Machine Anthropology Workshop
Can ethnographic methods be integrated with machine learning techniques? And if so, how?
On the 27th and 28th of January, SODAS hosted a Machine Anthropology Workshop to kick of the ERC-funded project DISTRACT: The Political Economy of Distraction in Digitized Denmark.
The goal of the workshop was to explore the prospects for a new computational or “machine” anthropology. Bringing together researchers from academia and industry who have in different ways experimented with combining ethnographic and “big social” (digital, etc.) data, the ambition was to take these experiments one step further by asking what a fully-fledged merger or even outright fusion between anthropology and data science might look like. Were this version of Levi-Strauss’ old big dream to be realized, computers would not only be metaphors that are “good to think [anthropology] with.” Computers would also become agents of anthropological study or even anthropological “thought” in their own right, and thus open up for the emergence of distinctly anthropological forms of artificial intelligence and “machinic” anthropology.
The workshop included twelve different presentations that in each in their own way discussed mixing anthropology and data science and/or computational methods:
Computational Methods for Explorative Human Analysis. Krista Lagus & Minna Ruckenstein
Diplomatic Face-work between Confidential Negotiations and Public Display. Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Kristin Eggeling & Patrice Wangen
How Many Algos Does it Take to Crash the Market? Daniel Souleles & Nicholas Skar-Gislinge
Are Smartphones Contagious? Identifying Causal Spread of Smartphone Use. Kristoffer Pade Glavind, Asger Andersen & Andreas Bjerre Nielsen
How Millions of Individuals Use the Apps on their Smartphones. Sune Lehmann & Anna Sapienza
Thick Machines. Anders Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen & Mathiou Jacomy.
Ethnography beyond Thick Data: Sensors as Witnesses of Human Activity. Ajda Pretnar & Dan Podjed
Teaching Machines to “Think“ like Anthropologists: Using Abstractions to Parse Context and Inform the Very Early Development of Context-aware Personal Computing and Assistive Technology. Maria Cury & Sebastian Barfort
Creative Coding Interlude. Andreas Refsgaard
Remixing Methods: An Alternative Approach to Data Exploration. Anne Ipsen, Clara Sandbye, Emilie Gregersen, Laura Jørgensen, Olivia Jørgensen, Sofie Astrupgaard & Signe Schønning
Qualifying Text as Data: Steps towards Interpretatively Valid and Unbiased Measures of Text Data. Hjalmar Bang Carlsen & Snorre Ralund
Anthrometrics: Mining Anthropology Journals. Kristoffer Albris, Terne Thorn Jakobsen & Morten Axel Pedersen
The workshop was arranged by Morten Axel Pedersen, Kristoffer Albris, Emilie Munch Gregersen & Eva Iris Otto. SODAS & Department of Anthropology, UCPH
