All Tomorrow's Cultures

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...

My colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have just finished our final iteration of a 4-year collaborative project,  Anthropology By the Wire .   From the outset, we sought to produce YouTube Video from this year’s Anthropology By the Wire, “Clean and Green Superheroes”. Photo courtesy Samuel Collins counter-narratives to David Simon’s “The Wire,” alternative representations that contest urban imaginaries of Baltimore premised on crime and drugs.  Through collaborative productions shared through social media, we have tried to challenge the directionality of these representational regimes by making local media disseminated on YouTube, Tumblr and Flickr. But what we have realized is that the urban imaginary (as  LiPuma and Koelbe describe it), is constituted not only by representations of urban circulation, but the imagination of the circulation of those representations of circulation (and it may be circulations all the way down).  In other words, it ...

A couple of decades ago, social network analysis was a fairly recondite branch of sociology and anthropology applying mathematical matrices to social relationships.  And then there was Facebook.  With the widespread adoption of social networking sites (SNS), several things happened.  First, these social networks utilized the same graph theory and matrices that social network analysis had applied to social relations.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking services are analyzing your social network data constantly, mining your information for friend recommendations (and to better sell you to advertisers).  Second, courtesy of the enormous popularity of SNS, we now initiate and maintain social relations based on those same matrices.  In other words, from an abstract representation of social relations, social network theory becomes generative of actual social relations; we relate to each other according to matrix logics of tie ...

We all know we live in a network society. But what does that mean? And what does knowing that mean for networked society? In his latest novel, This Is Not a Game (Orbit Books, 2009), Williams explores several themes, among them massive alternate reality games (ARG) and global capitalism, all in the context of the well-known "small world" thesis--the idea (pioneered by Stanley Milgram, among many others) that all of us our connected to each other along short chains of acquaintances. There have been other novels exploring the "six degrees of separation" idea, of course, but this is the Web 2.0 release--think David Lodge's Small World with more computing power and less spleen. In Williams's novel, four friends who gamed together at Caltech--Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ--find their futures revolving around a massive alternate reality game called The Long Night of Briana Hall (or, alternatively, Motel Room Blues). The details of the game itself are somewh...