Where's #Anthropology? Hashtag mayhem at #AAA2021Baltimore

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 Kim Seon Ho!) in Korean, Japanese and Thai. Other hashtags referring to the Awards likewise commanded large numbers of likes and retweets, and anthropology was fairly occluded under the white-hot glare of K-Pop fans.

Here are the top Twitter accounts by “betweenness centrality”: top betweenness: starnewskorea jonah_writer unitedmongjis_ anneekarika yoonbwii gummy88888 tsukicooky fkfkfk_kfkfkf korb_blog weareoneexo yukaseon18 nuestnews jseolhee 1exoklwkn americananthro kimsoen08051986 biancaphd Wickedwitcheso1

Note that @americananthro was the only anthropology account in the top counts.

Here’s the top anthropology tweet by re-tweet counts: “Interested in reaching a wider public with your research? Join us and @SAPIENS_org on Friday in Baltimore at the @AmericanAnthro annual meeting for our public scholarship event! Looking forward to learning and sharing ideas with you! @NapaAnthro @WennerGrenOrg #aaa2021 https://t.co/b4k210aCYs” While here’s the top tweet by “likes”: “Speaking of sanctuary spaces she has found/created within anthro, Dr. Harrison says (and I paraphrase) "If I had to depend on a department of anthropology for my sense of self, I wouldn't be an anthropologist today!" SAY. THAT. AGAIN. #AAA2021Baltimore”

In terms of the resulting network of meaning, this resulted in a AAA with a distinctly KPOP feel to it. Here’s a semantic network that classifies tweets according to otheir overall theme:

“Obfuscation” is a term that Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum have used to describe the political mobilization of hashtags and other techniques to dilute messages, hide data or otherwise re-direct people for political ends. “Obfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (2015: 1). Brunton and Nissenbaum document the first instance of obfuscation in Russian attempts to quell protests over the 2011 parliamentary elections. By flooding the hashtag “#Triumfalnaya” (a Moscow public square where protests took place) with messages extolling Russian nationalism or just nonsense words, the Russian government rendered the hashtag useless as a rallying point and reference to protests resisting the Putin/Medvedev government. More recently, KPOP fans around the world have used to same technique to flood white supremacist hashtags with concert clips and KPOP news. But, here, we have the American Anthropological Association in essence obscuring itself through its dogged insistence on the “#AAA” hashtag, with AAA already a casualty of twentieth century efforts to select names that would appear first in the alphabetical yellow pages listings (AAA Bailbonds, anyone?).

Why does the AAA continue with this hashtag? I think it ultimately comes down to brand identity--in other words, placing the organization over the imperatives of its members who might use hashtags to build solidarity among anthropologists. And it also has to do with a firm misunderstanding of the way Twitter works. Events are temporal. Even though Twitter breaks the strict chronology of its feed with older tweets (“In case you missed it”), conference tweets are not going to persist more than a few days. And what is the goal? To communicate with anthropologists, or to increase the visibility of the American Anthropological Association? If it’s about anthropologists, then what about hashtags like “#Anthropology2021”? There’s no reference here to AAA at all, and the hashtag could be used by any anthropology conference. Why not? Are we afraid that this will compete with other anthropology conferences in late November? At a time when hybrid formats seem likely to persist, why not use hashtags to build links around the world to other anthropologies?

References

Bunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015). Obfuscation: A User’s Guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

#AMANTH2016 WRAP-UP

The American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting is over, and, with it, the brief spurt of Twitter traffic that marks the event.  Here's a graph of Twitter traffic over the course of the week, created on NodeXL through a Twitter search for the hashtag #amanth2016:

And some statistics on the graph:

Vertices: 1746
Unique Edges: 4090
Edges With Duplicates: 6825
Total Edges: 10915

Here are the 50 most popular twitter accounts by betweenness centrality:

americananthro
culanth
biellacoleman
omanreagan
thevelvetdays
cmcgranahan
aba_aaa
berghahnanthro
ericalwilliams7
allergyphd
michelleakline
amreese07
jasonantrosio
fatimatassadiq
anthroboycott
peepsforum
anthrofuentes
teachingculture
hilaryagro
aaa_cfhr
dukepress
afeministanthro
anandspandian
anthrocharya
aunpalmquist
shahnafisa
jahkarta
nolan_kline
elena_sesma
savageminds
stanfordpress
girlhoodstudies
transformanthro
drkillgrove
anthronad
globalsportuva
ruthbehar
kimjunelewis
hacrln
nycnodapl
amethno
salliehananthro
beliso_dejesus
mounia_elk
angelacjenks
apv2600
melaniesindelar
jessacabeza

And, a wordcloud showing the most prominent word pairs:

(from wordclouds.com)

And from this list, some of the most prominent keywords (excluding personal names and Twitter usernames).

NoDAPL (North Dakota Pipeline)

White supremacy

Trump

As in other years, anthropologists tweet their sub-specialties and interest groups, but are likely to re-tweet areas of broad interest that cut across anthropology.  Current concerns about growing fascism, white supremacy in the U.S. together with (related) violence against Native American protestors in cut across interest groups and energize discourse between anthropologists who might normally remain siloed in their own sub-groups. In the graph, these tweets provide connections between clusters.  As in previous years, I note that these moments allow anthropologists to "perform anthropology" at the Annual Meeting and, simultaneously, create moments of coherency across a large and fragmented group of academicians, practitioners and students.

And, yet, last year's AAA spawned twice as much activity as this year's--testament, perhaps, to a decline in attendance this year (although I have not seen an official count) and to continued confusion over hashtagging.  

Hashtag Chaos: #AAA2016 vs. #amanth2016

As I've done over the past 3 years, I ran Twitter searches for the American Anthropological Association Annual meeting this evening.  Unlike previous years, though, the #AAA2016 hashtag seems to be popular with a number of different groups, effectively obfuscating the anthropological voice behind other causes.  My colleague Matthew Durington (@mdurington) noticed that and tweeted yesterday:

But, really, much of the damage had been done.  Here's a graph of my search results for #AAA2016:

This dense graph (over 10000 edges) is made up of tweets from several events, but it's dominated by one, the "Asian Artists Awards" held in Seoul.  Here's the top tweet by betweenness centrality:

1. "คนอะไรเก่งตั้งแต่เด็ก และเก่งขึ้นเรื่อยๆ แถมสวยน่ารักขึ้นทุกปี

#kimyoojung #AAA2016 https://t.co/DZVCDlnsY5"

Indeed, all of the connected components are tweets from the Asian Artist Awards, with the twitterverse dominated by Thai fans.  The American Anthropological Association, on the other hand, is relegated to the violet component on the far, middle-right of the graph.

Changing my search to the new hashtag, "#amanth2016", we get a much smaller graph with a few hundred edges:  

Here, the top tweets are from @AmericanAnthro, @JasonAntrosio, @culanth and @mdurington, and they revolve around the Melissa Harris Parry address on Wednesday night, the usual announcements of book vendors and paper presentations, and some self-referential discussion of the hashtag confusion itself.  

So, what's the lesson?  There's a lesson for marketing in here, certainly, but also a broader and more obvious one for the American Anthropological Association: know what's happening in the world you purport to study.  After all, there was the same collision of hashtags last year (the Asian Achievement Awards and the Act Against AIDS concert in Japan), albeit not the complete eclipse the music awards has meant for anthropological twitter content.  More than anyone else, we should know that we join a crowded field of representation, and that the digital content we produce may flow into networked connections we never intended.  If we fail to attend to these other sources of digital content and meaning, then anthropological voices are effectively silenced.