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Anthropology blogs more interesting than journals?

Published on May 19, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, journal articles / papers, media, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing

Have anthropology journals ignored students? Is this one of the reasons for the popularity of anthropology blogs? Anthropology journals are not well known among students, Owen Wiltshire writes in his class assignment Why do anthropologists blog? A mini ethnography, a story, and a field report:

A restrictive publishing environment gives little voice to students. Not only that, but anthropology journals have ignored students and perhaps in doing this they have missed out on generating a name for themselves. As more and more material becomes freely available online, it becomes a matter of knowing where to look – and my small survey of students revealed that journals are not well known.
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My small survey revealed that students had a hard time identifying a prestigious journal in their field, and the survey from Savage Minds shows that graduate students make up a large percentage of the readership. In my exploration of blogs I found a number of graduate students writing them. So perhaps the limited distribution of academic publishing contributes to the desirability of the blogsphere.

Owen Wiltshire found much “interesting thought” in the blogosphere and wonders if journal publications would only serve for the purposes of gaining prestige: “Everything is being said in conversations elsewhere, but is ‘proved’ in journals”.

In his text, he discusses several reasons for why anthropologists blog – or do not blog. Among other things he talked to several anthropologists who wish there was more room for new ways of writing anthropology.

Several students don’t want to share their thoughts online because they fear of having ideas “stolen”:

Another anthropology professor discussed the way societies he had studied were hierarchical, depending on secrecy and not necessarily the democratic exchange of knowledge – but as my interviews revealed many students worry that ideas can be stolen, and this is perhaps another reason people might have to not blog. Anthropologists in this sense are a hierarchical organization too, and secrecy is indeed a reason many do not feel comfortable sharing or discussing their ideas.

Here is his prelimarlary summary:

Why do Anthropologists Blog?

Public engagement – feedback from beyond the discipline
Less formal – much broader range of style, more complex ways of manipulating knowledge
(video, text, dynamic content)
Community, feedback. Enjoy discussing ideas with others.
Prestige – great place to get known, at least by other anthro bloggers
Younger generation growing up with online publishing – not worried about privacy as much
Perhaps an escape from work/professionalism when reflecting on anthropological ideas

Why Don’t Anthropologists Blog?

Fear that their work isn’t good enough
Do not want to have their name associated with it
Generally not part of internet culture – accessibility
Lack of time – anthropology is a professional topic – there aren’t many “amateur
anthropologists” – although this is one thing many bloggers want to change
Fear of having ideas stolen – desire to “own” ideas.
Prefer traditional publishing mediums – books
Desire for more filtered knowledge
Desire to maintain privacy outside of work

Wiltshire explored this issue by participation in the blogosphere through his own blog, and reading and writing on numerous other anthropology blogs. He also discussed blogging, sharing information, and public engagement with a focus group of six students, and multiple interviews with students and one professor – all at Concordia University.

>> read the whole text on Wiltshire’s blog

>> Follow-up post: forced vs free writing: “Students ignore journals, just as much as journals ignore students”

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

antropologi.info survey: Six anthropologists on Anthropology and Internet

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

On fieldwork: “Blogging sharpens the attention”

Blogging and Public Anthropology: When free speech costs a career

Danah Boyd on Open Access: “Boycott locked-down journals”

Success in publishing defined by quality? Anthropology Matters on “The Politics of Publishing”

Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist

Published on April 13, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, internet, media, technology, Us and Them

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT itself, says IT analyst Tom Austin in an interview by Fast Company.

The interview does not deal with user centered design but with shaping a climate of creativity in the workplace in the Web 2.0 era with Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis and other online social network tools:

A new species of Information Technologist is emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0 — social scientists and humanists who focus on human behavior more than software code. (…) As computer systems become ever more automated and transparent, attention will shift to how to use these tools as social lubricants in the workplace.

MySpace or Facebook will become models for business interaction, Austin thinks:

Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.

Austin tells about companies that are using websites like Facebook to help reinforce or build a social network inside the company to enhance collaboration and productivity:

They use a variety of tools where employees are encouraged to create a personal page where they share not only name, rank, and serial number but also information about prior jobs, interests, hobbies, other skills they may have, projects they’ve worked on, and so forth. That becomes a dynamic and important tool for navigating through the network of people inside the company to find others who may be able to help you.

In this world of the “ad hocracy” that we live in, where people get thrown into project after project, it helps to look at information and figure out, these three people I’m meeting with tomorrow who I’ve never met before. What are they like? Is there something we share in common — a hobby, a background, education, a boss we hated — that you can use to strike up a conversation?

(…)

The problem with IT today is there are too many engineers and not enough social scientists. Look at the numbers of features and controls we put on how things are done. That’s an engineer’s approach, versus some of the free form approach of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking.

>> read the whole interview at FastCompany.com

There is another business anthropology story in the news: In the article Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?, New York Times author Sara Corbett writes about the work done by Nokia-researcher Jan Chipchase, a “human-behavior researcher” and “user-anthropologist” (but with a degree in design, not anthropology):

His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

He works in a similar way as many design anthropologists:

Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

The whole article in The New York Times is interesting but quite long. For a summary including comments see the post over at Neuroanthropology Cellphones Save The World. For more information, see Jan Chipchase’s blog

For an earlier entry on Jan Chipchase, see Capitalism and the problems of “High speed ethnographies”

UPDATE (14.4.08) Anthropologists are part of a research team that wants to find out how mobile phones might be used to allow people to share content with each other >> more information at The Engineer

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology in FinancialTimes

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist at Nokia

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

(via Bits and Bytes) The true value of IT will come not from information or technology per se but from the social side. Therefore anthropologists and other social scientists will become more important to Information Technology (IT) Departments than IT…

Via YouTube: Anthropology students’ work draws more than a million viewers

Published on March 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cyberanthropology, internet, technology, Visual Anthropology

Many assignments go no farther than between the student completing it and the professor grading it. But assignments in Michael Wesch‘s anthropology classes at Kansas State University have been seen around the world and by as many as 1.5 million other people, we read in a press release.

We all know Wesch’ video The Machine is Us/ing Us that was viewed more than five million times. He is no one hit wonder. He has created several popular videos together with his anthropology students.

The spring 2007 intro to cultural anthropology class created the video “A Vision of Students Today”, which has been viewed more than 1.5 million times and prompted others to respond with their own videos. The video is up for a YouTube award for most inspirational video of 2007. It features Wesch’s class describing what it’s like for them to be college students today.

Wesch’s students and their video projects also have drawn attention of media from NBC to BBC. Yet the students’ work makes its way around the world without marketing, Wesch says:

That gets at the complexity of today’s media environment. The students don’t advertise. They get the videos out on blogs, people start linking to them, and other people find them.

>> read the whole press release (includes links to the videos)

>> Digital Ethnography blog by Wesch and others

Many assignments go no farther than between the student completing it and the professor grading it. But assignments in Michael Wesch's anthropology classes at Kansas State University have been seen around the world and by as many as 1.5 million…

Another way of doing fieldwork: Developing websites with your informants!

Published on March 30, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Caribbean, cyberanthropology, development empowerment, fieldwork / methods, internet, journal articles / papers, Native American, technology, websites

Indigenous communities have embraced the internet from early on. The website of the Oneida Indian Nation was set up before the website for the White House. Anthropologist Maximilian C. Forte has developped several websites in collaboration with indigenous organisations. Website development is a mode of action research, he explains in an interesting paper that is based on a recent presentation.

In his research on Caribbean indigenous resurgence, he began offline and later moved online, he writes. It started after he has signed a reciprocity agreement with the leader of the Carib Community in Arima. In return for access to the community, Forte would assist them with whatever technological, graphic, and writing knowledge he had.

Website development is no purely technical process:

The websites that were created represented, to a large extent, collaborative writing exercises, emerging from meetings, conversations, and interviews. Viewers would not have known that the launching of some of the websites were also occasions for parties in my apartment, with photographs, drinking, music, drinking, laughter, and much more drinking.
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The result of these early experiences led to my creating various online fora with a wider embrace, such as the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink – part directory, part listserv, part message board, part online publishing centre – and then one of the earliest and still existing open access, peer reviewed journals in anthropology and history, that being KACIKE.

Together with his indigenous partners (informants) he created the field. In contrast to traditional fieldwork, the researcher and his informants predate the site, they don’t arrive at it.

Web-based and Web-oriented ethnographic research, Forte explains, leads to “a series of moves from participant observation to creative observation, from field entry to field creation, and from research with informants to research with correspondents and partners”:

The Internet permits the co-construction of cultural representations and documentary knowledge, especially where the resource that is produced is the result of collaboration between those we traditionally sorted out as the researchers and the researched.
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Those who were traditionally “the researched about” in offline settings, now have access to the works of researchers, can argue back (as they often do), and produce alternative materials in their own right. No longer is there a simple one-sided determination by the researcher over what research should be about, how it should be done, how it should be written or shown, and what its results should be-researchers are often called to account.

Among the persons and communities that have had access to the technology there has been considerable enthusiasm for the internet from early on. “The Internet may be for marginalized indigenous minorities what the printing press was for European nationalism”, Forte writes. “We are not extinct” has become the leitmotif of online self representations by Caribbean indigenous persons and a basis for online activism, especially among Taínos.

These online struggles have produced some noteworthy successes in gaining recognition and some degree of validation from the usual authorities according to the anthropologist.

>> read the whole paper by Maximilian Forte on his own blog “Open Anthropology”

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

“We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from”

Collaborative Ethnography: Luke Eric Lassiter Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award

Play as research method – new Anthropology Matters is out

Going native – part of the darker arts of fieldworkers’ repertoir?

How to save Tibetan folk songs? Put them online!

The Birth of a Cyberethnographer: The MU5 is to Blame

Ethnographic research: Why care about plagiarism?

Published on March 9, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, internet, journal articles / papers, technology, University / Academia

Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It’s because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum writes in Anthropology News March 2008.

Blum has done ethnographic research on plagiarism and college culture for three years at “Saint Pastoral’s” University.

Social websites like Wikipedia challenge the romantic notion of the author as the individual genius:

While the romantic notion of the author emphasized creation in a vacuum, without influence, touched only by inspiration from the individual’s genius, the new collectivized idea of the author celebrates the kind of creativity that comes from selecting, from accumulating a pastiche, a patchwork, a sample of others’ work. The line between creation and what “copyright fundamentalists” regard as theft is now completely— and consciously—fluid.

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Collectively, one after another, contributors add to or edit Wikipedia articles, without directly requesting credit or payment. The living product is quite essentially collaborative, an accretion of many people’s words belonging to everyone and Common Sense and anthropological Sense no one simultaneously.

(…)

Sharing music, video, text and images is routine and simple on the “digital commons” with YouTube, Flickr and other file-sharing interfaces. Items often follow a circuitous path before they end up on some- one’s iPod or hard drive.

Maybe educators should care lass about plagiarism? Blum concludes:

Faculty can attempt to enforce traditional academic citation norms, but we are well advised to recognize that a large portion of the students we encounter do not share traditional academic values of originality, singularity and individualism in intellectual creation. In the area of authorship, educators’ common sense is not necessarily students’ common sense.

In some ways our students have become folk anthropologists, speaking out about the impossibility of singularity, the shared quality of discourse, the reality of fragments of texts incorporated into every utterance (or written document) and the collective nature of cultural creation. Now that’s a story!

>> read the whole article “The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism” (pdf)

This is one of five articles on “Online Engagement” in Anthropology News March 2008.

New media and anthropology – AAA meeting part III

Plans to study anthropological online communities and Open Access movement

Educators complain about plagiarism. But it is not principally because material is too readily available that students copy and paste material from the internet to their papers. It's because new forms of authorships are emerging online, anthropologist Susan D. Blum…