Multimodal Methods in Anthropology

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:

Anthropology and the Twitter Challenge

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 select researchers still manage to maintain access to the “firehose” of user data in social media, while the rest of us have to make do with whatever limited sets of data we can access.  For some platforms, (e.g., Facebook), access has ceased altogether.  You can still gain access to much of this proprietary data through scraping, but that’s not an ethical research practice for anthropology.  So, I’ve worked towards my “thick data,” using the limited data I can download from platforms like Twitter to broaden the “deep” data I’ve been getting from more traditional, ethnographic methods. 

This has proven useful for community-based ethnographic work, and I've applied it to studies of neighborhoods in Baltimore, in Seoul, and elsewhere, resulting in articles and a co-authored monograph (“Networked Anthropology”) explaining the advantages of this mixed-methods approach to community-based, participatory research strategies.  I’ve also worked on multiple grants with the National Park Service using the same approach.   There, the park itself is the focus of social media investigation, with the ultimate goal being the identification of community stakeholders and their connections to the park.  

However: in early 2021, after the introduction of a new API interface, Twitter allowed academics to apply for an academic track with access to 10 million tweets per month.  While this is not full access, it certainly moves my possibilities more into the realm of big data.  And this raises all sorts of new problems and possibilities.  While my work has utilized some basic metrics (centrality measures, word frequencies, descriptive statistics), the scale of data I now have access to requires a different set of empirical tests and, perhaps, a different class of questions.  Ultimately, I wonder if it is possible to even ask similar kinds of questions of these data.  Can they tell me, for example, about the meaning of place?  About the ways people interpret their worlds?  The challenge for me is to bridge “thick” and “big” data.

But the big challenge (and opportunity) here is to anthropology.  While no stranger to quantitative methods, we still generally do not work with larger data sets.  These have been inimical to the “small societies” approach that characterized anthropology in the early twentieth century.  So what will anthropology become in this environment?  

The Future of Social Media in Anthropology

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 highlight and perhaps
help to overturn persistent inequalities in the field, all the while revealing dimensions
of our work that may have been suppressed or sublimated in the past. 

 And I think I still agree with that-- social media continue to be leaky and messy: the dishes you haven't yet washed in your intellectual sink.  

Zombie in the Armchair: Anthropologists as Connective Agents

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, publish photographs; after all, “Web 2.0” is supposed to blur the distinction between producer and consumer.  But for every would-be filmmaker who uploads their work on YouTube, there needs to be agents that propagate media through a network.  This is the moral dilemma of slacktivism: despite the particularly tepid support a “like” or a “share” represents, political action undertaken through digital networks require agents to “route” messages through their own networks, and to do so while limiting their own commentary or added content.  In other words, digital creators need armies of people to pass along messages to all of their friends.  Conversely, they don’t need other people to appropriate and remix their message—they just need us to do what we’re told.  To go back to my examples above, it would seem inappropriate and disingenuous to piggy-back on my informants’ successes with my own self-aggrandizing thoughts: “Nice photos.  See my recent article on de-industrialization in Baltimore for more context.”  Shouldn’t I just pass these social media along?  Without subjecting them to my own hermeneutic violence?  In other words, the Internet needs mindless zombies.

I’ve been reading Tony Sampson’s Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks and find much there for anthropologists to consider in terms of their own work.  Nineteenth century social theorists were keenly interested in this process of creation and contagion; in an era of social unrest and popular rebellion, it was a symptom of their fear of “the crowd.”  In Gabriel Tarde’s formulation, the crowd could be explained with reference to an “imitative ray” that “comprises of affecting (and affected) noncognitive associations, interferences and collisions that spread outward, contaminating feelings and moods before influencing thoughts, beliefs, and actions” (Sampson 2012: 19).  Tarde’s subjects “sleepwalk through everyday life” (ibid., 13), the unwitting host to a parasitical message that will leap from them to other sleep-walking subjects along a networked chain of imitation.  In their urge-to-imitate and reproduce, subjects leave their free will behind.  In Sampson’s terms, “Social man is a somnambulist” (13).

It is safe to say that this is not how most anthropologists would like to be described.  We are, after all, the ones who are supposed to be doing the interpreting.  Our informants may produce anthropologically intended media, they may interview each other, and they may post insightful commentary; but these are data that wait for us to collect, collate, analyze, interpret and publish.  Even if we do so for all of the right, public anthropology reasons, we very much mean to have the last word; this will-to-subjectivity is readily evident in the texts and media we create.  Critical of rational choice theory and Western, 19th century models of subjectivity, anthropologists rest on their authority to create, to measure, to rationate.  Moreover, the qualities of the zombie—passivity, submission, thoughtlessness—are also associated with the terrifying domination of the person under advanced capitalism.  We live in a world where increasing numbers of people have had their own wills ripped away away from them as they are forced into prisons, migrant camps, homelessness.  And at the same time, Tarde’s “imitative rays” have been harnessed by corporate capital in order to denude all of us of our capacity to judge for ourselves.

But there is another side to Tarde’s model, one where imitation is still premised on a mutual relationship.  Sampson continues:

Tarde’s notion of hypnotic obedience reveals a complex reciprocal relationship in which subjects are not simply controlled by deep-seated fears and phobias but also tend to copy (on the surface) those whom they love or at least empathize with. (170)

Obviously, this can (and certainly is) manipulated by corporations and governments, but the relationship need not only be one-sided.  Our own, social media lives suggest a more egalitarian relationship.  Our friends post something—we duly send it along.  We post something, and we expect that they will do the same.  We are all full of pithy, political insights, hilarious jokes, mad photo-shopping skills: we deserve to be copied, shared, re-posted.  In the age of social media, to be friends means to be ready to take the role of the zombie.

For anthropologists, this means that sometimes we may be the imitated, and sometimes the imitator.  After all, our informants may not always need our sagacity—but they will always need our support.  And that support will take many forms, some more active and agential than others.  But following our informants is an important role, indispensable to a networked world.  Sometimes, in other words . . . BRAINS . . . .

Tagging Anthropology

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 the title) or it could mean increasing the number of inbound links, another method for SEO practiced by web developers everywhere.  It means, in other words, scientists utilizing the same methods as, say, websites selling Viagra and dietary supplements. 

Is anthropology the same?  In the era of “public anthropology,” isn’t the idea to reach a “public”?  But what is this “public”?   Despite lots of lip service and theoretical interest in expanding the audience for anthropological research, anthropologists seem to have little more than a vague sense of the public that might exist outside of the immediate academic context.   This question becomes more urgent with the advent of web 2.0 social networking.   When we’re blogging or putting something up on Youtube, it seems obvious that we’re making our work “public,” but that public is not synonymous with the “public” of television news or major newspapers.  Danah boyd has suggested a useful distinction in her definition of “networked publics”:

I am primarily talking about the spaces and audiences that are bound together through technological networks (i.e., the Internet, mobile networks, etc.).  Networked publics are one type of mediated public; the network mediates the interactions between members of the public.  (boyd: 125)

Neither entirely public nor entirely private, “networked publics” imply both the networked creation of a public (the public forged as a series of connections with content and with other members of that networked public) and the networked determination of the access to public content (through search engines, page-ranking, and meta-data).  Rather than an amorphous “public” made up of concerned citizens, these networked publics are forged consciously by people networking together and by corporations exploiting their sociality in order to add value to their social networking sites. 

The “public” here, in other words, is one that is consciously crafted, negotiated, directed and emergent.  It is one that we might enjoin through a variety of means: keywords, tags, links, repetition.   For the scholars and consultants who work on search engine optimization, this means maximizing the number of “hits”, but for anthropologists disseminating work through Web 2.0, the issues of the “public” should be more complex.  The construction of an anthropological public needs to be part of our research from the outset.

Of course, this seems counterintuitive to those of us socialized in more traditional academic publishing where write-up is followed by publication and dissemination.  In this linear process, the question of a public is ultimately the province of marketing.  But in networked publishing, there are at least two differences.  First, it’s up to us to forge those connections with a community of readers and writers (web 2.0 blurs that distinction).  Second, it’s also up to us to encourage the association of our work with a body of other works—e.g., our anthropological media of Baltimore with anthropological media about other cities.  The difference here is that we do this not for profit, but for the effectiveness of our intervention.   That is, a public anthropology in the age of networked media needs to create its public while it’s doing anthropology, a consciously forged interpretive community.

References

Beel, Joeran, Bela Gipp and Erik Wilde (2010).  “Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO).”  Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41(2): 176-190. 

boyd, danah (2008).    “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites.”  In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. by David Buckingham, pp. 119-142.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.