New publication explores anthropology’s history through computational text analysis
What happens when anthropologists turn their analytical gaze on their own archive—not through fieldwork, but through computational analysis? In a newly published article in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Kristoffer Albris, Matei Candea, Thyge Enggaard, Terne Sasha Thorn Jakobsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen investigate the intellectual history of anthropology using computational text analysis.
The study draws on a corpus of over 2,500 articles published in Man and JRAI between 1950 and 2018. Through word frequency analysis and topic modelling, the authors map long-term discursive trends in the discipline—highlighting, for instance, how certain theoretical currents rise and fall, and how the use of anthropological concepts shifts over time.
But the article does more than trace patterns. It makes a case for treating computational methods as modes of “estrangement” akin to ethnographic methods themselves. In doing so, the authors open a space for critical reflection on what it means to “read” a discipline, and how computational lenses might disrupt, challenge, or even revitalize traditional historiographies of anthropology.
Read the article Measuring MAN (incorporating JRAI): Computational anthropological analysis and quantitative speculation: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14290
Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash