All Tomorrow's Cultures

Today (April 26, 2024), our book, "Multimodal Methods in Anthropology" is released into the world. Here's a song I've created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative AI model: https://www.udio.com/songs/m5HMHSZ2exSgEWE7f8AaAr And here's a code for a discount on this book from our publisher, Routledge Books:

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...

From the conclusion to my contribution on " Social Media " in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:" Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every level of our lives.  No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media. By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons, anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to h...

One of the community groups we work with has a book out.  Another has just won a major victory for environmental justice.  A third is looking for new staff.  Another has posted an incredible collection of photos from the Baltimore Uprising.  My responses?  Depending on the social media platform, “Like”; “Retweet”; “Share”; “Follow”.  Perhaps those aren’t even “responses”.  I haven’t done anything—I haven’t even moved from my chair!  Even J.G Frazer had to get up to pick up another tome of hermetic folklore.  But I would be remiss not to engage in this slacktivism .  Not only remiss, I would be endangering our relationship to our Baltimore interlocutors.  Public anthropology takes many forms—including advocate, gadfly and cultural critic.  What about zombie? The digital, networked world in which we live has enabled unparalleled access to the tools of content creation.  All of us can make a movie, write a novel, publ...

In a 2010 article entitled “Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO),” Joeran Beel et al sparked controversy in some circles by suggesting that scientists tailor their writing in research articles to search engines in order to maximize web visibility.  Once the keywords are chosen, they need to be mentioned in the right places: in the title, and as often as possible in the abstract and the body of the text (but, of course, not so often as to annoy readers).  Although in general titles should be fairly short, we suggest choosing a longer title if there are many relevant keywords. (179) Building on almost 15 years of literature and scholarship in web marketing and e-commerce, Beel et al extended the model to academic work, arguing that the goal in writing for academic journals is little different than writing copy for web advertising: “to make this content more widely and easily available” (190).  That could mean including keywords in significant fields (like t...