All Tomorrow's Cultures

The joint SCA/SVA " Displacements " conference has come to an end (although the archived presentations will remain up until the end of the month).  By all accounts, this virtual conference has been a success, but I wanted to probe the extent to which the conference brought together people across diverse locations.  Although we have some sense of this from the "Nodes" (local groups of face-to-face meetings and events surrounding the conference), Twitter may be a more important index, since that social media emerged as the most generative form of communication over the past few days. Using NodeXL, I downloaded tweets with the #displace18 hashtag, and grouped them by timezone.  Here is the sociograph I generated: And here's a key to the groups (which may help with some of the smaller ones in the lower, right-hand corner).  Pacific Time (US & Canada) 0, 12, 96 Disk     Pacific Time (US & Canada)  ...

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 aff...

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 laten...

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.

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 ...

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 Ma...