another, but the protocols to be followed when that barrier is breached.   Moreover, transitioning from one to another is not just a matter of spatial movement, it also involves a shift in identity, from the one quarantined to the one not quarantined.   Finally, quarantine is a temporal state: fourteen days, or until the city lifts the quarantine measures.   Under these conditions, what does “home” mean?   What does “inside” mean?   And when one is quarantined, what do more collective identities like “community” and “neighborhood” mean?   U...

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 ...

This morning, before I left for AAA, I took a few moments to download #AmAnth17 tweets.   As you might expect, there was more twitter traffic than last week (603 edges), but still loosely connected (i.e., a low density) and still concerned mostly with advertising panels and other events.    Directed Vertices 425 Unique Edges 603 Edges With Duplicates 261 Total Edges 864 Self-Loops 248 Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio 0.043233083 Reciprocated Edge Ratio 0.082882883 Connected Components 72 Single-Vertex Connected Components 54 Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component 317 Ma...