Anthropology roundup: Dataverse: an open source solution for data sharing…

Dataverse: an open source solution for data sharing

When you think of scholarship you might think first of publications, articles and books, but that is just the final product. Yes it is polished through countless hours of research, writing, and responding to reviewers, however all that work is built on an even more time consuming foundation of collecting raw materials. In cultural anthropology this includes field notes, journals, marked up literature, audio recordings, transcripts, and maybe photographs and video. I think I even have a few 3-D objects squirreled away in banker’s boxes. Although we seldom refer to it as such all of this is “data,” it is information awaiting interpretation.

The House of Commons: An Anthropology of MPs at Work, by Emma Crewe
Times Higher Education
In this first-ever anthropological account of the secrets of the Commons, drawing on Emma Crewe’s first-person interviews with politicians, we learn that one MP won her seat by using modern electioneering methods to target tens of thousands of
A Cultural Anthropologist Reads a Science Journal

One morning, chasing down a lead about research on plant memory from an article published in The Economist, I ended up at the journal Oecologia. This trajectory is increasingly familiar: a news source renders a popular account of life science research, and, trying to learn more, I end up at the academic source. The table of contents quickly overwhelmed me, though, and provoked me to stop for a moment and take stock of what I look for or find interesting in journals on genetics, biology, and botany.

Teaching and using anthropology in the modern world
The Edwardsville Intelligencer
To many, anthropology brings to mind living in remote places, studying mysterious rituals, or harrowing adventures “Indiana Jones” style. These images make anthropology seem very exotic and removed from day-to-day life. In reality, anthropology is .
Fast Writing: Ethnography in the Digital Age

[Savage Minds is pleased to run this essay by guest author Yarimar Bonilla as part of our Writer’s Workshop Series. Yarimar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment(University of Chicago Press, forthcoming Fall 2015) and has written broadly about social movements, historical imaginaries, and questions of sovereignty in the Caribbean. She is currently a fellow in the History Design Studio at Harvard University where she is working on a digital project entitled “Visualizing Sovereignty.”]

In a recent contribution to this writers’ series, Michael Lambek offered some reflections on the virtues of “slow reading.” In an era of rapid-fire online communication, when images increasingly substitute for text, Lambek argues we would be well served to revel in the quiet interiority and reflective subjectivity made possible by long-form reading.

 

While I am trying to get back into the blogging business, here three selected pieces that I’ve written recently for the University of Oslo.

Two of them are accounts on somehow positive change that is happening.

Is email one of the last private spaces online?
Scientific American (blog)
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Email Print. Krystal D’Costa is an anthropologist working in digital media in New York City. You can follow AiP on Facebook. Follow on Twitter @krystaldcosta.

By Profs. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Scott Atran

After he circulated his address to the UN Security Council on extremism (available here), Prof. Scott Atran received the following response from Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan. Prof. Hoodbhoy is a nuclear physicist, essayist, national security advisor, and social activist. A prize-winning scientist with a PhD from MIT, Prof. Hoodbhoy teaches at Forman Christian College University in Lahore and the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. 

Anthropology PhD student explores new approaches to humanitarian photography
Emory University News and Events
“I sat down with Marciella on some rocks in front of her house and had a chat, I asked her how she wanted to be represented,” recalls Aubrey Graham, a photographer and a PhD candidate inanthropology at Emory’s Laney Graduate School. “She said that …

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