I heard about Korsakow in Jan or Feb 2010 from Steve Anderson at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. At that time I was teaching video production in a newly launched MA program in visual anthropology at USC and was also a lecturer in Studio Art at UC Irvine where I taught visual culture and the foundation series in digital art. In spring 2010, I got assigned a class I hadn’t taught before, “Interdisciplinary Digital,” an intermediate projects course focused on the art-making affordances, imaginaries, and practices of networked, digital media. I decided to have the students make K-Films for their first project so I could learn Korsakow alongside them. While it may seem risky to teach a system one is also learning, this is actually the best way to model the process of trying out new software–something that comes up again and again for anyone working in this territory.

Using Korsakow, students can make a database of video clips, thumbnail images, and text, and set up relationships among the clips, or SNUs (smallest narrative units), to create structured pathways through their material without any programming expertise. Readings I have paired with Korsakow assignments include:

• Digital Revolution is a Revolution of Random Access, Grahme Weinbren, 1997
• Generation Flash (.doc), Lev Manovich, 2002
• Database as Symbolic Form (.rtf), Lev Manovich, 1998
• Prologue, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, 2002

Lectures and discussion focus on sequence, structure, and narrative and I talk about Manovich’s conception of database and narrative as primary cultural forms in contemporary media culture.

Korsakow is a free download (both Mac and PC) with excellent documentation and a strong showcase of examples. Students can download and install it on their own computers. This option presents some valuable challenges that I’ll discuss shortly. For less intensive engagement with the technology, installing Korsakow (and making sure Flash is up-to-date) on lab computers is the way to go.

Through this initial experience, I found the value of the Korsakow assignment lies as much or more in the process as the product. That was certainly true for the many students who chose to download and install Korsakow to their own laptops and PCs. These students ran in to all sorts of technical difficulties on many different combinations of platform/OS/browser/Flash version, both with K-film builds and the display of finished projects. This gave me the idea and opportunity to add bug reporting and beta testing to the assignment. Both activities, by the way, that benefit from and hone observational and note taking skills so central to ethnography.

Most of the students had never before downloaded and installed an app like Korsakow and had never used non-commercial, free/open source software (F/OSS). The experience of troubleshooting on their own computers, learning to write meaningful bug reports, and in some cases, posting these to the Korsakow.org forum and getting help, was tremendously valuable. I was able to explain how software like Korsakow is developed, and talk about the difficulties of cross-platform development with a budget and user base far, far smaller than the Adobe and Microsoft suites they’re more familiar with. They come to see the similarity between software development (of Korsakow) and their own work as artists who want to explore digital, code, and networked art. Both involve interface, usability, cross-platform accessibility, and require backend structures and processes that don’t exist in quite the same way in the plastic arts (sculpture, painting, etc.).

For digital arts students, I push the lesson of cross-platform complexity and inter-operability even further by extending it to consumption (distribution and display) of their K-films. This is a highly effective way to demonstrate the many social conventions and shared protocols required to make media technologies work. Students were required to post their films online by the due date and, over the next few days, view and post feedback on all peer projects, including detailed bug reports on projects they could not view, had missing images, or other errors. I provided a template for them to fill-in system information on hardware/software they were using to view. After the project was done and graded, we wrote up a comprehensive report and posted it back to the Korsakow forum. The whole experience was a valuable initiation into testing and bug reporting as vital parts of the production process.

After this I wanted to use Korsakow with my ethnographic film students at USC, but our MVA program is cinema-centric, with the thesis requirement a 20- to 30-minute video. My strategy for introducing these students to non-linear, interactive media is to schedule the K-film assignment late in the second semester of my yearlong production seminar. At this point students have already spent time analyzing narrative structures and developing treatments for their thesis. They’ve all shot interviews and other video, logged footage, transcribed interviews, and learned paper-edit techniques, such as making index cards for all selected clips and playing with arrangements. I introduce Korsakow and the genre of the database documentary, showing pieces like Planet Galata: A bridge in Istanbul and The Border Between Us. I point out that the stacks of index cards representing interview clips and other sequences selected for potential inclusion in a film is a database of material through which there are many possible paths. The K-film assignment is an opportunity to get a fresh perspective on their material, explore some possible paths, and discover new relations among clips. Even if they have no interest in making this type of new media, I argue that the K-film is an exercise that gives them an opportunity to play and take a break from the heavy and serious burden that all thesis projects become after 9-months work.

This year’s MVA cohort, a remarkable group, produced some fine work in the 3 weeks they had for the assignment and the 2013 MVA K-Films demonstrate the possibilities of the database documentary for ethnographic representation. In using Korsakow, I bring my own research on new forms and social imaginaries of media production and consumption into my teaching of ethnographic filmmaking. My argument is that, while cinema remains a dominant and relevant cultural form, it exists today within an entirely new media ecology that radically alters both production and consumption processes and contexts. My students will need to thrive in this ecology and I believe having both hands-on and theoretical understandings of it will be a great benefit.

Though they write about new media, both Weinbren (1997) and Manovich (2001) privilege cinema and make their arguments in cinematic terms, which goes over well with my MVA students, young ethnographic filmmakers embarked on their first serious missions. The fact that Manovich devotes his prologue to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, a film they study in depth as a formative influence on documentary and ethnographic cinema, only furthers their connection and sense that, however great their devotion to cinema, it is always already part of a much wider cultural sphere. Theorizing the practice of cine-ethnography within this sphere is the book on which I’m currently working.

The post Teaching with Warez: Korsakow and the Database Documentary appeared first on blog.castac.org.

Erving Goffman argued that identity is always performed opportunistically during social interactions; however, in the popular imagination, a disconnect between online and offline identity is often thought of as playacting—or a falsehood—where the actual, someone’s physical characteristics for example, is privileged as the truth against which all else is measured. What can happen then to national identity or ethnicity when visitors to online spaces not only consume this foreign-ness, but also go a step further, electing to adopt and inhabit these alternate identities?

Many Western fans of Japanese popular media belong to a vocal transnational community of desire that is engaged in the direct performance of a kind of “Japaneseness.” Frequently appropriating the term otaku (translated as geek), this community of fans not only purchase and pirate Japanese media and import Japanese commodities, often they also study Japanese history and culture, learn to speak Japanese, and even live and work in Japan. Because of what’s viewed as their excessive interest in Japan, these fans are perceived to be both racist and shallow. While some do adopt the affected cadence of anime characters, or pepper their speech with simple Japanese phrases and cultural references (as lampooned in the Saturday Night Live skit J-Pop America Fun Time Now), there are just as many fans who are self-conscious about the mediated nature of their interests in Japan.

Online, is it possible for American fans to shed what marks them as, in this case, other, and “become” Japanese? In particular, when their performances, however essentialized, don’t stay tethered to virtual origins but instead circulate into daily conversations and cross linguistic and national boundaries, the dividing line between what is Japanese and what isn’t can become muddied; anime inspired artwork, posted online and then circulated as an artifact separated from its creator, is one example. This is made only murkier when American fans move to Tokyo and find work in the videogame and anime industries, helping to produce the very commodities that brought them to Japan in the first place.

What then is the relationship between being virtually Japanese, and actually Japanese? Tom Boellstorff and others have already investigated this relationship in a broad sense, suggesting that the question cannot be easily dismissed. Yet some scholars who study Japan have argued that Western fans are merely consuming “J-cool,” an empty brand signifier, and that such fans are unable to understand, in fact are not even interested in connecting to, the “real” Japan. Others might argue that this fan community remains marginalized to small, and eccentric English-language websites, circulating only in a feedback loop of other fans and disconnected from real Japanese people. However, this assumption is also complicated by the fact that communications technologies afford not only the performance of Japaneseness by non-Japanese, but also, again, the incorporation of these performances within Japan. Virtual locations are themselves of course intensely transnational; for example, “real” Japanese citizens also inhabit Second Life and play within it, and with what it means to be Japanese.

As the intensified global circulation of people and things continues to reinvigorate national gate-keeping practices, and new technologies are utilized by states to limit and contain the movement of people across national borders, any answer to this question then must also go beyond considering the affordances of new technologies; it must also contend with asking who is invested in maintaining the dividing line between who is, and who isn’t, appropriately Japanese.

The post American Fans of Japanese Popular Culture as Foreign-Identity Consumers appeared first on blog.castac.org.

***

There’s a new sociological variable in town, one which I call performing technical affiliation. Technically speaking, it is not a new way of thinking about identity. For many years, perhaps millennia, people have enacted aspects of identity by interacting with and through technologized objects, forms of knowledge and related practices and values. Nevertheless, technical affiliation is not recognized on the same level of analytical importance as are traditional variables—such as class, sex, gender, ethnicity, and social race—that are most often cited in anthropological studies of sociality. It is time that technical affiliations are brought more systematically into analyses of identity and negotiations of the self.

Performing technical affiliation means displaying in words or actions, alliances to objects, values, beliefs, or practices that are often assumed to be associated with particular technical cultures (Lange 2003, 2011). A basic example might be someone declaring, “I can’t live without my iPhone!” meaning that they prefer this device and its interactional implications over those offered by other devices or other brands of mobile phone. When people affiliate toward something, they also tend to affiliate away from something else. Performances may be much more subtle and complex. They refer to more than purchasing decisions (which are of course laden with many other beliefs). Performances can indicate how people accomplish being a competent, moral person in the world. For instance, some people believe that learning about technology is best accomplished in a self-directed way, rather than through taking classes in schools. How one should learn to use technical systems, or how one should share information through media are important aspects of everyday identity performance. Performing technical affiliation routinely occurs in offline, as well as online contexts.

The concept draws on Goffman’ (1959) notion of performing the self in everyday life, but does not imply a simple binary that equates performances with being “onstage” versus hiding a more true self “offstage.” Such a notion has often simplistically been applied to studies of computer-mediated communication to dichotomize online (onstage) versus offline (offstage) behavior. But writing many years ago, Goffman (1963: 9) demonstrated that such an assumption over determines how much identity information is actually shared in person. Speaking about in person interaction, he used the term “virtual” identity to refer to incorrect assumptions that people impute onto others, such as assuming they have never been in prison, have never had a depression, or have never harbored other stigmas. A binary application of the performance concept also under determines what identity information is shared online. Studies too numerous to list here have shown how much identity information is given and given off (in Goffman’s sense) in online contexts.

The concept of performing technical affiliation instead emphasizes Goffman’s (1981) work on footing, which acknowledges that people may exhibit different levels of intensity or commitment to beliefs and practices. Some people may be animating someone else’s original statements and technologically-inflected worldviews. Others may be the authors or originators of such beliefs, and hold them to be very influential in their everyday decision making. The concept is purposefully broad to accommodate many levels of affiliation. An analogy may be drawn to the metaphor of affiliation to a club. One person may receive the newsletter and read it now and again; another person may be the club’s president.

Another vignette may illustrate the concept. Years ago, I gave a talk at the American Anthropological Association meeting. At one point, a speaker who was using a laptop PC struggled to get his audio-visuals to display properly. Another person on the panel quipped, “You should have used a Mac.” A few knowing chuckles traveled around the room. Later, after hearing my talk, this panelist told me that his quip was not a good example of performing technical affiliation, because he had no personal affiliation to the Macintosh computer. I assured him that it was an excellent example.

Recall that the concept takes into account different levels of performativity and varying commitments to the affiliations contained therein. His remark performed affiliation to the idea that Macintosh computers are better for manipulating media than are PCs. He was animating a notion that was commonly held (although may or may not be true), among Macintosh supporters, and others who believe it. His was a performance that would not be intelligible if people did not think that this belief was common. The joke would unintelligibly fall flat if everyone “knew” that PCs and Macs were equally effective for working with media. He himself does not have to believe the idea in order for the joke/performance to “work.”

Performing technical affiliation is a part of human life; people cannot get particular jobs or have certain kinds of successful relationships if they do not convincingly display particular orientations to specific technologies or technically-inflected worldviews and values. But sometimes performing technical affiliation can be problematic not only for individuals but society as a whole. For example, in her classic ethnography of physicists, Traweek (1988) noted a competitive tension between the theoretical physicists and the experimental physicists in an advanced research lab. The latter designed experiments to test the theories of the former.

Advances in physics could not proceed without their collaboration, but identity displays often coded in-group members as superior to out-group members. A theoretical physicist told Traweek that it was appropriate for an anthropologist to study such a “primitive tribe” as experimentalists. Each group learned to display a “studied disregard for each other’s judgment” (Traweek 1988: 112). One empirical question is, to what extent do such displays advance or impede the production of human knowledge? How might their collaboration change if their cultural disregard was seen as a performance of technical affiliation that, if changed, could advanced the field much further?

It may be objected that technical affiliations only apply to specialized groups or elite technologists. But such an assumption ignores the anthropological record, and how technologies influence how people conceive of the self and how they choose to be a moral person in the world. For example, consider Gershon’s (2010) book on breaking up on the social network site of Facebook. She argues that people held definite ideas about how one should end a romantic relationship. Using particular media was seen to reflect something important about the morality and sensitivity of the person breaking up. If a person chose to break up over Facebook rather than in person, people used this information to make moral judgments about them. Their media choices often had more salience in determining a person’s social character in those situations than any of the other traditional identity variables. To argue that Facebook is or is not a true “technology” are, in and of themselves, performances of technical affiliation.

Another objection may be that people do not consciously orient toward technical affiliations in everyday life. Yet, the impact of any identity variable such as class, ethnicity, gender, and so forth must be empirically shown to be important in analyses of social behavior. Just because people do not verbalize or understand the impact of their affiliations is not sufficient proof that the variable is unimportant for understanding contemporary self-construction. The same argument may be forwarded with regard to other variables, such as class. Americans often say they are in the “middle class” and do not necessarily orient around class. Yet these elisions do not prove that class is irrelevant for people’s social negotiation of the self, nor that society is “class-blind” with regard to determining socio-economic opportunities.

Perhaps hesitancy about adopting the construct exists because identity variables such as gender and class may influence people’s technical affiliations. But such variables are not predictive of technical affiliations. Knowing that someone is a man of a certain economic class, for instance, does not determine his views on whether computer platforms should all be open source, or whether he should take certain drugs to address health issues, or whether learning the programming language of Python is a good use of his time. Certainly, technical affiliations have interactions with other variables, as is the case with traditional identity variables. For example, in reaction to second wave feminism, which explored universalized experiences of womanhood, third wave feminists convincingly showed that other variables such as ethnicity and class brought much to bear on the experiences of being a woman in particular cultural groups. The same is true of technical affiliations. Important interactions between such affiliations and other identity variables should be empirically studied to broaden understanding of how technologized worldviews impact self-construction.

The time is right to acknowledge what has been discussed for a quite some time. As long-standing cyborgs, people’s technologized identities have historically been part of the human condition (Haraway 1991). Affiliations to technologies and related values and world views speak volumes about who we are as people, as members of cultures, and as individuals. Technical affiliations are crucial aspects of social identity. Scholars should systematically incorporate them in analytical studies of social behavior as routinely as any other traditional sociological variable.

REFERENCES

Gershon, Ilana. 2010. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Lange, Patricia G. 2011. Video-mediated Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technical Competencies. Visual Communication 10(1): 25-44.

Lange, Patricia G. 2003. Virtual Trouble: Negotiating Access in Online Communities. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Michigan. Available from UMI at: http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The post Performing Technical Affiliation appeared first on blog.castac.org.

One answer comes from Makers: the New Industrial Revolution, where outgoing WIRED editor Chris Anderson sees 3-d printers as driving a wave of small-scale manufacturing. Recent advances have dropped the price of additive printing systems, which delicately squeeze out plastic that hardens to make nearly any shape, to the $500-1000 range. Anderson takes Negroponte’s famous statement of working with “bits not atoms” and turns it on its head: bits can now lead to change in atoms. He sees this as the natural application of his “long tail” thesis to small businesses… call it the “materialities turn” of Internet purchasing, where everybody can print out artisanal-style widgets. No longer do we need to be content with buying something and having it shipped, we can simply print it on a 3-d printer of our own or in a local workshop.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that enthusiasm for cheap 3-d printers gained momentum through the hacker and maker space (HMS) movement. Initially, 3-d printers were too expensive and difficult to fine-tune for your average user. Being part of an HMS provided access to a knowledge base and funding for tools. These devices also tickle hackers’ longstanding fascination with using technology to push boundaries of what is possible. HMS members immediately saw the benefit to one, because being able to print anything was a natural extension of their particular fusion of hacker and maker culture… think an “information should be free” hacker ethic meets hands-on craft.

My hesitance around Anderson’s enthusiasm is that his framing of 3-d printers is pure economic boosterism. There’s nothing inherent about 3-d printers that engenders it to a larger revolution. First, makerbots do not make something out of nothing any more than cars allow people to be magically transported from place to place. The plastic has to be purchased/shipped, the device assembled, and software understood. These require a pretty substantial investment in terms of money (from Maker industries the plastic costs $48 per kg plus shipping) and literacies. Second, the type of objects that are printable are rather limited. Additive printing, which uses plastic, is currently more popular than subtractive printing, which whittles down a block of wood or plastic to create a finished product. Third, 3-d printing can be quite finicky and difficult. Printing and assembling the plastic derringer that has garnered so much of the news cycle lately is a rather difficult process to produce a one-shot gun that (if you’re lucky) can be safely fired once or twice before cracking. 3-d printers may be useful ways to create parts or prototypes, but they will never be the best way to make many objects.

Hopes of 3-d printers re-invigorating the American economy also have a whiff of jingoism, or at minimum, an overbearingly anglo western male perspective. I had the same issue with Shop Class as Soul Craft, Matthew Crawford’s ode to working with one’s hands. In the book’s final chapter he wondered aloud while observing Indian workers if his profoundly male, western ideals of craft could exist overseas. What seemed to elude him is that western culture doesn’t have a monopoly on DIY. People in other countries are picking up on the same possibilities as American hobbyists do, but in profoundly different ways. If “maker culture” is anything, it is infinitely mutable. My friend Silvia Lindtner has been busy exploring shanzhai in China, where the government backs HMSs as locations for distributed R&D.

What seems more likely than a total economic revolution is what has always happened: the simultaneous advancement of hobbyist uses alongside more sophisticated for-profit applications of 3-d printing. Semi-amateur uses of these printers initially drew from practices developed for free and open-source software (F/OSS) software, where plans were made freely available. The shift towards closed-source has proven rather controversial, as evidenced in the flap surrounding the MakerBot Replicator 2 not going fully open-source. The goals of the open-source wing of this community are also somewhat odd. For example, a goal of the RepRap is “self-replication” – the 3-d printer could print another 3-d printer, continuing the existence (evolution?) of its species. While it’s an interesting provocation, self-replication is quite a ways off.

We can expect a progressive integration of 3-d printing with specific industries where they serve a purpose that isn’t currently being met with existing technologies. Expensive medical implants and prosthetics can be custom-printed for cheaper and with a more rapid turnaround. Toy manufacturing is based in plastics and always growing towards the more obscure, customized, and personal among hardcore adult RPG fans. But just because you can print a toilet and toilets are needed in third-world countries, doesn’t mean that we should start sending 3-d printers there. Looming socio-economic problems in areas with complex political histories can’t always be solved by applying the latest expensive tool.

The post A 3-D Future: A Response to Chris Anderson’s “Makers” appeared first on blog.castac.org.

Given TAF’s structure — thematic filing cabinets where data and projects are organized — we have many small findings, related to specific projects. For example, in our most expansive project “Asthmatic Spaces”, comparisons of data produced by state agencies (health and environmental), have made various layers of knowledge gaps visible, spaces where certain types of data, in certain places, is not available (Frickel, 2009). Knowledge gaps can be produced by an array of factors, both within organizations and because of limited support for cross agency collaboration. Another focus of “Asthmatic Spaces” (which aims to compare the asthma epidemic in a half dozen cities in the U.S. and beyond) is to examine how asthma and air quality data are synced up (or not) and made usable across public, private, and nonprofit organizations.

In another project area, “Asthma Knowledges”, we’ve gained a better understanding of how researchers conceptualize asthma as a complex condition, and how this conceptualization has shifted over the last decade, based on emerging epigenetic research. In “Asthma Care” we’ve learned that many excellent asthma education programs have been developed and studied, yet only a fraction of these programs have been successfully implemented, such as in school settings. Our recent focus has been to figure out what factors are at play when programs are successful.

Below I offer three overarching observations, taken from what our “breakout teams” have learned working on various projects over the last few years:

*In the world of asthma research, data production is uneven in myriad ways. This is the case at multiple levels — seen in public health surveillance and our ability to track asthma nationally, as well as at the state and county level; as seen through big data, generated by epigenetic research; in the scale of air quality monitoring, which is conducted at the level of cities and zip codes rather than at neighborhood or street level. Uneven and fragmented data production is to be expected; as ethnographers, we’re interested in what this unevenness and fragmentation tells us about local infrastructure, environmental policy, and the state of health research. Statistics on asthma prevalence, hospitalizations, and medical visits are easy to come by in New York State and California, for example; experts on these data sets are readily found. In Texas and Tennessee, on the other hand, this kind of information is harder to come by; more work is involved in piecing together data narratives and finding people who can speak to the state of asthma locally. Given that most of what we know about asthma comes from studies conducted in major cities, where large, university-anchored medical systems help organize health infrastructure, we wonder what isn’t being learned about asthma and air quality in smaller cities, rural areas, and the suburbs; what does environmental health (and asthma specifically) look like beyond urban ecologies and communities? We find this particularly interesting given the centrality that place has for asthma as a disease condition and epidemic.

*Asthma research is incredibly diffuse and diverse. Part of the idea for The Asthma Files came from Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun’s work on a previous project where they perceived communication gaps between scientists who might otherwise collaborate (on asthma research). Thus, one of our project goals has been to document and characterize contemporary asthma studies, tracing connections made across research centers and disciplines. In the case of a complex and varied disease like asthma — a condition that looks slightly different from one person to the next and is likely produced by a wide composite of factors — the field of research is exponential, with studies that range from pharmaceutical effects and genetic shifts, to demographic groups, comorbidities, and environmental factors like air pollution, pesticides, and allergens. Admittedly, we’ve been slow to map out different research trajectories and clusters while we work to develop better visualization tools in PECE (see Erik Bigras’s February post on TAF’s platform).

What has been clear in our research, however, is that EPA and/or NIEHS-funded centers undertaking transdisciplinary environmental health research seem to advance collaboration and translation better than smaller scale studies. This suggests that government support is greatly needed in efforts to advance understanding of environmental health problems. Transdisciplinary research centers have the capacity to conduct studies with more participants, over longer periods of time, with more data points. Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health provides a great example. Engaging scientists from a range of fields, CCCEH’s birth cohort study has tracked more than 700 mother-child pairs from two New York neighborhoods, collecting data on environmental exposures, child health and development. The Center’s most recent findings suggest that air pollution primes children for a cockroach allergy, which is a determinant of childhood asthma. CCCEH’s work has made substantial contributions to understandings of the complexity of environmental health, as seen in the above findings. Of course, these transdisciplinary centers, which require huge grants, are just one node in the larger field of asthma research. What we know from reviewing this larger field is that 1) most of what we know about asthma is based on studies conducted in major cities, 2) that studies on pharmaceuticals greatly outnumber studies on respiratory therapy; that studies on children outnumber studies on adults; that studies on women outnumber studies on men; and that many of the studies focused on how asthma is shaped by race and ethnicity focus on socioeconomic factors and structural violence; finally, 3) that over the last fifty years, advancements in inhaler technology mechanics and design has been limited in key ways, especially when compared to a broader field of medical devices.

*Given the contextual dimensions of environmental health, responses to asthma are shaped by local factors. What’s been most interesting in our collaborative work is to see what comes from comparing projects, programs, and infrastructure across different sites. What communities and organizations enact what kinds of programs to address the asthma epidemic? What resources and structures are needed to make environmental health work happen? Environmental health research of the scale conducted by CCCEH depends on a number of factors and resources — an available study population, institutional resources, an air monitoring network, and medical infrastructure, not to mention an award winning grassroots organization, WE-ACT for Environmental Justice. Infrastructure can be just as uneven and fragmented as the data collected, and the two are often linked: Despite countless studies that associate air pollution and asthma, less than half of all U.S. counties have monitors to track criteria pollutants. And although asthma education programs have been designed and studied for more than two decades now, implementation is uneven, even in the case of the American Lung Association’s long-standing Open Airways for Schools. This is not to say that asthma information and care isn’t standardized; many improvements have been made to standardize diagnosis and treatment in the last decade. Rather, it’s often the form that care takes that varies from place to place. One example of what has been a successful program is the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America’s Breathmobile program. Piloted in California more than a decade ago, Breathmobiles serve hundreds of California schools each year and more than 5,000 kids. Not only are eleven Breathmobiles in operation in California, but the program has also been replicated in Phoenix, Baltimore, and Mobile, AL. Part of the program’s success in California can be attributed to the work of the state’s AAFA chapter, and partnerships with health organizations, like the University of Southern California and various medical centers. Importantly, California has historically been a leader in responses to environmental health problem.

As we continue our research, in various fieldsites, grow our archive, and implement new data visualization tools, we hope to expand on these findings and further synthesize from our collective work. And beyond what we’re learning about the asthma epidemic and environmental health in the U.S., we’ve also taken many lessons from our collaborative work, and the platform that organizes us.

The post Findings From The Asthma Files appeared first on blog.castac.org.

I come to this discussion out of the excellent recent post by Chris Furlow on competitive cycling. Chris suggests that discourse amongst cyclists centers on a notion of “performance.” Here, I want to suggest that fake bodies and winning bodies, while they are both “drug” bodies, point to different kinds of performances.

I use “performance” here differently than Chris did, but in rather interesting relation to it… I will get to that later. For the moment, I am thinking along the lines of Judith Butler’s citations. Bodybuilders practice highly disciplined regimes of diet, exercise, and sleep toward transforming themselves into an ideal form. In competition, men and women display their bodies and compete for who most closely approaches the “ideal body.” The ideal body for both men and women is a combination of more muscle (for size), less fat (for “definition”) and symmetry, a somewhat ineffable balance of proportion. This goes for competitions across the board, whether “all natural” or not. Yet I would argue that these performances, these citations of an ideal, are not the same, and the distinction is embodied in the tension between authenticity (the alternative to fake) and winning (the alternative to “dead”).

When I first began researching bodybuilders in 2005-6, I was intrigued by the notion of “drugs” as a kind of moving target. For some, drugs were “anything that isn’t legal” while for others, the purists of the pure, all supplements were artificial and therefore suspect, though vitamins were described as a necessary evil. Clearly, they pointed to a boundary, a sense of what is and is not the proper domain of the natural human. What I discovered over the course of my dissertation research in 2006-2007 was that the distinction between “real bodies” and “fake bodies” for the all natural athletes I worked with pivoted on notions of what muscles said about the person. To develop a bodybuilding physique without the aid of growth hormones or steroids takes time, discipline, and an understanding of nutrition, physiology, and ones own body that informants called, broadly, “knowledge.” While steroids also demand careful management and in that sense a good deal of knowledge, “drug bodies” were seen as fake because they came too easily, without the kinds of qualities that a muscular body would represent if it were “real.”

Yet members of the all natural gym where I did the bulk of my research were sympathetic towards those who “went over to the dark side.” It was understandable, they told me, in a sport where drugs were the condition of possibility for success. While some said they preferred a more “natural aesthetic,” even those role models were drawn from amongst competitors who were known to have used steroids to achieve their looks (most commonly, Frank Zane). It was in reading Chris’ post regarding “performance” and cycling that I began to think about what kinds of “performance” the elite bodybuilder embodies.

What comes to mind, more or less simultaneously, is the continuity between the Olympic Games motto of “faster, higher, stronger” and “Moore’s Law” of the technology industry where I now work, which foretold (quite accurately, it would seem), that the number of transistors on a computer chip would roughly double every year. Across these very different contexts, it strikes me there is an ideology of surpassing, of endless and exponential growth that, the housing crisis of recent years notwithstanding, articulates a particular ideology of what “success” is that is common to both. In a bootstrap nation where success and failure are seen as a question of personal responsibility, and a reflection of individual capacity, winning means going above and beyond oneself, doing “whatever it takes.” The bodies of champion bodybuilders, the “monster bodies” of Jay Cutler, Ronnie Coleman, or Phil Heath, represent an ideal of “performance” as surpassing to the nth degree, an ideological refusal of glass ceilings, limits, or boundaries.

In their own way, the all natural bodybuilders I spoke to were also very much concerned with surpassing overcoming limits. The difference between all natural and elite bodybuilding was a question of what limitations were to be surpassed, and what various kinds of surpassing signified.

This is a tension that continues to fascinate me now; it is this issue that ties together my past work on bodybuilders where at first glance “technology” seems mostly the kind with weights and pulleys, and my current research on data, technology and the body. It is the dynamic movement between constrained notions of a proper, authentic, all natural “human,” and the effervescent rejection of those boundaries as mere challenges to be surpassed in hard work, discipline, and the next-gen technological innovation. What makes us human? How do we want to be human in the future? When, in the incorporation of technologies, by ingesting them, or as physical prosthetics such as spectacles that extend our capacities to see (farther, sharper, clearer), do these technologies become part of us, of what and who we are, and when are they mere fakery, muscle suits that conceal the diminished skinny guy within?

The post On Being a “Natural” Human appeared first on blog.castac.org.

While all of the papers provide key insights, three articles in particular will likely be of interest to CASTAC readers in light of their challenges to the dominant metaphor of the ‘network’ prevalent in internet and digital media studies. The first is the paper by John Postill and Sarah Pink (2012) that focuses upon social media ethnography and what they term ‘internet-related ethnography’. Departing from paradigms of network and community based research online, Postill and Pink focus upon the research process and how media ethnographers use the affordances of social media to understand ‘connecting online and locality-based realities’. They introduce what they describe as five routines – catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting and archiving – that are aligned to the ways in which sociality and movement construct ethnographic places. Their focus is on the ‘intensities’ of social media activity and the repercussions of this across the ‘messy’ web, as well as in face-to-face contexts.

A second article, co-authored by Sarah Pink and Larissa Hjorth (2012), looks at Location-Based Service games (LBS) and the unofficial game play of intertwining images with places. Demonstrating how these sites become the key spaces through which practices of ‘emplaced visuality’ emerge, they highlight how LBS camera phone images place becomes a process of perpetual oscillation between ‘placing’ (actively situating or contextualising phenomena) and ‘presencing’ (‘being there’ through various presences). Their analysis also seeks to shift the conversation from ‘networked visuality’ to the practice of ‘emplacement’, a response to the changing cartography of co-presence whereby binaries between online and offline experiences no longer hold and reflect a broader, sensorial experience of place.

Finally, the third article by Wanning Sun (2012), also focuses upon digital literacy, working class political consiousness and cameraphone practices. Sun draws on sustained interaction with a dozen migrant activists in Beijing to consider ‘the potential of digital media to construct collective self-ethnography, as well as its capacity to effect political socialisation and social change’. As she chronicles, the migrant working class has been able to articulate their struggles through mobile phone images and user created content. As we began to see in September 2012 Foxconn, the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods, closed its factory doors in light of investigations over poor working conditions. Indeed, Foxconn first came to global attention when workers began to document—through camera phone images and poetry—the inhumane conditions that had led to numerous suicides. Suns article conveys the complexity of mobile media as a source for exploitation and a site for empowerment and media literacy.

The special issue also corresponds with the establishment of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia (Website: http://www.digital-ethnography.net/). Co-directed by Heather Horst and Larissa Hjorth, the Digital Ethnography Research Centre seeks to foster cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and multi-sited research around this important field in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Through research and critical engagement, it will collectively push the boundaries and possibilities of ethnographic practice in, through and around digital media. DERC is committed to further forging the School’s strength in digital ethnography by developing international and regional collaborations through a series of workshops, publications and projects.

In this inaugural year we will be home to a number of exciting projects (http://www.digital-ethnography.net/projects/) on topics ranging from posthumous duets with musicians on Japanese television (Shelley Brunt), slow cities and urban activism across Australia (Tania Lewis and Sarah Pink), changing media environments across the Pacific region (Heather Horst and Jo Tacchi), mobile gaming and well-being (Larissa Hjorth), activism and political participation in Barcelona and Jakarta (John Postill), lifestyle television across Asia (Tania Lewis) and others. With funding from the Australian Research Council, Youth and Well-being CRC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a range of others, these projects have also attracted a dynamic group of postgraduate students and research assistants. We hope to grow our partnerships with other individuals and organizations through seminar series, workshops and hosting visiting scholars.

To learn more about the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, contact Heather Horst or Larissa Hjorth at digitalethnographyrc@gmail.com.

Contributions to the Media International Australia special issue include:

“Rethinking ethnography: An introduction” Heather Horst, Larissa Hjorth and Jo Tacchi

“Media ethnography and the disappearance of communication theory” Virginia Nightingale

“Normativity and materiality: A view from digital anthropology” Heather Horst and Daniel Miller

“The ethnographer as community manager: Language translation and user negotiation” Jonathan Hutchinson

“Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web” John Postill and Sarah Pink

“Amateur photography as self-ethnography: China’s rural migrant workers and the question of digital-political literacy” Wanning Sun

“Emplaced cartographies: Reconceptualising camera phone practices in an age of locative media” Sarah Pink and Larissa Hjorth

The post Digital Ethnography appeared first on blog.castac.org.

[Cross Posted at CultureDigitally.org]

Ask an anthropologist a question and they’ll tell you a story. In this case, you didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell. During the fall of 2012, I was perusing my Facebook feed before bedtime, imagining myself to be reconnecting with old friends and keeping up with their lives through their links, posts and various photos. I was ruminating on the continually tweaked feed algorithms that always seemed to send friends into the foreground and others out of view. One old friend in particular and his regular kid photos were strangely absent, so I flicked open the side panel of Facebook’s iOS client and began searching for his name. Nothing turned up in the auto-complete, which was strange… At which point I quickly realized it meant that I had been un-friended. Indeed an actual search yielded his profile, which offered me the friendly blue-button “Add Friend.” At which point I pondered, “I thought we were.”

Here was a guy who I shouldn’t have been friends with. He was a football player and I was a geek. I played video games and took Computer Science classes (and Women’s Studies classes). He was a Physics Major and jock. But, we lived next door to one another and after a particularly extensive round of playing Quake on my PowerBook 3400 I had stepped into the hallway of my dorm to be greeted with the sound of retching next door. I dropped in and asked, “hows it going?” (Incidentally, probably one of my de facto ethnographic questions.) We ended up chatting for a few hours (it was his roomate, not him having difficulty) until the worst seemed over and I eventually retired to my room.

A few years later, he was still a football player, but also a Mathematics and Computer Science Major, similar to myself. We worked together on a project team during our senior-level software engineering course. We cajoled one another through a particularly horrific experience with a probability course. We even managed to get snowed into a computer lab while crunching at the end of our senior project. Once we graduated, like most college kids, everyone went their separate ways. A decade later (or more, now that I think about it) when I received a friend request from him on Facebook, I was happy to accept and seemingly catch up.

Designing Publicly

A different story: I started playing with Facebook’s Developer APIs a couple of years ago, teaching them as part of summer courses at the University of Georgia in the New Media Institute. An early prototype was a Facebook “App” that displayed a leader-board of users who had authorized the app according to those with the most friends. In other words, it would show a top ten list of those with the most friends of the users who had authorized the app. It was a sample bit of code for students, but also a moment to get them to reflect on how many “friends” on Facebook they had and what that meant.

After my un-friending experience I returned to the Facebook social graph. I built a prototype app that would, when you visited the app, let you know who your new friends and un-friends were since your last visit. Relatively easy. I suspect that is what some of the available systems do right now. Some even do it for Twitter.

But, I was reluctant to do anything with the app (in particular release it). It seemed too much like “friend” surveillance, and we have more than enough of that already without each and every person on Facebook self-surveilling one another. There was also the issue of resources. If I did something like this well, I knew it would get use. Did I really want to offer tribute to the god of Amazon Web Services (AWS) just to allow people to know when they’d been un-friended? Because scale is a very real issue here.

When I queried the Facebook Oracle on the idea, even my network of friends were interested/apprehensive/dubious/worried. But why did I care? I was interested because I had been moved by my own un-friending. I never followed up on it. I never talked about it until nearly two months later with my partner and nearly eight months later on Facebook. But even now, it gives me great pause when thinking about social-media, technology and the ethnographic perspective.

Thus, I now wonder, what would a meaningful (or even playful) experience of un-friending be? How might it serve to convince people to think about their friends on Facebook or the nature of friendship in general? How might it explore surveillance and algorithmic culture? How might it be done ethnographically?

The Point, Really

The point, really, is that as someone interested in and capable of building these things, I often wonder if I should. There will be innumerable IRB issues associated with the building of such a thing if I wish to make research use of it. There are numerous ethical issues involved with its design and a hundred technical issues. Should I do it? What would it be? What is the potential for good and for harm?

Thus, this is partially a query to the CASTAC community. I can imagine numerous ways to take “Un-Friend Stories,” which is my unofficial name for the project. Initially I imagined that the “penance” that one must pay for surveilling their new and un-friends would be an occasional request for a story. It could be ignored. All stories would be curated (by evil old me). People would likely suppress the feed posts it would offer, but I’d be able to sleep at night.

Now, however, I don’t think that’s enough. Maybe I present the user with a variety of voices in their current network, presented graphically as will-o’-the-wisps perhaps, and it’s up to the user to explore why a voice is or isn’t present. Maybe, just maybe one of those voices is gone for good, but it’s up to the user to reflect on that absence.

My experience forced me to think about my friends and Facebook’s algorithmic presentation of (and, yes, I know I can pick between top and newest posts) information to me. I had to take a journey and think about friendship.

If I can do that for others, is it still good? Or is it still just another brick in the surveillance wall?

The post Public (Research) Design: Un-friend Stories appeared first on blog.castac.org.

This topic is a major departure from my previous research on Islam and science, but quite closely connected to cycling which has been a part of my life for three decades, longer than anthropology or STS. My training in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine gives me an interesting perspective on cycling and especially the doping scandals that have plagued cycling and sport in general in recent decades. While journalists focus on specific details like who took what for how long and how did they avoid detection, I ask what are the ideologies and the structures that both support and condemn a culture of doping? What are the connections among and boundaries between doping, high-tech engineering of bicycles, new science-based training regimens, and legal performance-enhancing substances? What are the connections between all of these developments and the structure of international athletics, the promotion and sponsorship of events, the mass media, the cyclists themselves, and the fans? What are the connections to the broader societies where cycling (and other sports) are practiced.

Science, technology, and medicine are at the heart of these debates. Sports scientists are defining the limits of human potential. For example, they have calculated based on laboratory studies of human performance that humans can’t generate more than 6.2 watts per kilogram of body mass and sustain it and therefore any performances that indicate sustained outputs above 6.2 watts/kg must be performance enhanced. Power meters that measure power output of cyclists and heart rate monitors are now used by all professionals and many amateurs in training and usually during races. Many cyclists, professional and amateur now can and do post their power profiles online. Sometimes during race broadcasts on TV, the networks even arrange to have access to live power output, heart rate, and speed numbers from several cyclists to let their audiences know just how hard the racers are working.

Over the last months, I’m becoming interested in the idea that “performance” is a key metaphor for understanding the doping debates. Specifically, “performance” is a metaphor that is being contested and is useful for related debates about the nature/culture and human/machine boundaries, about the authenticity of the human athletes. Are performances “authentic” or are they “enhanced” and therefore “unnatural.” Particularly interesting is the fact that sports is among a handful of areas in Western cultures that “nature” and “human” are privileged over “culture” and “machine” and “enhanced performance” can carry a negative connotation. Other areas where these halves may also be privileged also tend to relate to the human body and concern human limits, for example, in debates about reproductive technologies and end of life interventions. Elsewhere, “enhanced performance” is highly valued, for example, how often do you hear someone say that they prefer to own a laptop or smartphone or stock with lower performance?

As I move forward with this project, I am interested in exploring further the usage of the metaphor of “performance” in American and other Western contexts outside of sports to uncover what exactly is at stake in the doping debates and beyond. I’d welcome any thoughts or comments and encourage to participate in the discussion.

The post Moving Beyond Doping Scandals: Toward an Anthropology of Science, Technology and Performance appeared first on blog.castac.org.

The Quantified Self (QS) is a global movement of people who numerically track their bodies.  If you were to read popular press accounts like this, this and this, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was a self-absorbed technical elite who used arsenals of gadgets to enact a kind of self-imposed panopticon, generating data for data’s sake. Articles like this could easily make us believe that this group unquestioningly accepts the authority of numerical data in all circumstances (a myth nicely debunked here). Kanyi Maqubela sees a lack of diversity in “the quantified self.”  On one hand, he is absolutely right to say that developing technologies to get upper middle class people who do yoga and shop at farmers markets to “control their behavior” is a spectacular misrecognition of the actual social problem at hand,[1] and one that can be attributed directly to the design-for-me methodology[2] so rampant in Silicon Valley.  The charge works, however, only if we think about Quantified Self as if it were analogous to Kleenex:[3] a brand name that can be used generically for the latest round of health and fitness gadgets technologies whose social significance (or lack thereof) is self-evident.

The Quantified Self that we have come to know is not a Kleenex. It is a particular social movement with specific social dynamics, people and practices.  Even the most cursory ethnographic examination of actual practices of its members reveals a very different picture.  We have been conducting this research for the past year and a half, alongside many other academics who have also been welcomed into the community. The Quantified Self that we know has very little to do with trying to control other people’s body size or fetishizing technology. Indeed, people who use pen and paper are community leaders alongside professional data analysts.  As a social movement, QS maintains a big tent policy, such that the health care technology companies who do try to control other people’s body sizes also participate. But QS organizes its communities in ways that require people to participate as individuals with personal experiences, not as companies with a demo to sell.  This relentless focus on the self we suspect does have cultural roots in neoliberalism and the practices of responsibilization Giddens identified so long ago, but it also does important cultural work in the context of big data.

An example from our ethnography can illustrate this.  At a recent Quantified Self meeting on the West Coast, discussion turned to “habit formation.” Sean, one of the organizers of the group, was talking about his frustration with tracking apps organized around “streaks.” He felt great to have kept his new “habit” seventy times in a row, but “when your mother gets ill and you miss a week, poof! It’s gone.” He was looking for something that would offer a metric for what he called the “strength” of a habit. He felt that would be much more encouraging for him: after all, the habit does not just go away  because the data does.  Other participants mentioned various kinds of moving averages that would be nice, and the conversation wandered into a debate over whether “habits” was a negative framework to use, and whether “practices” were more constructive.

Later in the evening, two men, David and Tom, were talking about Tom’s recent purchase of a Jawbone Up—one of many devices that will track movements and infer various things from them, like sleep or exercise. Tom showed us the visualization of his sleep data that appeared to show that he falls asleep quite quickly most nights. That information was encouraging as he had been concerned about his sleep. While he was not entirely certain how the bracelet-style device measured sleep cycles, he conjectured that it must have to do with motion. In any case, he felt like he was more rested just knowing that “in fact” he was sleeping well. The group laughed, and then continued to wonder collectively about just how the thing “decided” what sleep cycle you were in. Discussion turned to other devices that incorporated other indicators like skin temperature, perspiration, heart rate and brainwaves. A certain watch had all the sensors David wanted. He could use it for more than just sleep tracking,  but it had limits.  He knew the watch could track his heart rate, but he wanted to see the variability of his heart rate because he had been curious about the physical expression of moods. The watch only gave a pulse, as if there were no other interpretation of the underlying signals from the heart.

The relationship between “habit formation” and the limitations of devices is significant. On one hand, the habits/practices that most participants sought to instill in themselves generally (though not always) adhered to normative guidelines around health and good citizenship: exercise more, work more effectively, keep moods elevated, etc. On the other hand, these clearly are not passive consumers swallowing blindly the parameters of “what’s good for them.” In many ways they see their activities as a response to big data and big science dictums that make claims about the healthy body from on high. In the face of generalized, anonymous one-size-fits-all prescriptions derived from population studies, they seek to understand what is right for me. What is the optimal bedtime for me? Under what diet regime do I feel my best? What activities (sleep, caffeine, wheat, dairy, and other usual suspects) are particularly correlated with mood or energy in my life?

If people in this movement appear narcissistic on the surface, it is because of their focus on the self.  The insistence on the agency of each person to track, understand, and decide for themselves what is right “for them” does draw on cultural threads of individualism, but they do it in ways that refrain from making assumptions about what is right for others. While the self is the site of internalization of dominant big data visions that do control people in Foucauldian, biopolitical ways,[4] here it is also, at the same time, a means of resistance. QSers self-track in an effort to re-assert dominion over their bodies by taking control of the data that many of us produce simply by being part of a digitally interconnected world.  When participants cycle through multiple devices, it is often not because they fetishize the technology, but because they have a more expansive, emergent notion of the self that does not settle easily into the assumptions built into any single measurement.  They do this using the technical tools available, but critically rather than blindly.  It is not radical to be sure, but a soft resistance, one that draws on and participates in the cultural resources available.

The eagerness with which pundits seize on the Quantified Self as a generic brand, a Kleenex style term to toss around, speaks to the ways that QS practices cohere with current ideologies and practices of self in the mainstream. Yet to stop there, to overlook the particulars of what actual QSers do, how they do it and why, is to miss the social significance of the Quantified Self as a movement. It is not the nerdy devices they enthuse over, nor the sometimes mundane self-transformations they seek to achieve, but the explicitness with which they confront the question of what the cultural dominance of data means for me.  Answering this question requires a critical and questioning point of view.  Within Quantified Self, like snowflakes, no two tissues are alike: now, how do we count that?

The post The Quantified Self Movement is not a Kleenex appeared first on blog.castac.org.

But I’m also behind in my MOOC diary which I started several weeks ago, and I hope the reader will forgive me for that. Now, onward.

A friend pointed me to this quote:

“And, finally, the organization of popular education will pass into the hands of Radio. The Supreme Soviet of Sciences will broadcast lessons and lectures to all schools of the country—higher institutions as well as lower.

“The teacher will become merely a monitor while these lectures are in progress. The daily transmission of lessons and textbooks through the sky into country schools of the nation, the unification of its consciousness into a single will.

“Thus will Radio forge continuous links in the universal soul and mold mankind into a single entity.”

(Velimir Khlebnikov, “Radio of the Future” [1921], trans. Paul Schmidt)

Seems to me that every new version of mass media has attempted to find a way to spread education to the masses, since the advent of the printing press. I remember old language records from childhood. Radio was seen as a potential pedagogical tool, and TV too, of course. NPR and PBS have maintained some success in this, of course, but pity all the cable channels that had their eyes on edification and now rely almost entirely on reality shows about child beauty pageants and weapons freaks.

There have certainly been some success in educational software. Rosetta Stone, for example, has taught me more French than I’d have gathered in the classroom, with less self-consciousness about learning to speak with a vaguely reasonable accent.

So it’s not surprising there are multiple outlets online for cobbling together an education online. The first real hit out of the ballpark was probably Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), which is a phenomenon of its own. But online learning is nothing new. A lot of schools had been partnering their classroom experiences with online content. My nephew in medical school tells me that there are many classes that people need not attend in person, because it’s pretty much all online.

So what makes a MOOC so different?

In my short experience — and with just the one MOOC course to go by — the significant difference for me has been the rather high production-value style of one-on-one professor-to-student experience in the presentation of the course material. However, some students in the forums have said that they wish the course at least occasionally showed us the classroom experience, as students take the course in the standard way, with the professor in the lecture hall, which is apparently going on concurrently at the University of Virginia (UVa). This, as one student said, would allow the online participants to have a sense of the classroom discussion. The desire to be in a classroom, debating controversial topics, stems from what appears to have become a rather intense conversation about Western vs. non-Western views of world history, and whether our professor is complicit in exacerbating a Eurocentric perspective that is too keenly felt, especially by the non-Western students, of which there are perhaps thousands in this MOOC.

The topic of the Eurocentric version of history is, of course, massive in itself. What I’m interested in at the moment, though, is that certain students believe that experiencing the physical classroom via video will provide them more insight than a large and diverse collection of discussion fora online.

I have pondered this for awhile. As you know, a large introductory lecture class is not usually the best site for deep discussion of controversial topics. And, in my experience as a TA, neither is a discussion section. There may be sections in which the occasional TA is able to elicit an exciting debate, but I can only imagine what disappointment the home scholar would feel as the camera pans the room, waiting for some student to tentatively let a comment fly. The presence of the camera might add an additional level of daunt to the proceedings, in fact.

Furthermore, this led me to recall my initial idea of the graduate seminar as an arena in which educated minds could meet and work out Big Ideas in a collegial yet challenging environment. Ah, the romance of the fledgling graduate student, prior to the realization that the seminar is made up of people who are competing for the attention of the professor and those who are trying to make it through a few hours without letting it slip that they hadn’t read the book.

Are we better off in the classroom than in the MOOC, where forum discussions are rampant and only somewhat moderated? In a discussion section, TAs can hope that their students will have learned their names by the end of the term. In the MOOC, the TAs may be completely invisible. Either way, many students will never meet their professor. With a MOOC, you’re welcome to join other locals at a Meet-Up — if there are other locals. Forums often lead to rather unexpurgated, sometimes crass interactions, of course, and we may miss the interactions with our in-person peers. But I continue to think that the college classroom and the MOOC are, and are likely to continue to be, two very different audiences. The presence of the MOOC does not signal the end of traditional college learning, at least not in the near future, from what I can see now.

The post Inside MOOCs: A First-Hand Account, Part 2 appeared first on blog.castac.org.

My dissertation research is focused on how technologies used in remote warfare are changing conceptions of warfare and experiences of agency within human-computer systems. These technologies include what the Air Force prefers to call RPAs, Remotely Piloted Aircraft, also known as UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and more commonly known as drones. While my fieldwork looks at individual experiences and institutional narratives within military communities, a larger backdrop of my research is popular conceptions of robotics and drones informed by mass media coverage and the long standing cultural paranoia that technological creations, once unleashed in the world, will escape human control and stop at nothing short of humankind’s destruction. In an important sense, these extreme narratives obscure more consequential and immediate discussions that should be had about robotics and artificial intelligence, and more specifically, the use of unmanned systems.

It will likely not be a surprise to CASTAC readers that popular understandings of technologies, especially in the field of robotics, are quite different from the on-the-ground reality of technological capabilities. Lucy Suchman’s blog, Robot Futures, has looked at numerous examples of such misconceptions. Nor is it unexpected that the terms “autonomous” and “unmanned,” so frequently applied to robotic technologies, are misnomers and obscure the very real human labor involved, from producing and operating hardware (from flying to interpreting data) to coding software. From Marx’s Capital to the more recent work of Shoshana Zuboff, Lucy Suchmann and many others, research has shown that advances in automation and robotics do not so much do away with the human but rather obscure the ways in which human labor and social relations are reconfigured.

And yet, the circulation of terms like autonomous and unmanned continues to frame much of the public discussion surrounding robotics in areas as diverse as the military and healthcare (see, for instance this month’s article in The Atlantic, The Robot Will See You Now). Although drones are termed “unmanned” aerial vehicles, every operation requires a team of at least three human Air Force personnel and sometimes a team of fifteen or more. (The precise nature of CIA operated drones, a different program than that of the Air Force, is not officially public.) This is in addition to those people who code the software and produce the computer and drone hardware, modes of labor that have been traditionally marginalized in conceptions of computing. And this is of course also in addition to the human lives on the ground, over which the drones fly.

The final section of the NOVA documentary looks at new sensing technologies that are being developed. The term autonomous is used numerous times and yet never defined. This is a problem because computer science understandings of autonomy differ substantially from popular understandings of the term. In the first instance, an autonomous robot indicates a sophisticated level of awareness of its surroundings and ability to react taking this awareness into account. Popular understandings of autonomous would assume that the robot could act entirely on its own and of its own accord, like Cylons or the Terminator.

Although Paul Eremenko, the Deputy Director of the Tactical Technology Office within DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research and development program, says in an interview clip, “I think if we were to ask most autonomy researchers or most AI researchers about if the “rise of the machines” type scenario is a real concern, their response would be, ‘We should be so lucky.’ In fact, if we could get little slivers of that kind of adaptive or cognitive capability that would be a very significant breakthrough over where we stand today.” Yet, the subtext of the documentary and the visual rhetoric suggest otherwise. A low-pitch sound pulses ominously throughout the documentary. Drones fly through the sky, isolated from their ties to human work and intention. (In fact, most media stories illustrate stories about drones with photographs of the machine in flight, and humans are absent from the frame.) In the final scene, the narrator says, “The ability to respond to the unknown may be the final hurdle if drones are ever able to fully replace manned planes… and start making decisions on their own.” Ominous indeed. A clip of interview with Abe Karem, the main engineer of the Predator platform, plays in response, “I think we’re far. But let me say, I’m the last guy who says impossible.” The tone of the documentary tends to push the audience toward this extreme paranoia even as the narrator reassures us that a machine still can’t do what a human can.

Although it feels like a false and placating reassurance, it is true. Humans are implicated in every moment of remote warfare. My hope is that my research can bring greater understandings to multiple communities about the social implications of remote warfare. I look forward to sharing more of my research as it continues in the coming months.

Along those lines, I also wanted to take this opportunity to let the CASTAC community know about a community that is beginning to formally coalesce, thanks to the organizing of Zoe Wool and Ken MacLeish, the Military and Security Critical Interest Group, which joins folks working ethnographically with critical conceptualizations of military life and security institutions, technologies and populations or related issues. If you’d like more information or would like to join the listserve, email MSCIGListserv@gmail.com.
 
I’ll leave you with a few links for further exploration:

Marcel LaFlamme, a fellow graduate student in the dissertation phase, on the emerging UAV industry in North Dakota.

Jessica Riskin’s classic essay, “Eighteenth Century Wetware” which explores the socio-historical specificity of what constitutes the imitation of life by machines.

A collaborative photo essay, “Soldier Exposure, Technical Publics” on Public Books that repositions current and historical images of wounded soldiers.

The post Popular (Mis)Conceptions & the Perpetual Rise of the Machines appeared first on blog.castac.org.

EPIC is an international conference attended by anthropologists, designers, computer scientists, sociologists, business strategists, and others working in and through businesses and organizations. It aims to illuminate social phenomena through theory and practice of the contemporary digital era to transform industry and the world. Proceedings are published and can be found through AnthroSource or on Wiley Blackwell.

The objects and subjects of science, technology and cultures of expertise, as well as their production and consumption, figure prominently in explorations engaged at EPIC. All the more expected this year, as the 3-day, richly interactive conference will be held at the Royal Institution, which since 1799 has had the aim of introducing new technologies and teaching science to the general public.

Call for Submissions
Since its inception, the EPIC conference has brought together a dynamic community of practitioners and scholars concerned with how ethnographic thinking and methods for understanding the contemporary social world are used to transform design, business and innovation contexts. Presenters and attendees come from innovation consultancies, design firms, universities and design schools, government and NGOs, research agencies and major corporations.

In 2013, EPIC comes to London for the first time. We are taking advantage of this opportunity by reaching out for contributions from a broad range of organizations and communities of practice in the hope of further enriching the EPIC ‘gene pool’ with those dedicated to illuminating social phenomena through ethnographic theory and practice. We are seeking engagement with social design firms, public policy developers, think tanks, the variety of marketing sciences, business schools, the service design sector, in fact anyone using ethnographic research to inform design, business, or innovation.

EPIC strives to serve as the premier site for deepening the contributions of ethnographic theory and practice in business and for maintaining a vibrant discussion about the significance of this work for industry and the world. In 2013, we break from the tradition of having a specific conference theme to refocus on how ethnographic ways of knowing the world are currently being used to transform it.

In 2013 we’re particularly interested in submissions of original research and material that address how ethnographic work is being thought about and practiced in the contemporary world. This may take the form of various theories made relevant and useful today, present discussions on technology such as Big Data, and the future of various public sectors which are in a state of transition.

In particular we seek submissions that illuminate:
• how ethnographers are pushing the boundaries of theory from the social sciences and humanities (i.e., rituals, symbolic interpretation, gift-exchange, kinship, participation, access and agency, etc.), to interpret, understand and render contemporary practices and processes intelligible
• the phenomenon of Big Data and the use of technology to support ethnographic data collection, organization and analysis
• how ethnographic research and social science thinking inform sectors in transition, such as finance, education and energy
EPIC2013 seeks original content for papers, artifacts and PechaKucha sessions. EPIC papers will be published in the EPIC2013 Proceedings.

Hope to see you in London!
The EPIC2013 Team

The post EPIC Conference CFP [Abstracts Due March 19] appeared first on blog.castac.org.

Along with my colleagues Lynda Duke and Suzanne Wilson, I recently completed a research study examining how undergraduate students located information using two discovery tools, the “Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS)” and Serials Solution’s “Summon,” as well as Google Scholar and the “traditional”  suite of library catalogs and databases (see Asher, Duke & Wilson 2013).  In this study, we asked students to find resources for a set of research questions that were similar to research-paper assignments they might receive for a course for a class.  After they were finished finding these materials, we played back a recording of their searches for them and conducted a debriefing interview during which we asked them to discuss how they approached finding particular resources and how they evaluated sources and information they chose to use.

As we observed how students interacted with the discovery tools, we also learned about how these systems perform an epistemological function by structuring how students use information and construct knowledge.  No matter which search system the students used, the process by which they approached searches typically followed a single pattern.  Students generally treated every search interface they encountered like a Google search box, using simple keyword search and ignoring more advanced functionality.  Simple keyword searches accounted for 82% of the searches we observed in our study.

Used in this way, all of the discovery systems in this study will return a very large number of items for any given query.  Faced with a results set that was almost always too large to evaluate comprehensively on an item-by-item basis, students instead relied primarily on the effectiveness of the search algorithms to determine resources’ quality, making rapid appraisals of an item’s usefulness based on its title or a superficial scan of its abstract, and almost never considering materials displayed after the first page of results.  In total, 92% of the resources utilized by students in our study were found on the first page.

This de facto outsourcing of the evaluation process to the search algorithm itself makes the default ranking criteria of the discovery system perhaps the single most important factor in determining which resources students chose to use.  Moreover, differences in the way the discovery systems produce search results could be directly observed in the resources chosen.  For example, students using Summon utilized more newspaper and trade journal resources than those using EDS since EDS weights results braced on article length (i.e. when other factors are held constant, longer materials rank higher).  Similarly, students using Google Scholar used more book resources due to its integration with Google Books.

This intersection between student’s search practices—which likely reflect their day-to-day usage of Google and other general search engines—and the design of discovery system’s interfaces and algorithms illustrate an important example of  “algorithmic culture.”  Ted Striphas (2011)  uses the term “algorithmic culture” to describe how some aspects of the work of culture–“the sorting, classifying, hierarchizing, and curating of people, places, objects, and ideas”– are becoming the purview of “machine-based information processing systems.”  He continues, “some of our most basic habits of thought, conduct, and expression. . .are coming to be affected by algorithms, too.  It’s not only that cultural work is becoming algorithmic; cultural life is as well” (Striphas 2011).

Through the act of ordering and ranking, search systems’ relevancy algorithms impart (and reinforce) a sense of authority and credibility to the results.  Students in our study regularly assumed that information that is objectively “best” will be ranked first, substituting the judgment of the algorithm for their own thought processes.  This “trust bias” is well documented in the literature on search engines (see Vaidhyanathan 2011:59; Hargittati et. al. 2010; Hargittai 2007; Pan et. al. 2007), and is also reflexive; because the search system alone holds the power to create a ranked list of resources from the huge number possible choices, it self-validates the quality of these results.

Relevancy-ranking algorithms are also cultural artifacts, and can be understood as embodying a set of socially and culturally embedded negotiations, decisions, judgments, biases, politics, and ideologies.  For example, PageRank, the ranking and relevancy algorithm that comprises the core of Google search, is premised on a concept of aggregated social judgment, that is, the assumption that a mathematical calculation based on the number of links to a website combined with an evaluation of the relative importance of the websites from which those links originate, can be used as a proxy for evaluating the quality or value of a site (see Brin & Page 1998; Page et. al. 1999; Battelle 2005:75-76).  Likewise, the discovery systems used in our study also contain a set of embedded decisions about information organization and quality, each of which represents a specific decision about the relative value of information.  For example, each system must define what characteristics qualify a journal as “peer-reviewed” and scholarly, as well as how to treat these materials once a determination has been made.

Unfortunately, since discovery systems are for the most part proprietary technologies, many of these judgments and decisions are kept secret from the user.  For this reason, students can not properly interrogate how a discovery system works even if they want to, and must simply put their faith and trust in the algorithm and the people who designed it.  From a pedagogical standpoint this is quite concerning since students for the most part appear to mistakenly view discovery and other search systems as neutral tools and do not consider their potential biases.

By shaping the processes through which information is found, discovery systems thus exert a form of disciplinary power that provides the scaffolding for how students complete their academic work and structures the way they acquire knowledge.  For this reason, libraries using or considering the implementation of these systems should carefully and critically assess their design and functionality as well as the potentially determinative effect these systems might have on students’ research outcomes.  Students’ practices of primarily utilizing the basic search functionality of any search system, relying only on the first page of search results, and trusting the relevancy rankings of a given discovery system makes the default settings of these tools critically important.   These patterns also underscore the instructional needs of students in both the technical and conceptual aspects of search, as well as in algorithmic literacy and the understanding of algorithmic cultures.

References

Asher, Andrew, Lydna Duke, & Suzanne Wilson
2013. “Paths of Discovery: Comparing the Search effectiveness of EBSCO Discovery Service, Summon, Google Scholar, and Conventional Library Resources.” College and Research Libraries.  Forthcoming July 2013.  Preprint available at http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2012/05/07/crl-374.full.pdf+html .

Battelle, J.
2005. The search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture. New York: Portfolio.

Brin, S., and L. Page.
1998. “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.” Computer networks and ISDN systems 30 (1-7): 107–117.

Hargittai, E.
2007. “The social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of search engines: An introduction.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (3): 769–777.

Hargittai, E., L. Fullerton, E. Menchen-Trevino, and K.Y. Thomas.
2010. “Trust online: young adults’ evaluation of Web content.” International Journal of Communication 4: 468–494.

Page, L., S. Brin, R. Motwani, and T. Winograd.
1999. “The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web.”

Pan, B., H. Hembrooke, T. Joachims, L. Lorigo, G. Gay, and L. Granka.
2007. “In Google we trust: Users’ decisions on rank, position, and relevance.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (3): 801–823.

Striphas, Ted.
2011.  “Who Speaks for Culture?” posted Sept. 26, 2011, http://www.thelateageofprint.org/2011/09/26/who-speaks-for-culture/

Vaidhyanathan, Siva.
2011. The Googlization of Everything (and Why We should Worry).  Berkeley: University of California Press.

The post “Discovery” Systems and Algorithmic Culture appeared first on blog.castac.org.

It is evening, in the sky over southern Germany. Two commercial aircraft are flying on a collision course: a Russian charter flight from Moscow to Barcelona, and a DHL cargo flight from Bergamo to Brussels. Their courses should be corrected by an air traffic controller in Zurich, but he is doing the job of two controllers, at two different work stations, as his equipment is degraded by ongoing maintenance work. Both planes are equipped with TCAS, an automated warning system that is the last line of defense if air traffic control fails to separate planes soon enough.

Less than a minute before the crash, the air traffic controller notices the collision course, and gives the Russian crew a command to descend. Seven seconds later, the automated warning system orders the Russian crew to climb, while ordering the DHL crew to descend.

The Russian crew begins to follow the human’s command to descend, ignoring the later automated command to climb (except for a highly mitigated objection by the lowest ranked crew member).

The result was a mid-air crash: the DHL crew followed the automated warning to descend; the Russian crew obeyed the human air traffic controller and also descended.

Regulations for the use of TCAS state that a TCAS instruction takes precedence over an air traffic controller’s instruction: that is, “Obey the machine.”

Why did the Russian crew obey the human command? One reason suggested by the accident investigation is that they did not have simulator training on TCAS. They had paper and pencil training, but not the near-realism of simulator training.

Another possible reason is that the human command came first. They were already committed to the descent when they heard the TCAS command seven seconds later. A Russian pilot with the same training interviewed after the accident made the interesting argument that the human voice sounds intense and passionate, while the machine voice is robotic: of course one would obey the voice that sounds more concerned.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT AUTHORITY

I am involved in this question because I am working at a project at NASA doing formal modeling of the FAA’s development of the next generation of air traffic control (NextGen).

The area I am working in is called “Authority and Autonomy (or Automation). “Authority” covers humans, human and machine systems, legal and regulatory structures, and rules of procedure. As a social scientist on the project, I am particularly focused on the authority issues, and how they work with what we know about

As a first approach to the question of authority, it’s useful to return to Max Weber’s classic question: What is the basis of legitimate authority. If A gives B an order, why should B obey? What makes B believe that A has the right to issue that order, and that B should obey? The issue of legitimate authority is mostly discussed in the context of large scale, state authority or religious authority.

I am looking at legitimacy in the short term: conflicts or ambiguities of authority that take place in minutes or seconds. If the Russian crew had received an instruction from TCAS before they heard from the air traffic controller, they might have obeyed TCAS and disregarded the controller. The ordering could make the difference.

Within the world of aviation, authority questions are often believed to be solvable by training the humans to automaticity. Yet in the moment, human judgment is always required. Further, many of these conflicts of authority are a result of design decisions in complex socio-technical systems. It is important to look at these decisions, rather than assuming that the humans can be trained to work with whatever design is produced.

Other examples of authority questions in the aviation domain include:

Who do I obey if I believe the legitimate authority has gone crazy? (The 2012 JetBlue incident is an example.)

What mode of automation are we in, and therefore what does an automated indication mean?

What happens when multiple authority regimes are giving conflicting commands?

More on these questions later.

Meanwhile, it might be worth looking out for issues of authority and authority deflection the next time a service person tells you: “I’d like to help you here, but the computer won’t let me do it.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE:

Summary of Überlingen accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Überlingen_mid-air_collision

Dramatization of Überlingen accident
http://www.cineflixproductions.com/shows/28-Mayday

Official accident report, Bundesstelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung
German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation
http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/414.pdf

The post Why Should I Obey a Machine? appeared first on blog.castac.org.

Session Proposal
Title: Big Data: Symbols, Practices, and Epistemic Uncertainties

Convenors: Chiara Garattini (Health Strategy & Solutions, Intel Corporation) and Dawn Nafus (Intel Labs, Intel Corporation).

Abstract: In the last couple of years “Big Data” has attracted increasing attention in academic, industrial and popular discourse. But what is being exactly referred to as Big Data and what are its implications? In images of data as a “gold mine” or “the new oil,” or even in Manovich’s (2012) notion of big data as a collapse of substance and surface, the sheer size and heterogeneity of these data bring back the analogue into the digital world in both the imagination and the practical lives of users. Practice, too, suggests its own trajectories. Keating & Cambrosio (2012) see an intensely debated shift from a hypothesis-driven to a data-driven approach in the world of medical scientific enquiry.

Our own work suggests that movements like the Quantified Self constitute sites of dialogue between those who approach big data as a panoptical stabilization of populations, and those who are devising alternatives in response to more immediate social and material contexts. This panel explores what happens when big data practice and big data discourse confront each other in a variety of domains. What socio-technical trajectories, new and old epistemics, and even forms of resistance emerge? This panel seeks paper proposals that offer perspectives on this issue from different spheres such as finance, health, entertainment, security and demographics.

Conference: Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, San Diego October 9-12, 2013.

Please write to chiara.garattini@intel.com if interested.

Best regards,
Chiara

Chiara Garattini, PhD
Anthropology & UX

HSS UK Health and Life Sciences Innovation Team,
Intel Corporation

1st Floor, Faculty Building, Exhibition Road, SW7 2AZ
Imperial College London

iNet: 87776951
t: +44 (0)20 7977 6951
e: chiara.garattini@intel.com
w: www.intel.com/healthcare

The post Big Data Panel at 4S Conference [CFP] appeared first on blog.castac.org.

My first encounter with CASTAC came at the 1992 AAA meetings in San Francisco. I was a new grad student of Gary Downey’s in the STS program at Virginia Tech; however, CASTAC had been founded earlier. The following brief history is based primarily on “corridor talk,” oral histories passed along informally at AAA meetings and other fora by folks like David Hakken, Lucy Suchman, Julian Orr, David Hess and others.

CASTAC, as an organization, began as CAC (Committee for the Anthropology of Computing) at the initiation of David Hakken and a few other anthropologists who were pioneering anthropological studies of computing. David approached Marvin Harris who was, at that time, the President of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) about creating CAC as a Committee within GAD. Harris and the GAD board at the time supported the idea and CAC began its long association with GAD. CAC expanded to CASTC (and later modified to CASTAC) as anthropologists interested in the related areas of science, technology, medicine, work, and engineering joined the nascent group. The 1992 and 1993 AAA meetings were a coming out party with invited sessions that included both anthropologists and scholars from other fields like Donna Haraway and Susan Leigh Star, among others. During the same period, the same anthropologists were crashing the sociology-dominated 4S conference—a pattern recently emulated by the Science, Technology, and Medicine interest group within the Society for Medical Anthropology.

The 1990s were in many ways the high point of CASTAC activity. Sessions were organized at both the AAA and 4S meetings. CASTAC business meetings were always crowded and productive. The tragic death of Dianna Forsythe resulted in the Dianna Forsythe Prize celebrating her legacy and the work of anthropologists working on science, technology, and medicine. CASTAC held summer conferences at RPI and Columbia and CASTAC chairs were active participants at GAD board meetings. And the “science wars” raged in anthropology, STS, and the academy in general—halcyon days indeed.

I became chair of CASTAC in 2005 after a period of relative decline and inactivity during the early 2000s when CASTAC did little beyond award the Forsythe Prize. The summer conferences ended and CASTAC didn’t hold a business meeting at the AAA meetings for a number of years. I offered to serve as chair because I considered, and still consider, CASTAC to be my intellectual home within the AAA and wanted CASTAC to continue to serve as a place that mentored young scholars. Senior scholars in CASTAC have always been extremely generous with their time for junior scholars and I hoped this would continue.

The first challenge, aside from walking into the middle of a GAD board meeting immediately after being elected as CASTAC chair (I was the only volunteer to take the position), was to deal with an existential crisis. We broached the question of whether we thought CASTAC still served a purpose and ought to continue as an organization and, if so, in what form. There was discussion of merging with the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW), of forming our own section or independent interest group within the AAA, or of maintaining the current status of staying a committee within GAD. There were benefits to each organizational model and after extensive discussion on the listserv we voted to stick with GAD. GAD provided a $500 annual budget and required much less work to maintain the organization—all we needed was a chair to represent CASTAC on the GAD board and two representatives to serve on the Forsythe selection committee. However, CASTAC still had a problem—we weren’t exactly sure what we wanted CASTAC to do or be—a problem that we are still facing today.

When CASTAC began and for most of the 1990s, CASTAC was about the only place within AAA that folks working on the boundaries between anthropology and STS could go. But by the mid-2000s, STS was emergent in all kinds of places in anthropology. All kinds of anthropologists working in all kinds of areas like medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, media studies, development anthropology, linguistics, and even biological anthropology had discovered STS. And most of these folks had never heard of CASTAC and some were forming their own groups like the STM interest group in SMA. I saw the proliferation of STS-inspired ideas outside of CASTAC not as a threat to CASTAC but as an opportunity to develop collaborative relationships to enhance all of these groups.

I reached out to many of these groups and individuals to let them know that CASTAC existed and that we would love to work together with them to expand the visibility and influence of STS in anthropology and anthropology in STS. I worked with a number of CASTAC members, the GAD board, the STM interest group, and SAW to organize a series of prominent CASTAC invited sessions including a session celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Forsythe Prize. I also produced a new CASTAC Directory to facilitate collaboration among people working on related areas.

My term as CASTAC chair ended after four years and current co-chairs Jenny Cool and Rachel Prentice are leading CASTAC into the digital age of the internet and the blogosphere—ironic that it has taken CASTAC so long to create a strong presence here when the organization was founded by folks studying computing. I urge CASTAC to continue to remain open to new perspectives and new areas of anthropology that intersect with STS. Finally, and most significantly, I urge CASTAC to continue to be a place where senior scholars mentor junior scholars whose research interests, much like their own research interests, may be the proverbial squares that don’t quite fit into the circles of the traditional research areas within anthropology.

My special thanks to Patricia Lange for inviting me to contribute to the blog. I hope many of you will consider adding comments and your own posts to keep the CASTAC momentum moving forward. Participating in the blog has helped me realize that it is the longstanding collegial relationships that make CASTAC my anthropological home.

The post CASTAC: Past, Present, Future appeared first on blog.castac.org.

Over the years, I’ve benefitted from educators who have generously shared their teaching materials online. This blog post is an attempt to pay it forward, and share an exercise that I’ve developed for my class on anthropology and technology at California College of the Arts. This exercise is meant to inspire discussion on how metaphors influence our thinking in daily life, as well as how they shape design and use of technological products and systems.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) long ago noted that metaphors are things that help us understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Words and images from one realm of experience may be used to structure not only action, but our thinking. Metaphors tend to spawn or are accompanied by whole families of associated expressions. Saying that “argument is war” for example, brings to mind other expressions such as “demolishing” or “attacking” a position, or using argumentative “strategies” that are “right on target.”

In addition, metaphors exhibit certain entailments, or assumptions or consequences that result from the use of particular metaphors. For example, saying that “argument is war” entails a winner and a loser. Such entailments structure perceptions of our choices and possible courses of action. Lakoff and Johnson invite the reader to reconsider their metaphors. They ask us to imagine what it might be like to envision a culture where arguing is not equivalent to war. In this alternate universe, “winning” is not the desired outcome of verbal conflict; rather participants strive for empathy and mutual understanding.

The exercise below invites students to consider the entailments and potential impact of metaphors that are used in daily life. Such an exercise might be paired with many classic readings on metaphors in science and technology, such as Cohn’s (1987), “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” or Martin’s (1991), “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” A more recent work by Rene Almeling, winner of the 2012 Diana Forsythe prize, has also discussed how sex cell donations are gendered through metaphorical concepts. Men are encouraged to consider donating sperm as a “job,” while women are invited to see their contribution of eggs as a “gift.”

But use of metaphors is not limited to biology or defense industries. They are part of everyday life. The following exercise, which might be useful as a homework assignment or a classroom exercise, provides a list of metaphors that are used today and exhibit particular entailments that influence our options in terms of understanding complicated processes, solving complex problems, protecting our identities and security, or conducting new quests for knowledge.

In preparing this exercise, I combed the web for contemporary metaphors that might spark productive discussion. Please feel free to share other metaphors that might be useful for similar discussions about science and technology. Students are also encouraged to explore their own technological metaphors that bring new perspective and insight to this conversation. Educators are invited to discuss how this exercise may be adapted to various contexts or subject areas.

Let us know what you think!

Exercise in Exploring Science and Technology Metaphors
For the following metaphors, list as many entailments as you can. How do these metaphors influence thinking on a particular subject? How do they influence choices people might make? How do they privilege certain solutions or worldviews over others? What steps might people take to overcome the limitations of particular metaphors, or of metaphorical representations in general?

#1 Battling cancer

#2 Surgical strike (an attack without warning on a planned target)

#3 War on drugs

#4 Astronaut (star sailor)

#5 Cloud computing (the practice of using a network of remote servers on the Internet to host, store, and process data)

#6 Desktop computing

#7 Information highway

#8 Cyberspace

#9 The universe is a clockwork

#10 The mind is a printing press

#11 [Insert your metaphor here]

If this exercise was interesting or useful, let us know!

References

Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cohn, Carol. 1987. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.
Signs 12(4): 687-718.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, Emily. 1991. The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles. Signs 16(31): 485-501.

The post The Power of Metaphors appeared first on blog.castac.org.

A number of senior scholars have agreed to contribute papers and serve as discussants on this panel. We are currently soliciting abstracts for 3-4 ‘open’ slots on the panel. While we encourage potential participants to think broadly – and critically – about this topic, preference will be given to abstracts that complement the interests of our senior scholars.

Panel topics might include:
• Genetic testing: How is the emergence of genetic testing technologies affecting public understanding and discourse about concepts of ‘race’ and ‘risk’ for disease? How does access to information about increased genetic risk for future disease(s) shape future bodies through identity, practice, and policy? As access to this technology becomes more widespread, how will consumer genetic testing products and whole genome sequencing (e.g., the $1000 Genome) affect individual behavior, as well as reproductive decision-making and parenting practices?

• E-health: How is the use of technology in e-health and telemedicine influencing the way patients and providers define and experience clinical interaction and the doctor-patient relationship? How does this technology shift notions of what constitutes successful consultation and efficient treatment?

• Robotics: How do we evaluate the spectrum of robotic technologies – from prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons to full-bodied robots designed both to provide care to and receive care from socially isolated individuals? How are these devices incorporated into the bodies and lives of the patients they are intended to serve?

• Pharmaceuticals: What kinds of bodies and publics are being shaped by long-term and concurrent pharmaceutical regimens (e.g., hormonal manipulation of reproductive-age women, post-menopausal women, and transgender youth)? What role do assumptions about bodies and publics play in the distribution and uptake of pharmaceutical technologies (e.g., ‘racialized’ pharmaceuticals, gender and heteronormativity play in STD vaccination)?

• Nanotechnology: How are nanotechnologies currently understood by the medical publics they are designed to serve? What are the deliberative processes through which these new technologies are socially incorporated and do perceptions of nanotechnology shift across national and/or cultural contexts?

Access to (bio)technologies is unevenly distributed across the kinds of differences with which anthropology is engaged. This panel examines at access in bidirectional terms, where technology is insisted upon the bodies of some and withheld from others. For example,
• How does unequal access to (bio)technologies (such as dialysis, contraception, or abortion) interpolate distinct future publics?
• How do the states of limited and excessive access to medical technologies and scientific knowledge contour the emerging bodies and futures of unevenly located individuals and groups?
• What lines are being drawn—and blurred—between “enhancement” and “medical” technologies? What are the frames of reference through which various publics distinguish between these two modes of (bio)technology?
• How will the Affordable Care Act impact the deployment of and access to medical technologies?

For consideration, please send abstracts (max. 250 words) to jjthomp@uga.edu, by February 22.

Jennifer Jo Thompson (University of Georgia)
Christine Labuski (Virginia Tech)
Tanja Ahlin (University of Amsterdam)
Allan Hanson (Kansas University)
Co-organizers of ‘Emergent Technologies, Future Publics’

The post CFP AAA: EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES, FUTURE PUBLICS [Abstracts due February 22] appeared first on blog.castac.org.

PECE has been built to support collaborative, multi-sited, scale-crossing ethnographic research addressing the complex conditions that characterize late industrialism – conditions such as the global asthma epidemic and air pollution crisis; conditions that implicate many different types of actors, locales and systems – social, cultural, political-economic, ecological and technical, calling call for new kinds of ethnographic analyses and collaboration. The platform links researchers in new ways, and activates their engagement with public problems and diverse audiences. The goal is to allow platform users to toggle between jeweller’s eye and systems-level perspective, connecting the dots to see “the big picture” and alternative future pathways.

The Asthma Files has taken us “beyond academia” in a number of ways. Ethnographically, we are engaging an array of professionals, organizations and communities, trying to understand how they have made sense of environmental public health problems. We want to document their sense-making processes, and what has shaped them; we also want to facilitate their sense-making processes – through ethnography that help them understand their own habits of thought and language, and those of others with whom they likely need to work cooperatively. For example, we’ve recently been contacted by a New Orleans housing contractor who wished to know the kind of research being done on asthma and housing in Louisiana. PECE is designed to support this, making space for different kinds of participants at different points in the ethnographic process.

We’ve also gone “beyond academia” to learn how to think about and build a digital platform to support ethnographic work. One step involved selection of the best – for our purposes, for now – online content management system. Quickly, it became apparent that most technical professionals had strong preferences, sometimes based on assessments of functionality, sometimes – it seemed – as a matter of habit. Through a long, comparative process, we ultimately decided on Plone, an open source content management system known for its security capabilities (important in creating space where groups of ethnographers can work together with material, perhaps IRB restricted, out of sight even though online), for its capacity to archive original content (such as interview recordings), and for the ways it supports our effort to nest multiple projects within a larger project structure.

Another important step, which we are still figuring out, is to hire the ongoing technical help we need for PECE. We need ongoing technical help because the platform isn’t finished, as we now envision it. But also because we want the platform to continually evolve as we continue to figure out what kinds of functionality we need to support collaborative ethnographic work. And this may be specific to each project housed on PECE. So we need on-going, ever learning relationships with people who can provide the technical support PECE requires, such as computer scientists, IT specialists, or programmers. As ethnographers, we know that technical professionals will think very differently about the work that we do. And we need to learn to work with this. We need to engage with skills and knowledges that are traditionally outside of the discipline of anthropology by taking on, in a practical way, the continual anthropological challenge of figuring out how difference works.

The Asthma Files and PECE are experiments that have taken us in many new directions – beyond academia, as well as back to basic questions about what should be considered ethnographic material, where theory is in ethnography, how ethnographic findings are best presented, etc. We keep open a call for new collaborators. Let us know if you would like to be in our mix.

The post The Asthma Files: Anthropological Learning Through Technical Practice appeared first on blog.castac.org.