Anthropology in the digital worlds

A few months ago, BBC did a news series on AI and robotics. Part of the series was a list of jobs ranked according to their ‘automation risks’, on the basis of a paper by two Oxford researchers titled The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to automation. Social and humanities scientists (ranked 279th of 366) and higher education teaching professionals (327th of 366), the jobs to which I related most closely among others on the list, were both in the ‘quite unlikely’ category with a very small risk of being replaced by robots (10% and 3% respectively). Er … a sigh of relief?

In this context, I would imagine that anthropology would be one of the last disciplines to be affected by technology. I believe I am not the only one with such a perception, and I suspect the perception has something to do with the lay distinction that “sociology typically studies first-world societies, whereas anthropology has a rep for studying so-called ‘primitive’ cultures” (Aaron Swartz, 2006).

I have never been formally trained in anthropology, but as I have openly stated before, I have always had a thing for ethnographic fieldwork – something most often associated with anthropologists. Those who have done long-term fieldwork in a remote and harsh environment might dismiss my interest as naivety and say the notion in my head is more romanticised than what it actually entails. That might also be true to an extent, but what can I say? I do find the growing field of “understanding social phenomena as they unfold” both fascinating and important, but in the end I just like my research slowly brewed and rich in nuances.

So, it was an interesting realisation that in my social media feeds I am seeing more and more articles on anthropology/ethnography in the digital age. That’s how another new collection was born, and as in many cases previously, this blog will once again serve as a placeholder.

• Ethnographic approaches to digital media (Gabriella Coleman, Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 487-505)
• Fieldwork in social media: What would Malinowski do? (Annette N. Markham, 2013, Qualitative Communication Research 2(4): 434-446)
• Ethnography: Ellen Isaacs at TEDxBroadway (1 March 2013, crossposted 31 May 2018)
• Why we are all digital anthropologists (Olivia Bellas, CNN, 29 May 2013)
• Ethnography beyond text and print: How the digital can transform ethnographic expressions (Wendy Hsu, Ethnography Matters, 9 December 2013)
• Ethnographic research in a cyber era (Hallett & Barber, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(3): 306-330)
• The emerging science of computational anthropology (MIT Technology Review, 10 June 2014)
• “Just another dad on his cellphone”: Evernote as field notebook (David Keyes, Anthropologizing, 10 January 2015)
• Six ways of doing digital ethnography (John Postill, Media/Anthropology, 16 January 2015)
• Data augmented ethnography: Using big data and ethnography to explore candidates’ digital interactions (Salla-Maaria Laaksonen et al., 30 November 2015)
• Small methods for big data (Heather Ford, Ethnography Matters, 9 February 2016)
• The future of designing autonomous systems will involve ethnographers (Madeleine Clare Elish, Ethnography Matters, 28 June 2016)
• The [human] codebreakers (Jessi Hempel, Backchannel, 8 August 2016)
• Smart ethnography (Goldsmiths Sociology workshop, 16 December 2016)
• What is Cyborg Anthropology? (see also Levi R. Bryant, 2014, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media)
• Digital methods for ethnography: Analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments (Alessandro Caliandro, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, advance online publication 29 April 2017)
• Anthropology with algorithms? An exploration of online drug knowledge using digital methods (Lisa Jenny Krieg, Moritz Berning & Anita Hardon, Medicine Anthropology Theory, 28 September 2017)
• Towards augmented ethnography? Methodologies, theories, and arguments for a data-driven digital ethnography (Matti Pohjonen, SOAS Centre for Global Media and Communications seminar, 11 October 2017)
• Three lies of digital ethnography (Gabriele de Seta, anthro{dendum}, 7 February 2018)
• Digital anthropology (Daniel Miller, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018)
• What should an anthropology of algorithms do? (Nick Seaver, Cultural Anthropology 33(3): 375-385)
• Fieldnotes from the kitchen counter: Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the anthropologists (Anthropology News, 25 January 2019) 😀
• LSE Digital Ethnography Collective Reading List (February 2020)
• Fieldwork in the 21st Century (Geographical Review special issue, 2020, 110(1-2))
• Doing Digital Ethnography: Private Messages from the Field (Journal of Digital Social Research special issue, 2020, 2(1))
• What’s in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research (Ysabel Gerrard, Qualitative Research, 2020)
• A manifesto for patchwork ethnography (Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma & Chika Watanabe, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 9 June 2020)
• Walking through, going along and scrolling back: Ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography (Kristian Møller & Brady Robards, 2019; see also Brady Robards & Siân Lincoln, 2017)
• Computational challenges to test and revitalize Claude Lévi-Strauss transformational methodology (Albert Doja et al., Big Data & Society, “Machine Anthropology” SI, 2021)
• Computational ethnography: A view from sociology (Phillip Brooker, Big Data & Society, 2022)
• Code ethnography and the materiality of power in internet governance (Fernanda R. Rosa, Qualitative Sociology, Digital Ethnography SI, 2022) 
• Hybrid ethnography: Access, positioning, and data assembly (Ruo-Fan Liu, Ethnography, 2022)

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