@Edwin – You make some fine points about the need to keep anthropological terminology global and inclusive. Can I interest you in volunteering for a hypothetical Keywords project?

One suggestion regarding keywords though, is to be cautious about codifying American-centric phrases. The one that sticks out in my mind is tweeting. “Tweeting” refers specifically to the posting of information using the Twitter platform, which is a copyrighted American brand. The formation and use of this word is quite different than say the word “blogging” which is the action one takes to place information on a blog (the shortened word for weblog). In place of “tweeting” I would recommend the more commonly (well common outside of the U.S.) used word “micro-blogging” so that such activity includes users of Weibo, Tumblr, Google+ or even Facebook’s “status updates”, which seems to have inspired Twitter and Weibo in the first place. I would be interested though if people can think of ways to explain the other kinds of actions that happen on social networking sites like Facebook, Hi5, Orkut and Myspace, where both blogging and micro-blogging are possible. For instance how do we describe the uploading of pictures and videos onto these sites? It seems we should avoid using phrases such as “youtubing” “photobucketing”, “facebooking” and even “googling” (For the first two I don’t have any suggestions, but I think “social networking” and “querying” or “web searching” are equivalent for the last two, yes?)…but I say this only in the context of codification for ease of analysis and communication across cultures. Obviously though we shouldn’t change these words if our informants use them, in that sense they are a fascinating set of sociolinguistic data.

With regard to Nick’s comment above, it does seem like the “Mission” of CASTAC would facilitate DANG. But I have two questions:

First, has DANG actually established a broad mission statement such as that found on the CASTAC website? I see that there is this post by Matt over at 01Anthroplogy (http://01anthropology.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/statement-of-purpose/) and his previous post on SM in March (/2012/03/22/digital-anthropology-group-is-happening-now/) but not sure if there’s anything final.

Second, is the bulk of DANG research directly engaged with STS? From the CASTAC website, it is quite clear that this committee was created due to anthropological engagement in the “science wars” debate. I would argue though that not all research on Science, Technology or Computing necessarily has to engage with that discourse. For instance, this is also true for some of the work commonly presented at panels hosted by the Society for Anthropological Science (which is also younger than CASTAC) but would also fit within the CASTAC mission statement. If DANG research does not directly engage with STS literature, would CASTAC still be amenable to allowing DANG research (oh acronyms, why are you so fun) to be included in their panels and publications?

That’s my Tencent ;-p

My suspicion is that DANG gestated during the recent time that CASTAC was rather dormant, and that they exist separately not because of any fundamental difference in topic, but due to administrative coincidence. (It seems like, if you had to name it, DANG refers to a subset of the phenomena covered under CASTAC, but certainly you could pose this a number of ways.) In any case, unless CASTAC and DANG can sketch out distinct missions from each other, it seems crazy to me that we divide up anthropologists interested broadly in “stuff that happens on and with computers” like this. It seems like maybe what defines DANG specifically is not so much digitality (fun acronym be… damned), but rather the internet and networked computation, as both objects and media for scholarship. Thus the difference may be academic generation, with CASTAC bearing the history of an “old guard” anthropological interest in STS and DANG being the upstart internet thing, with suitably cheeky acronym (note that these differences in academic generation don’t necessarily, or actually, correspond to the ages of participants themselves).

In any case, as someone whose research could easily fit in with either group’s mission, I don’t think anything would necessarily be lost if they were to be combined. I’d be interested in hearing from people who think otherwise, though: why do you think you fit with DANG and not CASTAC or vice versa?