All Tomorrow's Cultures

In 2011, we started a project entitled "Anthropology By the Wire" with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with neighborhood-based groups in Baltimore to make anthropologically informed representations of their communities that they could utilize for their own purposes. My co-PI for the project, and my co-author, Matt Durington, explains the whole process in this 2011 video on the YouTube channel for the project . We meant it as a critique of "The Wire"--or, at least, the way "the Wire" had come to stand in for documentary truths about the city. Circling back to the series 20 years, and our project 10 years later, I find that not much has changed. The series continues to have this representational hegemony and, in many ways, still pushes to the sides other representations of Baltimore not grounded in policing and heavily demonized images of drugs and crime. "The Wire" pre...

 It has been 10 years since David Simon's "The Wire" premiered on HBO.  A product of Simon's long-time partnership with Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore City homicide detective, "The Wire" presented Baltimore through the lens of police officers, drug dealers, troubled children, educators.  A Dickensian drama-from-below, Simon's series grew more and more complex through its five seasons.  Actively working to challenge easy interpretations of Baltimore's problems, Simon refused to indulge in the usual media reduction of urban life to pathologized caricatures. Over those 10 years, some anthropologists began to include "The Wire" in their courses , presumably because they found it ethnographically interesting .  And it is, but not because it offers an empirical "window" onto the lives of Baltimore's urban poor.  Instead, "The Wire" is interesting because it presents the complexities of white, middle-class perspectives ...

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...