As described in my last post, listening to lots of audio in the target language is a key part of my approach to language learning. For that reason I needed a good field recorder app for my iPhone. I spent a lot of time and (because you can’t demo most apps without buying them) money searching for a workflow which would let me record, edit, and listen to audio within the same application. I wanted it all in one application because I find that I sometimes want to go back and re-edit a file. It is also currently difficult to send files to iTunes without going through the desktop. In the end, I found a wonderful app that did exactly what I wanted: FiRe2 Field Recorder.

FiRe2 has some really great features that I find particularly useful. First of all, it shows a waveform of the audio. When you are trying to edit an audio file, or listen to it for language practice, having a visual representation of the audio is very useful. Secondly, you can easily mark the audio during recording or playback for easy navigation or editing. While I found other waveform editors, none were as easy to use for playback and language practice. In FiRe2 it is very easy to jump back to the previous mark or the beginning of an audio file with the tap of your thumb. Third, it is easy to sync the audio to the desktop in a number of formats via Dropbox. Forth and most importantly, if you turn the phone sideways it gives you an intuitive and easy to use waveform editor which allows me to easily extract the bits of speech I want to listen to for my language practice.

Of course, FiRe isn’t perfect. I wish it was easier to edit and see text labels for the markers. But FiRe is not meant to be used for transcription. In another post I will talk about transcription software – an essential part of my language learning workflow. I also wish it supported the “open in” feature of iOS which allows apps to send and receive files from other apps. (They say they are working on it.) I should also add that while I find the built-in microphone is good enough for my needs, there are a number of external mics you can buy if you need better sound quality.

Also worth mentioning here: In the end of January Zotero released version 3.0 of Zotero, which finally introduced a “standalone” version of Zotero that doesn’t require Firefox to run. IMHO, it still has a ways to go before it can catch up to Sente, but there are two areas where it is ahead of the game: (1) It has plugins for Chrome which allow you to save citations directly from your browser. (Sente still awkwardly requires you to open its own browser and copy your link before you can save a webpage.) And (2) it has a AAA format built-in.

Finally, on the iOS front, I still find GoodReader + Dropbox + Evernote to be my best mobile reading workflow. But it is worth mentioning that in addition to Sente’s excellent iOS app which I reviewed earlier, there is now an unofficial iOS app for Zotero. There is also a new iOS app from the makers of Bookends, and a new version of Papers as well.

“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

Inspiration came from online discussions about pedagogy among digital humanists, from folks such as Cathy Davidson at Duke University’s HASTAC collective, Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom project at Berkeley, and here at the University of Colorado, our ASSETT program‘s focus on teaching with technology. In the summer of 2010, grad student Marnie Thomson and I crafted the wiki and blog assignments as complementary and required components of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course I taught that fall with an excellent team of graduate student teaching assistants, including Marnie as Head Teaching Assistant (TA).

We had no idea what to expect. Would the students really be able to create a theory wiki as first-year anthropology undergraduates? Would they theoretically engage each other on the theory blog in the ways we hoped for? The answers were ‘sort of’ for the wiki, and ‘yes’ for the blog, where their work went beyond even what we had imagined. Here is what we did:

Food and love. All students wrote two 500-word essays applying two different anthropological theories to a topic of their choice under the rubrics of food and love. Essay due dates were staggered over the semester, with some groups of students writing first about food, then love, or vice versa, and applying the theories they were learning at that particular moment in the course. TAs graded the essays, and selected those to put up on the blog. We posted the essays under gender-neutral pseudonyms, and students were required to submit six “substantive comments” on the blog (three on food essays, three on love essays). Their Theory Blog + Wiki Assignment explained:

What do we mean by substantive blog comments? We are looking to create a truly dialogic space for exchange about anthropology. We ask you to engage with the posted essays—for example, offer your thoughts on the author’s argument, raise questions, make connections to other course topics or cultural phenomenon, in general, participate in such a way that conversation is started, continued, or otherwise enabled.  

All comments were moderated, meaning they were not made public until a TA or myself had read them. Any student who did not want to post under their real name created a pseudonym for their comments. The essays and blog comments were 50% of their recitation grade, which made up 40% of their course grade.

Did it work? Beautifully.

Students had respectful, intellectual conversations not usually possible in a large lecture class. They read, responded to, and benefitted from each other’s writings, rather than just writing for the instructor. Collectively, the students turned the blank blog into a space of intellectual exchange and growth. The TAs and I decided not to participate in the blog but to allow it to be a student space for discussion (except for the time a middle-aged man not in the course commented on the “cougar” essay, and I as professor had to reply; a teaching moment, indeed).

We posted six “food” essays and ten “love” essays (turns out as much as we all love food, we love “love” more). In one essay, a student analyzed the US locavore movement using structural-functionalism and cultural ecology. Another wrote about “bromance” from functionalist and Boasian perspectives. A third student critiqued Facebook profiles using symbolic and feminist anthropology. Following each essay are student comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and productive. The format was a great success in terms of getting students to think with rather than about theory. Again and again, they asked each other “what would a ______ anthropologist think about this?” and thought through the different theoretical approaches to any one topic.

While the course was in session, students gave positive feedback on the blog, and their understanding of theory was evident in the essays they wrote on their final exams as compared to prior semesters. Students from this 2010 class who have since taken more advanced courses with me are comfortable with theory, clearly retaining knowledge from the earlier class, and thus further marking the pedagogical impact of the blog.

The wiki was not as successful and remains unfinished. Each theory (and a handful of topics) were given a page with four sections: main points, key figures, key texts, and critiques. Some sections are competent, while others are incomplete or even convoluted in places. Designed to accompany the course blog as an introductory theory resource, the wiki covered contemporary and classic theory (rather than just classic theory as some sites do). Course students wrote all entries, and frankly, one semester was not enough time to get to a baseline of content for further refining, editing, and developing. Anyone interested in helping out with it—as part of a course, or on their own—is welcome.

Not all of my Digital Anthropology experiments have been a success (cough, cough, Twitter course feed), but the theory blog was successful beyond my expectations. There is no anthropology without theory, and so teaching it well to our newest students is important, giving them a base on which to build as they go forward. I offer our model and experience in the spirit of sharing and would love to hear what has worked for others, as both instructor and student.

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She regularly teaches theory classes to undergraduate and graduate students, and just debuted a new course this semester on “Reading Ethnography.”

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue.

I just went through the whole job-hunting process before signing a contract on Monday to become a Lecturer in media and cultural studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. I was able to apply for a silly amount of jobs, get a bunch of interviews and campus visit requests, and have some choices and grounds on which to do some humble negotiating. I think my trick was post-disciplinary research and (a considerable amount of) cross-disciplinary publishing. I could apply to communications, media studies, anthropology, information studies, STS, sociology, television studies, American studies, and internet studies. If I were desperate I could apply for archaeology and film production positions. Postdoctoral positions, particularly those financed by the Mellon, are all about interdisciplinarity as are jobs looking for digital humanities scholars.

So I’d encourage my fellow freshly minted ABDs and PhDs to begin seeing their research and their teaching across at least 4-5 large disciplines. Be able to realistically apply to 4-5 departments. One can put this together variously by publishing in different journals, collaborating with colleagues from different fields, or simply working the boundaries of one’s discipline in necessarily interdisciplinary ways. (All I can say is that I hope this is not my internalization of the precarity of neoliberal governmentality in the education sector.)

And there is something said for responding (in non-trendy and timeless ways!) to emergent patterns in industry, politics, and social movements. The departments recognize that what is in the news is what the students want to study. In my case this amounted to a recursive loop from the hype surrounding new media –Arab Spring, Anonymous, Wikileaks, SOPA, PIPA, and Occupy– to departments requesting applicants with expertise in social media and political movements. Oddly enough, if the academic job thing doesn’t work out this type of preparation in the now prepares oneself better for a post-academic profession. In academia the joy of investigating emergent practices is that there is no syllabus. You get to design your own. And in the classroom you are not pulling teeth, the issues are on students’ minds. It is relevant.

I may sound heretical to some of you by suggesting that post-anthropological disciplinary affiliations are necessary. But one gains much less than one loses by fundamentally aligning oneself with the orthodoxy of a specific discipline. One one hand, the qualitative and critical social sciences are converging. Critical theory and ethnographic or textual methods run across all the disciplines above. On the other hand, replicating the discourses specific to a discipline is important for the survival of that discipline and I am glad some people are monogamously “physical anthropologists” or whatnot. But my argument is that this practice of disciplinary orthodoxy is dangerously myopic for a discipline and puts the job hunter in a situation with few options. I preferred to bring scholarship from other disciplines to anthropology, and though it proved difficult to buck anthropological tradition by studying contemporary technoculture in America, it provided me a wider repertoire of skills that apparently translate into numerous disciplines and a blessed job offer.

Good luck! Tell us how it goes for you.

it has become easier to steal information remotely because of the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones and the inclination of employees to plug their personal devices into workplace networks and cart proprietary information around. Hackers’ preferred modus operandi, security experts say, is to break into employees’ portable devices and leapfrog into employers’ networks — stealing secrets while leaving nary a trace.

I mention this because it is also a serious concern for anthropologists I know who do research in China. We here on Savage Minds have written a lot about using digital tools for research, but it is also worth thinking about the vulnerabilities such tools create for one’s informants. There are a lot of tools one can use to encrypt data, but they are useless if some Lisbeth Salander has already hacked into your computer and stolen the password. How paranoid should we be? What steps can we take to protect our digital data? Please use this as an open thread to discuss these issues.

Thinking is one of the most important parts of the research process, second only to reading. (You must read. Read. Read. An article. A day. Read.) And yet I’m struck by the way that smart phones inhibit thinking by keeping us busy. When you are waiting for the bus checking Twitter, you are not only giving up the opportunity to read an article, you are giving up the opportunity for thought.

Thinking isn’t hard, at least not for me: most of my thinking occurs during my free time (walking is a fave) and just involves sitting there either silently ranting to myself (“We’ve given up thinking! Hey wait, I bet I could spin that out into a blog entry…”) or just sort of sitting there letting thoughts roll absently about in your head (“uh… interpellation…. hmm…”). Like sleep, the other major time your brain sorts itself out, moments of downtime spend stupidly pondering the universe can be remarkably productive because they allow your mind to shake the leaf bag that is your brain down until all your thoughts are nice and tightly nestled together.

Of course, thinking is second to reading because most thinking actually is the act of reading, which involves actively if silently responding to the author. But failing that, I really believe opening a beer, watching the sun set and going “uh… interpellation…” is a valid and important part of the academic process. So the next time you feel the urge to trawl the Internet for more things you’ll never read, take a second instead and turn off your smart phone and stare vacantly at the cars going by as you wait for your bus to come. Trust me — it’ll pay off in the long run.

Make sure they will say yes: Ask your advisor if they think the prof would be a good fit on your committee. A lot of the time professors will talk to each other first before you meet, so the new addition to your committee may already know you are coming and has already basically agreed to serve. A lot happens behind the scenes in academe, so even though it is ‘your’ committee, its very important to work with your advisor so that they can shepherd the whole thing along.

Pop the question early: There’s nothing weirder than having a graduate student come to your office and spend five minutes explaining why they have the same intellectual interests as you, seemingly for no reason. Perhaps they are planning to do this for your entire office hour…? It’s far better to just sit down, be business like, and say “the reason that I’m here to see you today is to ask you to serve on my dissertation committee. Uh… will you?” Remember: the goal is to have this already taken care of ahead of time, which means your probably next step will be to:

Accept acceptance gracefully: If someone agrees to be on your committee then… say thank you! They may want to talk more (for which, see below) but they may also be very busy and consider this whole embarrassing ritual a waste of time. Take your cue from the prof — this meeting could be really short.

Accept rejection gracefully: If someone says no, don’t ‘personalize’ — people decide not to serve on committees for all sorts of reasons, not because you are a total fraud who doesn’t really belong in graduate school. Sometimes people are just too busy, sometimes they have personal issues with other committee members, etc. etc. There are lots of reasons people say no. Its ok to push people a little bit: are you sure? Do you mind if I ask why? But don’t push too hard. Those who say no will still end up evaluating your work in the future. There’s no point upsetting someone when you could have a perfectly collegial relationship.

Prepare for ‘the Probe’: The problem is a long, metal instrument professors keep in their office to… no just kidding. Often before deciding to be on your committee professors will ask a couple of probing questions to see who you are and what you are doing. Much of the time they know they are going to say yes, but they still want a sense of who you are and what they are getting into. This kind of thing may also happen immediately after they agree to serve if they want to move on to the nuts and bolts of the advising relationship.

Basically, you should be able to say why you want to work with someone — how their interests overlap with yours, what you might read together in the future and so forth. I’d advise reading the acknowledgements and introduction to their dissertation to get a sense of their genealogy, as well as their latest article or two so you can understand what they’ve been working on lately.

You don’t have to knock the ball out of the park on this one — I think a lot of professors just want some very basic sense that you know what you are doing, and where they will fit into it.

Discuss expectations: No one registers for their wedding after the first date, but it does help in this initial meeting to give your committee member some sense of how much of their attention you’ll be needing. Some people want assurances that you are not going to show up on their doorstep too often, while others are not going to take you on unless they know you are ready to put in some serious time with them. Giving a committee member a sense of what you want from them is helpful, as if making sure you learn what they are willing to contribute to your committee.

But above all, professors are crazy people and office hours are an extremely strange institution. You have to learn to roll with the punches. If someone wants to talk about baseball for five minutes before you get started, let them. If they are super busy and want to shoo you out of the office after they “yes yes, I’ve talked to professor Jones about this, I’ll be on your committee” then get out from underfoot. And above all, if the vibe seems seriously off, don’t ask someone to be on your committee who you don’t think should be there.

This is such a small thing, but like a lot of things in academia someone its something that we never really talk about. So maybe this will help provide some transparency on this small academic ritual.

Before you do anything else, you should answer the following question: why are you are going to graduate school in anthropology?

If the answer is that you want an academic career in anthropology, you might think twice about graduate school. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I think the percentage of current anthropology Ph.D.s who are likely to find tenure track jobs in an anthropology department isn’t much better than the percentage of people in college rock bands who go on to sign deals with major record labels. If rock ‘n roll is in your veins, nobody is going to dissuade you from trying to make a career of it, and if you feel the same way about anthropology I say “Go for it!” Otherwise, I’d suggest something else.

Of course, even within academia there are a range of choices. If signing a tenure track contract at Chicago is the pinnacle of the academic job market there are lots of decent options further down the slope: including teaching in another field or an interdisciplinary department (I’m in a program on “ethnic relations and culture”), teaching at a community college, or teaching outside of the U.S., etc. But even if you do get a job, know that academia almost everywhere is under attack from a range of neoliberal policies and budgetary cutbacks, so be ready for a rough ride.

Some of you might be interested in applied careers. Here I think there are a lot more options and I would be much more encouraging. There is a real demand for people with anthropology degrees in a variety of careers. The AAA has a page listing some of them, and I like this list from the counseling centre at the University of Manitoba, but I think the real list is nearly infinite. Basically anything you can do without an anthropology degree can be done better with an anthropology degree. Or at least I think so, and so (it seems) do many employers.

Knowing the answer to the first question will affect what you do next. I won’t spell out all the possible permutations, but suffice to say that if you want a job at one of the top anthropology programs in the US, you would be best off attending such a program. Sure, someone from a third tier university still has a shot at getting a job a the top programs, but know that the odds are stacked against you. Partially because the top universities are more likely to give you the funding, support, and training necessary to do top-quality work and partially because of the sometimes incestuous nature of the discipline. Still, there are many good reasons you might not simply choose a university based on its ranking. For instance, there might be supporting programs which you might wish to make use of at another university, such as a good film school, or medical school, or linguistics program, etc. This could be especially useful for those going into more applied programs.

One thing I tell international students looking to go to the US is that they are best off applying for a Ph.D. program. Many countries more clearly demarcate the M.A. and Ph.D. and so it is good to know that these programs are likely to be combined in the U.S. Rather than writing an M.A. thesis, you will be required to take the same courses as M.A. students and will receive your M.A. upon completion of your qualifying examinations (and/or submission of your dissertation research proposal). As such, it doesn’t really make sense to apply for an M.A. and doing so will often disqualify you from funding opportunities.

Now we get to the hard part. How to pick the program which is right for you? My response to this question is that if you don’t already know the answer you should give yourself six months to a year to do research on graduate programs. I know it sounds like a long time, but the truth is that it is a very difficult question and researching the answer requires doing a lot of reading. That’s because I think you are best off researching professors, not programs [but see note #1 below]. You need to find people who are doing work that you like, that excites you, that makes you want to give up seven to nine years of your life doing something similar. And the time will be well spent because knowing the answer to this question will not only help you pick good a graduate school, it will also help you prepare your application, making it more likely that you will be accepted to the program of your choice.

Of course, knowing you like the work of a particular professor doesn’t necessarily answer the question of which graduate program you should attend. Because the current job market is such a mess someone who does great work might be unemployed or might be teaching somewhere other than in a graduate program in anthropology. But you can write to that person and ask for advice. Perhaps you could study with their teacher, or one of their classmates, who are at a university better suited to your needs. It also sometimes happens that great programs get split up and the professors scatter to a number of other universities. To sort all this out you need to become a scholar of the recent history of academic anthropology. You should also attend AAA meetings and try to talk your way into some of the various parties being held by the graduate programs you are interested in (often in their hotel rooms after the meetings are over), or perhaps just visit the school and try to talk with some of the graduate students. The point is that if you aren’t simply choosing programs based on the name of the university, it is a difficult choice and requires some careful research. Take the time and do it right.

Finally, everyone should have a “Plan B” (and even “C”). It is sometimes possible to transfer to your first choice program after spending a year or two somewhere else. It is also possible that your second choice turns out to be better than you thought. But also be ready to do something else if a career in anthropology doesn’t turn out the way you wanted. A number of my friends dropped out of academia and while fellow academics treated this as a kind of death, they themselves seem much happier as a result. Sure, they miss it sometimes, but then they come to their senses.

NOTES:

1. Since I recommended choosing a gradate program based on how much you like the work being done by individual professors, I should add a word of warning: professors can get sick, they can loose their jobs, and they can move to other universities. While finding an individual professor is a good way to start the job hunt, be wary of picking a program because of just one faculty member. Best if there are a couple of professors you would be willing to work with at the same university. You are going to have to take courses with the rest of the faculty anyway, so you’d better like them.

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

But if you are in scanning mode, what do you do when you find something interesting to read? There are now a number of “read later” services, but my favorite is still Instapaper which gives you a nicely formatted offline reading experience on your smart phone or Kindle. Flipboard and many other apps have Instapaper support built-in. But this doesn’t work for everything. What if someone links to a book? Or a movie? Or an article which doesn’t work in Instapaper? Or perhaps it is just a website you want to save for later?

In that case, my favorite option is the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in. Pinboard can be set to archive your Twitter account and even automatically bookmark every link in your Twitter feed. But I prefer more selective control. For that there is an option to only bookmark “starred” tweets. This means that as I read Twitter I can “favorite” something and know it will be bookmarked in Pinboard. I can then return later and process the links accordingly. I will usually add books to my Amazon wishlist, movies to my RottenTomatoes “want to see” list, and articles to my Zotero list.

Browsing

Browsing is a more engaged and purposeful type of scanning. This is what I do when I’m doing research. There are really a couple of different activities I might be engaged in when I’m browsing. I might be actively searching online, in which case I’ll add finds to my Amazon wish list or Zotero, or perhaps save a website to Evernote (Pinboard can also archive websites offline, but I prefer Evernote because I can also save PDFs, and I can select which part of a webpage I wish to archive – it also works well on iOS.) I also get various TOC and Google Scholar Search alerts via email. But here I want to focus on another type of browsing which is the process of going through actual texts and figuring out what you want to do with them.

I used to use Sente for this, but increasingly I find it easier to simply save PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox account which seamlessly syncs with my favorite PDF reading application: GoodReader. It is much easier to sit on the couch with my iPad and quickly scan these PDFs than it is to do at my desktop. The articles I must read go in a “must read” folder. For books, I download sample book chapters to Kindle, and use the Kindle iPad app in the same way. The books I decide to read I then buy from Amazon. If the book isn’t available on Amazon (or anywhere else), I will scan the book in Google Books if I can, or sometimes the publisher has a sample chapter.

Increasingly many books are available online in PDF even if the publisher doesn’t officially make them available as texts. This happened with the music industry earlier, and I think academic publishers would do well to learn from the past by making their books available via legitimate services like Amazon and Apple. One interesting new option is 1dollarscan which will scan your books at a rate of $1 for 100 pages. The downside is that (for copyright reasons) they will then pulp the book after scanning it for you. For a cheap PDF of a book not currently available, one could purchase a cheap used copy online and send it to 1dollarscan. I haven’t tried this, but you might even be able to have the book sent to them directly.

Devouring

So you’ve finally got your articles in Instapaper, Kindle, and/or GoodReader and want to sit down with a cup of tea and engage in some more careful reading. Things still aren’t that simple. What if you want to take notes? While printed texts can all be dealt with in the same way: a highlighter and/or a pencil, electronic texts have different restrictions depending on the software and publisher. Instapaper lets you save articles you like directly to Evernote. GoodReader lets you highlight text and then email a summary of your highlights, which you can send to Evernote via your private Evernote email address. A more complicated scenario is when you have a PDF that doesn’t have text which can be selected. Then you either need to run it through OCR software on your computer, or use GoodReader’s other annotation tools which let you draw over the PDF. (I usually use the “box” tool and simply draw a box around the text I am interested in.) The annotated PDF can then be sent to Evernote, which will do it’s own OCR, allowing you to search the full-text of the PDF (assuming you have a “pro” account).

Kindle is more difficult. Kindle lets you make highlights (read this tutorial), but then you need to go to the webpage and copy those annotations back to your computer. There is no way to simply copy or email these annotations from the Kindle app. Because some publishers restrict how many annotations you are allowed to make on a single book, you might need to backup and delete some of your annotations before you can make additional highlights. For the tech savvy, there are also ways to crack the Kindle DRM and save the book you’ve bought as a PDF in GoodReader, where you will be free of such restrictions.

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to find oneself spending far too much time “scanning” and “browsing” and not nearly enough time actually “devouring” the books and articles that we have already decided to read. It is too easy to be distracted by the constant stream of incoming distractions. Research shows we are far worse at getting back to concentrating on the task at hand than we think we are. My solution for this has been to adopt the Pomodoro approach. This means you set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes during which you don’t do anything except read. When I started doing this I found myself itching to check Twitter after about ten minutes. Slowly, using this approach, I’ve re-trained myself to go for longer without seeking distractions. You then “reward” yourself with 5-10 min of scanning before doing another “Pomodoro.” I personally found Pomodoropro to be the best Pomodoro app for iOS. They don’t yet have an iPad version, but the iPhone version works just fine on the iPad.

That’s it for now. A year ago I wrote a similar post about “going paperless” but a lot has changed in a year. I imagine next year this will all look hopelessly out of date. If you have your own suggestions, or a more Android friendly version of some of the iOS apps I listed above, feel free to share them in the comments.

The first lesson is that it takes a certain amount of repetition for a point to sink in. This is normal in spoken discourse, but it is useful in writing as well. It isn’t just repetition: successful academic writers often seem to be able to spin endless variations on the same theme. This not only helps bolster their argument, it also makes their point clearer by presenting it in a variety of different ways.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, many junior scholars undervalue their own insights. They tentatively make a theoretical point, find lots and lots of citations to bolster that argument, and then rush on to discuss the data. They feel safe with data, and are eager to establish the validity of their theoretical insights. An established scholar, on the other hand, sees the theoretical point as a rich vein to be mined for all it’s worth. While the initial case study may need exhaustive documentation, additional iterations of the main point can be made with less evidence, and in some cases can be purely speculative. This also helps attract other scholars to cite the work, providing them as it does with potential avenues for new research.

These two styles of writing might be thought of as “mining” vs. “harvesting.” Where the established scholar doesn’t let go of an idea till every last bit of ore has been extracted from it, the junior scholar is busy harvesting citations to bolster a single insight. I think this explains why experienced scholars seem to cite much less frequently. If you are making the same point over and over again, you don’t really need to provide additional citations for each new iteration of the central theme. The junior scholar, on the other hand, lacks the confidence to push too hard on any given idea, worried perhaps that it might fail to hold up under too much scrutiny. Instead, they hide it under a pile of citations, hope to deflect, rather than draw attention to their own ideas.

When I examine my own motivations for avoiding repetition and using lots of citations, I don’t see the kinds of motivations I’ve just attributed to other junior scholars. I tell myself that I just like to “show my work” by highlighting the scholarship upon which my own ideas are built. My frustration with established scholars is that they so often feel no need to do so. Similarly, as a very careful reader, I often find myself skimming over work which is overly repetitive, and I don’t wish to bore my readers in the same way. This is how I used to think about it. Now, however, I’m less certain. I think there are some good reasons to do more mining and less harvesting. They say you should “dress like the job you want to have.” Since most established anthropologists dress so badly I’m not sure that is good advice. But maybe writing like an established scholar is not such a bad idea…

How do anthropologists systematically review the things that other anthropologists have written? Do we in any way systematically read, summarize, and synthesize the things others have written in order to draw generalized conclusions from them? In the case of sociocultural anthropology, I think the answer is generally: no. I mean, we have Annual Review articles and introductions to edited volumes, we have landmark collections which deal with particular topics or ethnographic areas — its not like we have no interest in figuring out where the field is going and what others are doing. But we don’t have a methodical means of working through our materials.

I think partly this is due to the history of our discipline — the time when you could read everything by everybody was not that long ago. When was the last time biologists could say that? The past couple of decades have seen a tremendous growth in the field as well as its professionalization — although perhaps not in all areas.

But there are other reasons that anthropologists don’t systematically summarize their literatures — reasons that become clear when you look at the fields that do. The most rigorous method, metanalysis, is frequently used in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) to compare studies, tests, clinical trials, and what not. A lot of the books I’ve discovered in my meta-lit review were actually delightful how-to guides written for nurses on understanding the medical literature. Rigorous metanalaysis involves using mathematical analysis to normalize studies and make them comparable even when the number of patients involved, duration of the clinical trial, amount of medication given, etc. vary across them.

There are a boatload of reasons that sociocultural types can’t do this: at the most basic level, we just don’t follow the same generic format in writing our articles: you can’t quickly jump between the findings, discussion, and conclusion of our articles because we don’t write them all in the same order. It’s just this simple. And then of course there are the methodological issues: as in, we don’t have any. Or at least one one susceptible to any degree of mathematical tweaking to make our findings (which we may also be lacking) comparable with those of our fellow ethnographers.

To be honest, I’m not so sure this is a bad thing. I think of anthropology a frying pan full eggs that someone tried to make into an omlette, but didn’t quite manage to flip over and as a result it is sort of half-omlette, half-scrambled eggs in a bizarre and slightly runny mixture which still tastes perfectly delicious despite looking really wierd. Even that half of our discipline that has aspiration to be something more than poetry greatly benefits from the other half that has a practicum in its class on shamanism that requires students to become Possessed By The Beaver Spirit. We gain an insight and vantage point that is valuable because it has not solidified. Of course the flip side is the constant feeling you get that we are reinventing the wheel.

The second method of literature review, the ‘matrix method’, is really just a barely-structured way to impose some order on your notes: you create a matrix with authors on one axis and the topics or themes they treat on the other, and then you fill in the boxes in the resulting table: Foucault says this about power, Durkheim says this about power, Weber says this about power. Foucault says this about socialization, Durkhein says this about socialization, Weber says this about socialization. Etc.

I think this could be a useful method for some things — especially ethnographic details — but not for others. In the example I just gave, for instance, what would record for Foucault’s take on socialization or Durkheim’s take on power? Some would argue these are the same things, while others would say that their viewpoints are so incompatible that comparison of this sort would require a metalanguage so vague as to be useless. Or — more to the point — you’d have to have read the articles already in order to construct the metalanguage that you’d use as you read the articles. In a field with many alternate vocabularies and a penchant for induction, this is a deal killer.

I am not sure if the lack of fit between anthropology and these forms of lit reviews indicates a fundamental problems with the discipline or the scholarly method. It is surely telling, however, that anthropologists can’t easily use either of these methods.

Skimming the Citational Ocean: The Internet has made this seductively easy, and the downside of this method is well-known and often-stigmatized: you never actually read anything, you just become aware that it exists. Of course, this is a good thing as long as you then go on to the next step and read a subset of what you’ve discovered. The danger is going into Overwhelm mode where the vistas of scholarship stretch so endlessly before you that your awareness of the interconnectedness of all knowledge turns into acute agoraphobia, you roll into a small ball, and weep silently about all the PDFs you will never have time to read. You should probably stop browsing before that happens.

Book Mark It: Bookmarking something is basically a way to promise myself I can find it again if I ever need to, and a tacit admission to myself that I will never try to find it again in my entire life. Let’s face it: the vast majority of what you stumble across in your research simply has to be ignored. Much of it can be straight-out ignored because it’s not relevant, and the rest must be gently let down, be told that you just want to be friends with it, that you’ll see it around, that it’s not the information, it’s you. Bookmarking is a way of letting yourself off the hook for the coulda shoulda woulda information out there. After all maybe someday you will have a chance to read that five hundred page definitive history of the Balkans.

There are different ways to bookmark things — I use delicious myself. You can keep a reading journal, or even use the bookmark features in your browser. You can have a special database in your favorite database program. It’s all good. Just fire and forget and let your outboard brain do the rest.

Skim and Note: By skim I mean ‘spend at least one minute with the book open’. By ‘note’ I mean: record what you find out about it. If you are judging a book by it’s cover, that’s fine. But it also means that that book should be bookmarked. If you are ‘spending a little time’ with a book, then you must take a note on it. (‘spending a little bit of time’ is also the aphorism you use to describe your engagement with the book. They: “Good lord, you’ve read all of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money” You: “I’ve spent a little bit of time with it”. Say it with an easy smile to convey the impression that you have achieved a subtle and masterful understatement instead of the actual fact, which is that you have pored carefully over the table of contents). Who wrote the book? Why? Who are they arguing against or in favor of? How long is it? How long did you spend with it? For instance, here in their entirety are my notes on The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems

An edited volume in honor of Clifford Geertz, with obvious origins in the Deep Seventies. Includes papers by Boon and J.S. Lansing on Husserlian phenomenology in Bali. Also for me the most interesting is the short kalulu [sic] paper by Buck Schieffelin. Authors are focused on SE Asia and the way that cultural experience is a learning process, experiential, etc. as opposed to more cerebral algebraic undersandings of culture as a code. Also very focused on expanding what it is acceptable to study — the arts, not kinship, and way-out groovy experiences as well, although no obvious reference to drugs in the 1 minute I spent flipping through the book.

A lot of time I just copy the top levels of the table of contents, or read the introduction where they explain what it’s about and how the chapters are broken down. Paying attention to topography is important. The question is really just: what did they say? These potted summaries are designed to 1) make you think about the book so that you internalize it in a vague but important way and 2) come back to your notes to remember what you’ve read. You are going to return to this stuff later at some point for some reason… maybe decades later… but you will return to it, right? If not, then it should be bookmarked.

Read and Annotate: As you grow ever more selective in your filtering, you’ve ignored most of what you’ve found, said adieu to the stuff you’ve bookmarked, and left a quick note to yourself on stuff you’ve skimmed. Now it’s finally time to get to that 10% of material that you actually want to read. Or I should say, read and annotate. Reading something without annotating it — well, it’s basically like not reading it. Like all forms of scholarship, reading and annotating is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs Future You can follow to figure out why you thought this stuff was important back when Past You read it. Again, look for signposting and topography: highlight passages that say “in this article I will argue” or “there are three things to remember” and then highlight the words “first” “second” and “third” when the author gets to each of their points. Write summaries in the margins, to make the topology of the piece explicit. Do not underline every time you come to a passage that makes it clear to you at that moment what the author is thinking. Do not highlight the whole article. The maxim is: highlight only those portions of the text absolutely necessary to understand it’s gist. In other words, highlight the minimum necessary for future you to return to the piece and remember it. Don’t drown Future You in tons of annotations, or leave Future You paging in blank incomprehension over tons of unhighlighted pages. Love Future You, care for Future You, nurture Future You with a steady diet of relevant passages.

It is also at this point that you should actually store a copy of the text locally. Bookmarked and skimmed notes are basically about data that lives somewhere else. Read and annotated materials need to be kept on-hand since you have not taken the time to pull full citeable notes from them. You probably also want to store the metadata (i.e. the full citation information) about them somewhere. Some people use programs to store PDFs and metadata in the same place, some people don’t — it’s up to you. The important point is that to own the literature you have to own the literature.

Reading and Note: This is the most intense form of scrutiny you give a text — a close reading to extract from it what you want from it. It’s similar to R&A except that it is more like being a vampire. you are sucking the text dry and using its precious ichor to keep your unholy academic career alive. Funders are attracted by your mysterious and yet dangerous allure. This means doing the same thing as R&A except 1) doing it more carefully and 2) instead of annotating passages, copying them into your personal database of notes. Because it takes more effort to copy and paste (or even — good lord! — copy by hand) quotes you are even more selective in boiling down their essence. In the end you have a (digital) notebook full of quotations, summaries, and your own comments about the reading.

This means that you can dispose of the bodies once they are drained: you only have to refer to your notebook in the future to get the gist of the argument or pull a quote that supports your case. This is really discarding the corpse, as opposed to R&A, which is more like keeping your PDFs hypnotized and locked in some strange pod or suspended animation unit you are ready to feast. This is the kind of research you do in the library or archives (where The Council Of The Five won’t let you check out the humans and take them home) and when you are serious about a book that you don’t want or need to pull it off your shelf. You just can’t compose texts with five hundred books and PDFs open and piled up to your ears, but you can easily do so if all your notes are in a single place. Now the criterion for whether you need to own texts is whether you will likely return to them for another purpose at another time. It’s a handy criteria to have the next time you are trying to decide between Amazon or ILL.

In conclusion, here are a few key points to make:

1. The quicker the pace the less focus is required to do it: You may only be able to read really really difficult material really really closely for, like, three or four hours a day. But there is never a time when you’re so tired that you can’t say to youself: “Why don’t I just read the table of contents for every issue of Dialectical Anthropology eve published?” Matching pace to focus increases productivity. Surf in the evening to set yourself up with something to read carefully in the morning when you mana pool is replenished.

2. Chose a pace and stick with it: If you are annotating, annotate. If you are bookmarking, bookmark. Use your concrete action on the text in order to gauge your genuine level of interest in it, and vice versa (and also, btw, how much focus you’ve got in you). When you fall between the cracks, you are not working efficiently.

4. Use pacing to define your intellectual world. You are interested in a lot of stuff, but what do you need to focus on right now? What is your core competency and what is the stuff you are just vaguely interested in? If you had to chunk your readings into three themes, what would they be? Using choice of pacings to create a ‘literature map’ of your headspace greatly simplifies figuring out what in fact is happening to you, mentally, at this point in your life.

5. Balance balance balance. Hyperactivity and endless browsing is a sign of trouble. Never peeking out from behind your copy of A Thousand Plateaus is not a good sign either. A healthy academic diet involves managing these extremes, and attending to pace layering can help you explicitly recognize what adjustments you need to make to your inputs.

And that’s it! At least for now. Does this jive with how other people take notes or do research?

AAA papers matter more than publications: AAA papers are the consommé of our academic inventory of soups and stocks. They are short, so it is easier for people to digest them than publications. Your presentation is not even mostly about the paper, but mostly about you as a person — whether you are ‘smart’ or ‘interesting’ or a ‘comer’ or not. Articles do not allow people to size you up in this way. And, realistically, even in very small sessions, more people may closely attend to your paper than ever get around the scrutinizing your articles. Above all, at AAA you make a flesh-and-blood on people, people who may later be interviewing you for jobs, evaluating you for tenure, or giving you research money. The bad news is that for some reason we treat these papers as the least important form of scholarly publication when, sociologically speaking, they are the most important. The good news is that you now know this while all the in the room do not, so now you have the advantage.

Take it seriously: don’t be a total moron and “write your paper on the plane”. You don’t get to be good at anything by doing it sloppily at the last minute, over and over again. Take the time you need to work on it. This will be easy because…

Seven pages, twenty minutes: AA papers are 20 minutes long, more or less. It takes three minutes to read a page of double-spaced 12 point Times New Roman. Your paper should be 7 pages long. Not 8 pages, and not 6 pages unless you then proceedeth to 7. Don’t come to the meetings with a 50 page dissertation chapter and expect the thing to magically cut itself down to 7 pages magically before your eyes as you stand at the podium during your session.

Think about your evidence: qualitative data takes time and space to layout, which is why anthropologists write long-form monographs. In most cases participant-observation is resistant to tabulation, and I can guarentee no one at AAAs is going to ask you what P is for your study. This means that you will have the freedom to make whatever claims you want in your paper regardless of the quality and amount of your evidence.

With 7 pages to work with, you have roughly 1.5 pages to introduce and conclude and 4 pages to make your case. This is a ridiculously compressed amount of space/time. The good news is that it focuses you to figure out what your point actually is and allows you to dwell on the broad relevance of your findings. The bad news is that you must resist spending four pages just describing where your fieldsite is. Remember: because of length, evidence in AAA papers is decorative and exemplary, a promissory note for the whole story.

I’d suggest either analyzing one single event or case study, or else focusing on three things/conclusions/themes and spending a page and change on each of them. Keep it tight, and remember to include only the details you need to make your point. This will probably be challenging because 1) it is too hard for you to be reductive due to your holistic, particularizing impulses or 2) you have no idea what you actually want to say. Regardless, remember that the evidence is there to make a point, and that your presentation must be point driven.

Read your paper out loud: Remember, a AAA paper is a performance the same way someone on stage doing The Vagina Monologues is a performance. The paper is your script. Read it aloud for twenty minutes, and make it as engaging as The Vagina Monologues except (probably) with less vaginas and more anthropology.

Many people — mostly those with no background in the performing arts — argue that you should never ‘read your paper’ because doing so is ‘boring’. This is just stupid talk. You know what’s boring? Someone going off script telling us what their paper says when it’s right there in front of them delivering an oral presentation full of “um”s and “I guess my point is”s. If you paid fifty bucks to go see Vagina Monologues and the actor stopped halfway through and decided to improvise their own monologue loosely based on the actual monologue, would you give them tenure?

Of course, when you read your paper you should not suck at doing it. Write the paper as if it were a monologue instead of dense academic prose — no one wants to read dense academic prose, much less listen to it. Read it as if it were a monologue. Project, stand up straight, make eye contact, read at a reasonable pace, all that kind of stuff. You could even try rehearsing before you perform if you were feeling really ambitious. In fact, the best way to present would be to just memorize your talk so that you don’t need a paper, but this is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

Revise: 7 pages is totally nothing. Revise constantly. In fact, why don’t you pound out your 7 page draft now, let it sit for a couple of months, and then pick it up a month or two before AAAs? I guarantee it will result in a better finished product. I’ve already written my first draft of my AAA paper.

In sum, AAA papers are so important, and yet so terrible that it should be easy to produce a good one: with the bar this low, how much trouble will you have jumping over it? Do the world a favor and reduce the suck quotient at AAA panels by following these simple pieces of advice today, so we can have a better world tomorrow.

INPUT: If you aren’t starting with a digital document from JSTOR, you need to scan your paper. My school has a fancy photocopy machine which can chew up an article and spit out a nice small PDF file, but if you don’t have access to that you can get yourself a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (or S1500M for the Mac) which can do the same thing. If you have a smartphone with a good camera you can also simply take a snapshot and use software like JotNot to convert those photos to something resembling a scanned document.

STORAGE: Once you’ve scanned something or downloaded it from the web, what do you do with it? Personally I am a big fan of Evernote which will do OCR on your (English) image and PDF files and which lets you do fulltext search on your entire library. It also can sync between your computer and mobile apps. But for academic texts I need structured metadata. I need to be able to pull out citations and insert them in my bibliography, etc. For that I use Sente. The iPad version of Sente pro finally came out and it is amazing. (See my review of the free version.) Unfortunately, Sente and Evernote still aren’t enough. I have some huge PDF files which aren’t handled well by either app so I also depend on Dropbox to sync those files across computers. And while all of these options have the ability to share with others, I find the easiest way to share files online is with Google Docs so I also use that, especially for teaching.

READING/ANNOTATING: Sente is pretty good for annotation, and I’m sure it will get better, but my favorite way to read PDFs right now is with iAnnotate for the iPad. I find the reading experience nicer than Sente which currently only shows one page at a time. For academic reading it is nice to be able to quickly scan whole paragraphs which cross page boundaries. And for documents where text is not “selectable” (such as docs I’ve scanned myself but not OCR’d) I like iAnnotate’s ability to add little “stamps” in the margins, such as a check mark, exclamation point, or question mark. When done both Sente and iAnnotate have the ability to export selected text and notes along with the marked up PDF. I email these to Evernote. (The fact that Sente syncs its annotations back to the desktop means you don’t have to do this step if you just use Sente.)

Not everything is on PDF. More and more academic texts are now available on Amazon’s Kindle and other ebook formats. (Although sometimes the pricing is ridiculously high. Academic books from UK publishers can cost over eighty dollars as an ebook!) What I like about Kindle is the ability to easily access one’s annotations online via the Amazon web interface. That and the fact that my annotations are synced between all my various devices. (I don’t have a Kindle, but I use the Kindle software on my iOS devices and my desktop.) I have not found anything as useful in other ebook software. One problem, however, is that Kindle books don’t give you proper page numbers. You can just cite it as an electronic text as the APA recommends, or you can do a full text search for the material on Google Books or Amazon book search to see the page number.

NOTE TAKING/PROOFREADING: One of the last redoubts for paper in my workflow has been those few places where pen on paper just seems to work best: taking notes during a talk or marking up text while proofreading. But recently I found something which makes it possible for me to do this on my iPad without printing out: Note Taker HD. The trick is that it lets you “write” in a special writing box. This allows you to write large letters with your finger, but have it appear small on the page. You can also switch to a standard writing mode where you can mark up the page directly. You can either write on a blank piece of paper or you can import a PDF, such as a PDF of the paper you are working on or a student’s paper you need to correct. It may not be quite as good as pen and paper, but it works well enough for me that I’ve stopped printing things out. I’ve tried several similar apps, but I find Note Taker HD to be the best. However, for taking notes at lectures or while interviewing people it is also worth mentioning SoundNote which can record audio as you type notes. Afterwards you can then lookup the relevant audio by clicking on the word you were typing when it was recorded—a little like how Livescribe works.

With these tools I’m able to avoid using paper nearly eighty percent of the time. The waste generated creating all these electronic devices may not be any better for the environment than cutting down trees, but keeping everything electronic means it is all searchable and I’m less likely to loose it. And now that so much data is stored on the cloud, it also means I can access my library and my notes from just about anywhere that has web access. As someone who travels between at least three countries every year, I like the idea of having most of my stuff stored in the cloud. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to join the Cult of Less but it is an idea that appeals to me. More importantly, in 2010 it is finally within the realm of the possible.

ckelty’s unimportant, quickly written, barely proofread, profound thoughts on blogging (in particular with respect to anthropology), including some clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ moments.

Why blog?

1. Blogging is so not for everyone.  The first reason to blog is to figure out whether it is for you.  And this is part of the point:  there is no cost or barrier to blogging.  Anyone can do it, and anyone who says that there is a digital divide is selling you snake oil of one kind or another.  What they usually mean is: not everyone is equal.  This is true, and sadly, blogging won’t change that.

2. Blog because you want to, and if you are lucky because people want to read what you write.  Getting people to read what you write is not hard.  Getting the right people to read what you write is very hard.  On the other hand, it’s easier to get the anthropologist in the office next to yours to read a blog post about your last article than your last article—and might force you to elegantly and concisely communicate what it’s about and why it is important.  And if you don’t have an office, all the more reason to blog about your articles!  If you don’t have any articles, definitely stop blogging now.

Why blog in anthropology?

1. Because if we don’t, no one will.  And I don’t just mean blog, I mean talk about what anthropologists do, and write things about what is great in anthropology right now. The key to making blog posts interesting to other anthropologists?  Blog about anthropology.  The old saw about writing what you know goes here.

2. Because it makes anthropology public.  The calls for a public anthropology have been coming for decades, but it’s not going to happen unless people take the risk of interacting—not just with “the public” (whoever they are), but with their peers around the country and around the world; with anthropologists who teach at community colleges, work in corporations, or left the practice for greener pastures, but never gave up loving anthropology… aaaah.

3. Because it’s a way to talk to other anthropologists as if they were human. Anthropologists, more than any other discipline I interact with, suffer from low self-esteem about their discipline.  This problem correlates directly with the level of public awareness and discussion of anthropology, which correlates directly with that bizarre desire to engage in debate in the article or the monograph… Blogging is a way of writing as if you were talking to someone, rather than as if you were saying something once and for all.

Observation: in five years of blogging at savage minds, I have seen less than a handful of comments from established (i.e. famous) anthropologists.  This does not mean they are not reading it (because they do mention it when I meet them), but that this particular form of interaction is still not seen as legitimate.  As long as this is the case, anthropology will fail to be “public” in any meaningful sense, and the famous anthropologists will continue to lament the fact that the New York Times doesn’t write about our work.

What sucks about blogging?

1. your audience. You can’t control it.  It’s not a seminar room, it’s not the AAA.  They ask weird questions, they don’t seem to have read Talal Asad or Emily Martin or whoever, and don’t seem embarrassed by that fact.  Sometimes they are mean. Really mean.  Sometimes they take offence, really take offence, and then it feels like you spend the next three days obsessing about whether you are a bad person.  But most of the time, they actually read what you write, and sometimes are moved to say something, sometimes really nice things (Thank you John McCreery).

2. the 72-hour attention span.  Regardless of how much time you put into a piece, it will only generate attention for 72 hrs, give or take a day.  Most posts disappear without comment.  If you are blessed/cursed as I am to write for a blog that more than 5 people read (and I love ALL SIX of our readers equally), then you will get a comment, two comments, maybe 30 or 40 comments wherein people are arguing and calling each other names and talking about religion and politics (see 4 below). But then it dies down in anticipation of the next post (see 5 below).  Spending longer than 72 hours working on a blog post:  really stupid idea.

3. the space it takes up in your brain.   Posting on a blog causes a temporary behavioral disorder (don’t worry it only lasts 72 hrs, see the previous point).  Kind of like obsessively checking status updates, or in old school terms, walking out to the mailbox every hour.  It’s the anxiety of writing condensed into a small time frame and usually regarding a largely unimportant issue.  If you have this anxiety, I think it is a good thing, because it makes you more conscientious about what you write.  Unfortunately, blogging might not be the best avocation for you.

4. Off topic much? What was the post about again?  Thread hijacking is a frequent feature of the blogosphere.  But really, this isn’t all that different from the seminar room now is it?  Of course, if you want to keep your comments on point, it requires being even more obsessive about your blog posts (see 3 above).

5. Blogging is a relentless activity: it suits people who have always got something they want to say, or those who see something fascinating in everything they observe.  Add to that just a bit of skill in presenting it, and you have a blogger.  The rest of us struggle to come up with interesting topics and takes, while an angry mob of six readers stands virtually outside your door waiting for you to post the next thing.  This is why group blogging is a good idea.  It’s particularly why group blogging with people like Kerim Friedman and Alex Golub (who fit the description above) is a good idea.

How do you write a good blog post?

It should be clear from the above, but let me condense it:

Rule 1. Don’t spend longer writing it than your readers will commenting on it.  The point is communication, not publication.

Lemma 1a. Don’t give up on the craft of writing.  A well constructed blog post is a great thing, and it’s good practice.  It is it’s own genre, a hybrid of a news article, an op-ed piece, an aphorism, and a critical review.

Rule 2.  Blog about anthropology.  Most of our anthropology brethren break this rule, and blog primarily about what’s in the news.  But who needs an anthropology blog to do that?  If it’s about what’s in the news, but also about what anthropology has to say: much better.

Exercise: Blog about a journal article you read recently.  We need far more of this kind of informal discussion of our work.  Think how pleased you would be if someone blogged about your research…  This exercise hones two valuable skills: a) the ability to communicate what an article says and why it is important better than the article does itself and b) the ability to do so in a language and tone that flatters the author, provokes your audience to thought and doesn’t take you longer than a couple of hours.

Rule 3. Love your comments.  If you get them, be grateful, even if they spew vitriol and hate.  Encourage discussion rather than foreclosing it.  But…

Lemma 3a: Never, never, never feed the trolls. Trolls are an invasive species on the internet and the blogosphere is a rich broth for their reproduction.  Only respond to good comments, ignore (i.e. do not respond to or mention) bad ones.

Rule 4: Post early and often. Even though it might seem like no one is reading your posts, believe me, they are, and they will, if they keep coming.  Again, group blog makes this easier.  If you start a blog, post for a month and then stop, people will stop reading it until you start writing again.   Having an audience is an incredibly important aspect of this practice, but you don’t get one without trying.

Lemma 4a.  Communicate with the other blogs in the anthropology blogosphere… tell them about your posts, comment on their posts, link to their blogs, tweet, update, check-in, whatever, but recognize that this is about social intercourse, not armchair reflection.

Rule 5.  Never follow rules written by bloggers.  All Cretans are Liars.