Neuroanthropology

The Back-In Lede

Over at Savage Minds, Matt Thompson posted Alright, how about a Digital Anthropology Interest Group? earlier this week. The comments are up to twenty-eight, and I want to discuss here Matt’s outline for an interest group within the American Anthropological Association institutional framework and the many suggestions and ideas that people provided.

I have written more on digital anthropology in the past year than I expected, most recently on the AAA’s stand against Open Access (followed by a quick almost-retraction) and an overview of Digital Anthropology: Projects and Platforms.

My own ideas about a digital anthropology group date back to the #AAAfail controversy over science, and the letter a group of anthropologists (including myself) wrote to the AAA leadership. It finished:

We encourage the Executive Board to consider how to support anthropologists working online, and to encourage further online collaboration and dissemination among AAA members. This will strengthen the discipline, and also permit more timely discussion and engagement among AAA members…

We view our online role as anthropologists as contributing a valuable service to the discipline we love. We are hopeful that this episode in our shared history will prove to catalyze important and inclusive dialogue regarding who we are as anthropologists as well as the channels we use to communicate with one another. We encourage the EB and the AAA membership as a whole to participate in this online community, to hear and join with the voices that are coming from within our discipline. This is an opportunity to move past marginalization and work together toward rebuilding a truly interdisciplinary anthropology based on mutual respect.

My thoughts below have also been shaped by Greg’s contributions onsite, in particular his pieces Blogging for Promotion: An Immodest Proposal (take getting credit by the horns!) and Brand Anthropology: New and Improved, with Extra Diversity!

The Digital Anthropology Interest Group – Proposals

What should a Digital Anthropology Interest Group look like? What is its purpose? What will it do? These are important questions raised by Matt and by many commentators, in particular John McCreery.

Matt proposes three basic functions:

(1) Form a common meeting place, both at the AAA conference and online
(2) Compile and communicate important information
(3) Raising awareness and being proactive within the AAA, while connecting to other groups outside the AAA

In terms of the comments, I will highlight four strands:

First, Ryan Anderson writes about an interest group that it should be about “making connections, making things available, and creating places that help direct people (teachers, students, general audience, etc) to the kinds of content that is being produced.”

Second, Danny Miller points to a forthcoming edited volume, Digital Anthropology, that focuses on research on the digital. Besides critiquing the parochialism of a AAA group speaking for digital anthropology coded large, Miller points to how research, training, and funding form a defensible intellectual program within anthropology.

Third, Megan McCullen (among others!) highlights a push for open access and the creation of new platforms and digital repositories for research and dissemination: “a hub for Open Access Anthropology Papers. This is potentially a general repository, possibly one that has some level of peer review, perhaps something that includes both.”

Finally, John Hawks stakes out a different space for the group, one that is not about digital anthropology research but about the presentation of open data, incorporation of digital tools in research, and other digital means for doing research in public and disseminating results in novel and often broad ways. “As I’m reading, it seems that ‘digital anthropology’ engages different audiences in different ways… There clearly is a ‘digital anthropological genetics’ unfolding today, using many of the social media tools that are developing for other kinds of online communication and community building.”

The Digital Anthropology Synthesis

In the Savage Minds comments, John McCreery repeatedly challenges the group to present a coherent vision and purpose for the group. So here goes, a second draft building on the Savage Minds post. Hopefully it will lead to an even better final draft. And an actual formation of a AAA interest group!

The Digital Anthropology group should do three things:

-Foment change
-Focus on research
-Foster communication and networking

Together these can drive strong growth in the group and its broader impact, and have the dynamism and openness to avoid being a “one issue” interest group that might quickly rise and just as quickly fall.

The Digital Anthropology group should foment change both within and outside the American Anthropological Association. It should both support and critically examine open access initiatives, with a focus on how to achieve greater access to anthropological scholarship while having a sustainable business model. It should promote blogging and other forms of online dissemination and public engagement, and argue for greater recognition and accreditation of online scholarship. It should promote outreach across the sub-disciplines in anthropology and between academic and applied anthropologists, while actively working to connect with anthropologists and organizations working outside the American Anthropological Association institutional framework. Finally, the Digital Anthropology group should recognize that inequalities of all sorts recreate themselves online, and that inside and outside the discipline, problems in representation and access will take new forms that need to be addressed both directly and indirectly.

The Digital Anthropology group should focus on research. The group will support anthropologists who focus on digital mediation and engagement – on digital anthropology as an object of research – using a range of anthropological approaches. Anthropologists can also use digital forms to enhance research in other ways, from tackling large data sets to fostering ideas and using social media to improve how research is done. Finally, the Digital Anthropology Group will support researchers in their attempts to do research in public, from making data accessible to the building of repositories for data sets and publications.

The Digital Anthropology group should foster communication and networking. One of its primary purposes will be to provide a common space, both at meetings and online, to communicate and interact among members of the group. The group will also actively pursue ways to provide resources, ideas, examples, and critiques on using digital initiatives and social media in teaching. Given how digital concerns can bring people together in novel ways, the group will draw on digital anthropology as a way to create the flow of ideas and relationships across sub-fields within the AAA, between applied and academic anthropologists, and across international boundaries. Finally, the Digital Anthropology group will actively promote way that digital communication can enhance interactions with the many communities we serve and reach the broader public.

The AAA Digital Anthropology Interest Group – In Brief

The Digital Anthropology Group will provide a common forum so that members help move anthropology to embrace how digital forms of communication, interaction, and research increasingly mediate what we do as anthropologists.

Foment Change
-Open Access
-Online scholarship and accreditation
-Outreach within the field, with practicing anthropologists, and with anthropologists outside the AAA
-Addressing inequalities of access and representation, from indigenous groups to political economic disparities to gender and race online

Focus on Research
-Digital anthropology as a focus of research
-Using digital tools for data and for improving the creation and execution of research
-Support research done in public, including repositories for data and publications

Foster Communication and Networking
-Offer a forum to communicate and interact among members
-Provide resources, ideas, examples and critiques of digital initiatives in teaching
-Draw on digital anthropology as a way to create the flow of ideas and relationships among anthropologists inside and outside the AAA
-Embrace the ways that digital communication can reach the broader public

**CALL FOR PAPERS**

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
San Francisco, CA, November 14-18, 2012

Drug (Ab)use: Border constructions and crossings in the anthropology of psychoactive substances

Co-organizers: Tazin Karim, Roland Moore, Gilbert Quintero, Lee Hoffer, and Daniel Lende on behalf of the Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Study Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology

This panel invites papers that explore the ideological, legal, and physical borders between sanctioned and illicit drug use through ethnography. We argue that the examination of drug behaviors is particularly salient to anthropology because they traverse and influence many culturally constructed boundaries between work/play, ethical/unethical, mind/body, etc. In particular, the recent development and repurposing of certain psychoactive substances has acted to blur the lines between recreation, medication, addiction, and enhancement. Street drugs like marijuana and certain psychedelics are now being reconceptualized as treatments, while prescription stimulants and narcotics continue to become objects of misuse and abuse. Changing prescription practices and the growth of new grey markets further obscure the space between acceptable and improper drug use behaviors.

This panel explicitly asks: what criteria do individuals, populations, and governments use to define appropriate use of these substances? How do substances move within the space between what is acceptable/useful and what is illegal/immoral? In what ways do these values influence access and encourage behaviors necessary to navigate these new borders? How do these beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors construct cultural configurations of health, agency, and identity?

This panel also seeks to shed light on the experience of drug ethnographers as they trace the social lives of drugs through various cycles. How do we as anthropologists and researchers understand and traverse these borders ourselves? How does this influence our interactions with subjects, law enforcement, policy makers and health professionals? In what ways does this influence the overall quality and content of drug ethnography?

Topics might include:

 Drug free zones and trafficking across local/global borders
 Online pharmacies/grey markets
 Changing prescription practices
 E-cigarettes, nicotine patches, etc.
 Prescription drugs v. recreational drugs
 Legalization of marijuana or psychedelics
 Prescription drugs as enhancers
 Drug ethnography and research

Please send titles and 250 word abstracts to: Tazin Karim (karimtaz@msu.edu)

DEADLINE: February 26, 2012

Every summer a group of top-notch anthropologists assembles at the Duke University Marine Laboraties in Beaufort, North Carolina to teach the world how to do cultural anthropology. These methods courses are fully funded by the National Science Foundation (participants need only pay their own transportation) and provide training opportunities for graduate students and faculty.

Deadlines for applications have been extended to this Friday, February 17th, more information can be found at the QualQuant website. The application is available here.

There are three programs this summer:

The Summer Institute on Research Design provides PhD students an intensive three-week course in research design for students preparing their doctoral proposals. It is directed by Jeffrey Johnson of East Carolina University, with Susan Weller and H. Russell Bernard as co-directors.

The Summer Institute on Museum Anthropology is an intensive, four-week course for graduate students in anthropology and related fields who are interested in research methods for the study of museum collections.

Finally, there are the Short Courses in Research Methods, 5-day, intensive training opportunities for faculty members who already hold a PhD in anthropology. These summer there are three great options:

Behavioral Observation in Ethnographic Research (July 16-20, 2012)
Raymond Hames and Michael Paolisso

This five-day course focuses on methods for observing behavior in a field setting to answer questions of anthropological interest, like: time allocation and division of family labor and child labor; locational analysis (where people spend their time and what they do); what students and teachers do an elementary school classroom; energy expenditure and ecology; food and labor exchange; social groups and patterns of association (sex, age, family, kinship, mates); what people talk about during social interactions; and the nature of doctor-patient interaction.

Methods covered include systematic spot or instantaneous sampling of behavior, continuous monitoring of behavior, and computer-assisted approaches to collecting behavioral data in the field, in addition to survey methods, like recall methods, like time diaries. Finally, participants design a behavioral research project they anticipate investigating in the future, using one or a combination of the approaches presented in the course.

Social Network Analysis (July 23-27, 2012)
Jeffrey Johnson and Christopher McCarty

This five-day course focuses on the methods for collecting and analyzing social network data. The first part of the course provides an overview of social network analysis, including fundamental concepts such as cohesion, bridging, directed versus undirected ties, strength of tie, structural holes, one mode and two mode data. You will learn about specific types of social network metrics that are used to describe these concepts and test them against outcome measures that may interest you. You will also learn about social network visualization, which is a way to combine both the composition and structure of the network so that you can quickly identify patterns that are more difficult to find using metrics alone.

The remainder of the course will focus on hands-on data collection and analysis using social network tools. These include Ucinet for whole network analysis and Egonet for personal network analysis. You will learn how to construct a social network questionnaire and how to identify methods for collecting whole network data from existing data (such as e-mail, citations or just plain observation). During the course you will collect data from each other for both whole networks and your own personal networks. These will be analyzed in class so that you will better understand the benefit of these methods and measures.

Analyzing Video Data (July 30-August 3, 2012)
Elizabeth Cartwright and Jerome Crowder

This five-day course prepares participants to collect and analyze anthropological data gathered through video recording. In the first two days, participants learn to use high quality video and audio recording equipment and the basics of video interviewing, including location of audio and lighting, camera handling, and scene composition. Working in small groups, participants generate video footage that they use in the rest of the course to learn coding and analysis.

Participants learn to tag and code images and how to partition their footage into meaningful sequences that can be coded and analyzed for audio and visual content. Naturally occurring speech in the footage can be analyzed thematically, as can movements, interactions, facial expressions, and other observable events. Still images from video allow researchers to measure and more accurately observe subtleties in body language and facial expressions that may not be detected during full-speed play back. Participants learn how to produce still images from video footage and how to use those stills to understand proxemics and as a means for eliciting informants’ descriptions and interpretations of a scene.

QualQuant also details new distance-learning courses in geospatial analysis and text analysis offered this summer. There is also the Summer Field Training in Methods of Data Collection in Bolivia, application due tomorrow.