CFP AAA 2018: Visualising the Visible and the Invisible: ethnography and technologies of the unseen

Apophenia—the recognition of patterns within randomness—is, as Hito Steyerl (2016) has argued, a condition of the rapid multiplication of chaotic plumes of data swirling around us, data riven with errors, misunderstandings and half-guesses somewhere between the seen and unseen.  On the other hand, as Lepselter (2016) argues, it is just this sort of “misrecognition” that proliferates in an age when truths are submerged.  Here, apophenia is a survival skill in a paranoid age.  But with the emergence of new digital audio visual technologies and their networked connection through social media, the opportunities for opening up a dialogue between the visible and the non-visible, as well as between vision, sound and the other senses have grown. We can today bring cameras to places that were out of access before (think of drone, wearables, life-logging cams) as well as  tools and techniques allowing us to visualise data that is not visible in nature (such as bodily and affective reactions gathered from heart rate and sweat sensors, brainwave meters, GPS trackers). Through these technologies, our images connect to both the sensible and the insensible through their entanglements with diverse platforms, not only in the present but in unseen futures where those images might proliferate along undisclosed vectors. Finally, the new deployment of these technologies of seeing underscores the salience of a withdrawn unseen amidst the complex objects that make up the ethnographic landscape.  For example, panoramic cameras beget both new techniques of revelation and concealment (Pels 2003), while life blogging introducing the unseen interstices of hyper-mediated lives. Here, our technologies themselves participate in the apophenic, opening shadowy connections to the world to each other.  This panel aims to enter this terrain (visible, invisible and imagine) in dialogue across disciplines, unified only by the insistence of inquiry at the junctures of seen and unseen. 

We've still got room for presenters at this - Please contact me or Paolo Favero (paolo.favero@uantwerpen.be) by April 1 if interested! 

Signs of Latency

One of the ideas I've been playing with over the last few years is the idea of latency in the networked age.  As we relate, communicate and move through increasingly connected action along digitally augmented lives, clouds of latent social relations, latent geographies and, overall, latent belonging develop around us.  Many of these latent clouds form around technologies of surveillance, but even these suggest potential relatedness--a latency from below.

We've already written about some of these in Networked Anthropology (with my co-author, Matt Durington).  For example, here's a graph of tags linked to "Busan":

That is, tagging one's photo "Busan" links that photo to related tags, some ("water," "ocean," "Haeundae") are strongly connected, while other ("Buddhist," "temple") are much more weakly associated.  Nevertheless, images tagged with "Buddhism" form a latency around images, places and the people posting about them, one that could coalesce into new meanings and relationships.  

This is the same for people.  Here is a graph of a Facebook page, "부산맛집여기," that depicts a few  posts about food in Busan, followed by a complex skein of commentary and "likes" from other Facebook users.

Relatively few of the page users are actually communicating with each other.  Instead, they comment on the central posts.  This accounts for the vague, star-shape of the graph.  Still, if we zoom in

on the graph, we see not only weak connections (largely through 'likes' generated by comments), but also latent relations, missed opportunities for communication that--through the structure and permanence of Facebook--could be exploited at a later date. 

In the United States (and other countries), Twitter contracted with Foursquare to provide gelocations for tweets. So, tweeting from my home, I can choose from a number of locations within a few miles of my domicile:

Even if I don't choose one of these alternative pins, these form a cloud of related locations, a weakly defined zone of geolocation.

Finally, place itself is rendered latent.  Here's a photo I took of Sejong-no in Seoul in 2015:

 

And here's an "imagequilt" of pictures generated by uploading this picture to Google for an image search:












This suggests a locative latency--a belongingness--that extends from the digital life of a photograph. 

National Science Fiction Day --- 1/2/2018

On this day devoted (by some) to a genre fiction, my thoughts have turned to dystopia and utopia--these are not, however, co-extensive with SF, but see Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future for a utopia-centric understanding of the field.  When I look around at events in the U.S., it is hard not to center on the imminence of dystopia: state terror, totalitarianism, white supremacy.  But, I am reminded of Ernst Bloch: even in the midst of dystopian actualization, there are utopian potentialities, and the challenge for my scholarship and teaching in the new year is to mine the present for these tendrils of utopia, and to utilize those for an everyday practice of SF that looks to the present as the source of a more just, more equitable society that allows people to pursue their lives without structural inequalities and environmental injustice.

#AmAnth17 Wrap-Up: Anthropology Matters?

On Monday, I downloaded #AmAnth17 tweets.  This proved in many ways elusive and piecemeal.  First, the conference hashtags continue to shift.  Last year, the AAA finally discovered that the #AAA hashtag had other meanings and other audiences, among them AIDS activism in Japan and a pop music awards program in Korea (both of which prompted lively Twitter conversations this year).  Their efforts to promote alternative hashtags resulted in confusion, with people tweeting at #AmAnth17 (the ‘official’ hashtag), along with #AmAnth2017 (which would have been logically consistent with previous years) and, for the hell of it, #AAA2017. So the graph below includes tweets with any one of the three, with the top 50 Twitter users (by in-degree centrality) labeled. 

Here are the general metrics on this network.  

Graph Metric	Value
Graph Type	Directed
Vertices	426
Unique Edges	649
Edges With Duplicates	0
Total Edges	649
Self-Loops	145
Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio	0.047817048
Reciprocated Edge Ratio	0.091269841
Connected Components	100
Single-Vertex Connected Components	63
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component	245
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component	445
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter)	12
Average Geodesic Distance	4.810299
Graph Density	0.002783761

It’s not an enormous graph, nor particular connected.  In many ways, it's similar to other graphs I’ve run in 2015 and 2016 (see.  For example, we see the same, prominent Twitter users.  Here are the top 50 accounts by in-degree centrality:

americananthro

profsassy

womenarchys

anthrofuentes

aprilmbeisaw

culanth

julielesnik

aba_aaa

sonyaatalay

hilaryagro

valorieaquino

altmetric

protest_matters

drtomori

jennyshaw011

lesleybartlett_

aunpalmquist

archyfantasies

twitatreyee

dukepress

stemethnographr

lauraellenheath

aaas_doser

pottershousedc

diane_tober

susangsheridan

blackfeminisms

afburialgrndnps

geekanthro

anthrosciences

stelynews

dcanthro

archpodnet

yarimarbonilla

oceaniajournal

beccapeixotto

mcclaurintweets

cvans

soclinganth

police_worlds

illinoispress

machristofides

anthroboycott

hildallorens

ratnagiri77

anthromuxer

tikabakic

camee_maddox

This is a great bunch of anthropologists and institutions, but, compared to previous years, Twitter traffic has diminished and, with it, topics have proliferated along lines of subdiscipline and sub-specialty.  That is, anthropologists (at least in their Twitter traffic) have retreated to the specifics of their panels and papers.  Here’s a word-cloud of the most frequently occurring 500 words from the 2017 AAA:

Now here’s another wordcloud from the 2015 meeting.  

The prominence of activist causes in 2015 (#BlackLivesMatter, BDS) stimulated tweets across subdisciplines in a way that is conspicuously absent from this year’s conference with some notable (and welcome) exceptions (thanks, @yarimarbonilla, @aba_aaa and others!).

Of course, these causes are still with us, along with a dumpster fire of authoritarian politics, fascism, rampant misogyny, ascendant white supremacy and environmental apocalypse.  But, in all of this, where does anthropology matter?  And if we can’t represent our united opposition to, say, fascist policies in the U.S., then what hope do we have of demonstrating the relevance of anthropology to anyone outside of this conference? 


In her critical summary of this year's meeting, Emma Louise Backe notes in Geek Anthropologist:  

the exclamatory nature of Anthropology Matters feels ineffectual. Are we trying to signal to the broader intellectual community and American public that anthropology does indeed matter? Or are we instead convincing ourselves that our choice of discipline was legitimate, necessary?

Well--those are the questions.  What will we--as anthropologists--do in the face of the palpable evil around us?  

Tweeting #AmAnth17 - Part 2

This morning, before I left for AAA, I took a few moments to download #AmAnth17 tweets.  As you might expect, there was more twitter traffic than last week (603 edges), but still loosely connected (i.e., a low density) and still concerned mostly with advertising panels and other events.  

	Directed
Vertices	425
Unique Edges	603
Edges With Duplicates	261
Total Edges	864
Self-Loops	248
Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio	0.043233083
Reciprocated Edge Ratio	0.082882883
Connected Components	72
Single-Vertex Connected Components	54
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component	317
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component	737

Here’s a rather ineffective visualization (sorry – but I’m away from my office computer now), and a list of the 30 most prominent user names (by in-degree centrality).  

americananthro

anthrofuentes

natalia13reagan

culanth

anthrorepro

anthroprez

socmedanthro

coolanthro

sciencetechmed

teachingculture

soclinganth

acyig_aaa

protest_matters

kristamharper

aba_aaa

jasonantrosio

scott_a_ross

nick_kawa

rob_o_malley

amethno

gad_aaa

allergyphd

news4anthros

politicallegal

dominicboyer

samuelcollins43

archaeo_girl

jason_decaro

The word cloud supports this interpretation—a series of keywords and prominent user names distributed like stars in the AmAnth universe.   Meaning (and action) have yet to coalesce at this conference!