AnthroSpace

For the last several weeks I have been busy preparing for this summer’s Sea Island Field School. I am very grateful to Rich Holeton and Makoto Tsuchitani to have given me the opportunity to provide every student of the group with an iPad2 this year. Building on last year’s experience and with this year’s project focus in mind I am currently testing applications and capabilities of the new device. To take a look head over to ubiquity.stanford.edu and read here and here.

With a recent revamping of our Spatial Interest Group Website we decided to take a look at social networking tools and how we might employ them for a greater visibility for the site and a more dynamic content. It caused me to revisit Twitter, to explore the possibility to set up a group account (for restricted membership not without a third party paid service) and to set up my personal digital environment that would allow to shorten URLs, manage accounts, and send Tweets from everywhere I was going, physically and virtually. It also pulled me into the academic network of Twitter users.

I have blogged about Twitter before, because I have been curious about the academic value of social networking tools, and how it ties into faculty work. While in my opinion there is still too much ‘noise’ in the information that’s being put out there, it is interesting to see its adoption by members of academic institutions, who engage in exchanges with their colleagues. According to this study of 1400 college faculty members, participation on Twitter is up from 30.7 in 2009 to 35.2% in 2010. 72.2% of this user group use Twitter to share information with peers and 70.4% use it as a real-time news source. My guess, based on the number of tweets from the network I entered, would be that most, if not all of the contributors have tweeted for less then a year, probably even only a few months.

What is most compelling for me is that some of my faculty have begun to take up tweeting as routine activity (@juemos, @SimonJackman), which has become a great source of information, quite relevant for my work as ATS. What better way to know what your faculty are up to?

Curiously, only a third of the respondents used Twitter in a course “sometimes,” “occasionally,” or “frequently.” Suspected cause: the students. Stanford students are not on Twitter.

If you are interested in the work of the ATS group beyond this blog, you can follow the Stanford ATSs @mljockers @cncoleman, and @ceng_l, or our interest group @stanfordspatial.

“You don’t want to be seen with such a high-tech device when you meet local people and talk to informants” said the faculty. Our conversation had begun with the iPad, and we were contemplating if it was feasible to take the device to do field research this summer. The concern is certainly valid. Yet without doubt, we are subjected to a constant flow of new gadgets and technologies that continue to emerge and become part of the researchers’ as well as the informants’ lives. Surely, they must affect the landscape of anthropological fieldwork. But how?

Digital tools can increase efficiency. Online questionnaires, for example, have relatively low cost, and allow for fast and if necessary large volume data processing. Recorded interviews provide more detail than written notes. Increasingly smaller and mobile devices can become part of the interview. For example, it is possible to pull up Google Earth on the iPhone and point out particular locations. Ethnographers have begun to make use of online or social networking sites as tools to conduct research. Blogs have been described as democratizing force in the ethnographic process that scrutinizes researchers.

This, of course, has its flip sides. Arguments have been made, like the faculty’s remark above, that technology distances the ethnographer from the informant. “A few years ago I was excited about the possibility to take large amounts of digital pictures in the field. Then I realized how impossible it was to manage thousands of photos” is what another faculty mentioned to me. And aside from those rather practical considerations, we should also expect qualitative consequences for anthropological field research.

However, new digital technologies not only offer new tools for the way fieldwork can be conducted. Technologies also become to varying degrees part of societies and cultures. This has two major consequences: (1) digital artifacts can enter as objects of research and (2) online environments are potential sites for field research. Both equally affect the researcher and the informant. Where then, do those developments meet the challenges of anthropological field research?

Anthropological field research, at its core, is about interaction with people. In the 80ies, one of the critical debates drew attention to the authority of the researcher. Digital technologies have the potential to empower informants, participatory mapping is an example, as is the use of blogs mentioned above. And increasingly, the researcher also needs to understand the technologies informants use. Others issues include: how to collect information, how to show different perspectives and do so in multiple languages, how to create an immersive experience of a culture or a place, or how to facilitate interactions with and within communities.

If we envision today’s undergraduate students, growing up as facebook generation, conduct research as senior anthropology professors, that’s what we should probably think about.