The introduction of portable personal computers significantly broadened the scope of computing in anthropology. Where centralized mainframe computing had lent itself to large calculative tasks and team research projects, PCs fit more readily into the classic model of the lone fieldworker working primarily with textual material. Through the 1980s, computers achieved a certain ordinariness in anthropological work — the use of a computer for data collection or analysis was not limited to a vanguard group seeking to redefine anthropology, but was rather becoming a typical fact of university life (and, increasingly, life outside the university as well). This ordinariness set the stage for the explosion of social scientific interest in computers that was to come with the introduction of the world wide web and its attendant mediated socialities.

Computer applications for anthropologists were the object of a variety of reviews within the major journals of the discipline as well as specialized publications on computers and the social sciences through the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to reviewing the latest programs (from qualitative analysis software to word processors that could handle unusual scripts), many of these reviews contained some editorializing on the state of computing vis-à-vis anthropology. From a review of these reviews (primarily in American journals), I’ve identified some common themes that emerged as computers became ordinary.

Materiality

One striking feature of these reviews is their concern with the materialities of computing. While an emerging literature in critical theory explored the virtualizing potential of computing technologies — their ability to confound traditional boundaries and decorporealize cultural experience — these articles focused on the mundane pragmatics of ethnography conducted with the personal computer. In a 1987 article in Current Anthropology:

Fischer was quite surprised by the lack of problems using floppy diskettes in the very dusty environment of the Punjab. The primary base was a small house with open doorways and windows, and the only precautions taken were to face the disk drive away from the wind and to store the diskettes in dust-proof boxes.

In a note in the 1986 Bulletin of Information on Computing and Anthropology:

It is really very sensible to take back-up copies of the software: Roy sent a tape in his briefcase through the security x-ray machine at Gatwick (i.e. in the first hours of his journey), and wiped the tape. Fortunately he had another copy in other luggage…

Other concerns included the weight of computers that had to be carried in backpacks, the unreliability of power mains in non-Western urban centers and the unavailability of electricity in more remote areas, necessitating batteries with solar chargers which had to be moved inside and outside with the passing of rainclouds. The material particularities of computing brought into relief the dependence of these technologies on contextual supports that were not available in many of the places anthropologists conducted fieldwork. In a way, computers were not only tools for supporting the obvious tasks of ethnographic data collection and analysis; they served as instruments for reckoning local infrastructure, as difficult mismatches made clear that computers were technologies designed for use in certain places rather than others, computing’s specificity to particular ways of life became evident.

Fieldwork Practices

PCs made it possible to take some methods for formal data elicitation and analysis out of the lab of “white room ethnography” and into “the field” proper. This move placed the computer at a crucial juncture in the tacking back and forth between “field” and “home” that characterizes anthropological knowledge production. Bringing the lab to the field could facilitate strong knowledge claims,¹ but it also brought into question an idealized vision of “the field” as free of advanced technologies like the computer and the analysis stage of research that it represented.

This period also saw computers starting to be used for storing and analyzing textual data — from one’s own field notes to interview transcripts or local newspaper articles — in addition to the numerical (or categorical) data they had primarily been used for. As Bernard and Evans wrote in 1983, “We have learned that computers can crunch words just as handily as they crunch numbers, and there are interesting things ahead.”² These qualitative data analysis programs built on earlier formalized methods for analysis such as grounded theory. Many of these methods came into the anthropological toolkit from the humanities, which had focused on textual rather than numerical applications for computing since the 1950s.

Reviews of computing applications for anthropologists evince some anxiety about the material rearrangement of fieldwork around these new tools — for instance, how much time one spent in front of the computer rather than in the village or how teams of researchers could format their data so that it could be effectively combined in a computer representation. Work was required to make PCs “fit” in these new settings they had not been designed for — both in terms of humidity or dust and the epistemology of fieldwork.

Anthropologists typically incorporated PCs into their existing fieldwork practices, using word processors to collect field notes, to do basic statistical operations when they had quantitative data, and, when back from the field, to prepare manuscripts for publication. Many of their uses for calculation were so ordinary that many publications that appear to have used computers don’t even mention it. For anthropologists more interested in computing, this failure to take advantage of the unique and potentially transformative capacities of computers was a disappointment — using “new tools for old jobs” — and it led some to advocate for a “move from computing in anthropology to a true anthropological computing.”

Ordinariness

This concern echoed the earliest discussions of computing in anthropology, centering on the question of whether the computer was truly transformative or just a more efficient tool to conduct business as usual. In principle, the digital computer is not capable of doing anything that couldn’t be done by hand with enough time. In practice, computerization of scientific research programs from physics to sociology generally only occurred for methods that had already been configured as “computational,” even when computerization was considered post facto to have been a transformative tool. We might remember Hymes’s point from 1965 that computers, if they didn’t herald a transformation in what it was to do anthropology, at least encouraged a research ethic of explicitness and formalism that could be an end in itself.

The desire for novelty in method resonates with the broader discourse about the PC “revolution” popular among technologists at the time: figures like Ted Nelson posed the PC as a liberatory technology that made it possible to break free from centralized mainframe computing and its supporting social and corporate structures. However, as PCs were taken up, they became ordinary rather than transformative — as Bryan Pfaffenberger put it, “the personal computer revolution was no revolution,” but rather a slow process of building on existing understandings of what computers could be. For large computer companies like IBM, the “freedom” offered by personal computing was no real threat, and networking was already anticipated to draw these individual machines back into a relationship of centralized control.

This chart isn’t as clean as Kieran’s – and probably has too much data (four journals going back to 1973), but Jonathan has helpfully provided instructions for how he did it in case anyone is interested in pursuing it further. I’d love to be able to create separate charts for each of the various sub-disciplines in anthropology, but that might be harder to do since they often appear in the same journals. Still, hopefully some interesting insights can be gleaned from this kind of data. If you are able to do anything with this, let us know in the comments!

UPDATE: Jonathan made a new, lower-density, chart for just 1998-to-the-present.

UPDATE: And a new one, with a chronological slider.

What might one find on the sidelines of academia? If you’re the managing editor of an academic journal, such as Cultural Anthropology (CA), the sidelines are rich with activity – trouble-shooting Open Journal Systems and managing content on http://culanth.org/; staying up on open access conversations; running CA’s editorial intern program; coordinating various projects and figuring out how best to archive them; overseeing the production of the journal, in print and online; and managing the redesign of CA’s website. You’ll spend untold hours with your email client, and talk about how much time you spend there (this is part of your “busy” talk).

I didn’t see my work with CA as academic, or ethnographic, until recently. “Sidelines” is a fitting concept for the work I do at CA – managing editor by day, and ethnographer – of asthma, yoga, and alternative healthcare systems – by night, and weekend. I told myself I would stay on the sideline just until my partner finished grad school, then we could go on the job market together. But this isn’t honest – CA is much more than a day job for me (especially when you consider how I really spend my nights and weekends). I am compelled by our professional gold standard, the tenure-track position. That’s the endgame for many of us, I think. On the other hand, I love the work I do at CA. It’s an incredible space of production, if not in terms of conventional social science research.

As for my precarious position – I work on a 12-month contract and I ignore this fact. For now.

In this first post I’ll sketch some of what I’ve done in the last six or seven years, focusing on details most important for where I am today – full-time managing editor and program director (I’ll come back to “program director” in Post #2) of Cultural Anthropology, and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). A year ago I filed my dissertation, completing my PhD in Science and Technology Studies at RPI. I’m currently trying to figure out what postgraduate research looks like and how to build an academic career outside a tenure-track line. I’m also trying to figure out where and how my work with CA can be understood, in part, as social science. This figuring marks a shift for me – for the past five years I diligently bracketed my work as managing editor from my dissertation research. Practically speaking, there were very good reasons to separate the two. But as it turns out, bracketing has several meanings, which may help to explain why I haven’t been able to keep things properly parsed out.

My work with CA began at the end of my first year in RPI’s Science and Technology Studies doctoral program. Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun were then editors; the Fortuns had just published their second issue and launched CA’s first website. With Casey O’Donnell and Shailaja Validya (also editorial assistants at the time), I would learn the peer-review process, inside and out; work with digital platforms that supported journal publication; and build a repository of supplemental material for CA essays. The internship (from May 2007-August 2008) gave me the opportunity to work closely with the Fortuns. It also kept me in the digital humanities world, a world I thought I had left for the PhD.

Prior to RPI’s PhD program, I earned my M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University at Albany, SUNY. My work there brought feminist praxis to emerging digital humanities projects – exploring how digital space allows for (and produces) different pedagogies; analyzing the landscape of digital research and its pitfalls; and working with forms of representation made possible with digital infrastructure. My thesis was a historical hypertext fiction, a story written around the Triangle Factory Fire and presented in digital form. Imagine a 100+ page website with images from public archives, maps and technical drawings created with Adobe, all presented with fictional and nonfiction accounts of the Triangle Factory Fire. I assumed I would never be able to undertake this kind of work in a PhD program, even if the program was “interdisciplinary”.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the case.

My doctoral research focused on chronic disease epidemics and the various forms of care that emerged around these epidemics. My original project looked at Alzheimer’s disease and aging; my later, dissertation work turned to asthma, a complex and poorly understood environmental health problem. This later project was embedded within the Fortuns’ larger digital humanities project, The Asthma Files. At RPI, digital projects are everywhere – built into course curriculum, a key component of grants, and, increasingly, a site of ethnographic practice. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has been a productive space in this regard; digital scholarship proliferates. My colleagues inspire me, and the context infuses the work I do. Although I’ve often felt discontinuity and fragmentation in my training and research, a solid thread can be found in the mash-up. It’s just not the thread I’ve desired or focused on.

Maybe all I need is a slight shift in perspective and practice, a move that could merge my day job and night work. The split identity is tiring. If I were to continue being honest I might admit that my split sense of identity – my struggle to maintain an ethnographic project while working at CA AND teaching at RPI – is produced on the sideline, because of the sideline. A sideline I ran to with open arms and much enthusiasm.

Can precarity really be ignored?

Production from the sideline sustains academia today, that’s the story. It’s my story, and my ethnography. It’s an ethnography informed by my interdisciplinary training in STS and Women’s Studies. The study is project-oriented, and lives on several scales. Projects embedded within projects. The projects are collaborative, envisioned with colleagues from various fields and situations. We trade in technical tricks and specialized language. It’s ethnography directed by the problems and possibilities of academia. It unfolds in the relationship between the “field” and its sideline, the space where I catch myself doing ethnography, on the job, everyday.

Collaborative, interdisciplinary work – the kind that I find myself doing at CA – is increasingly needed in/from the humanities and social sciences. I don’t want to romanticize the digital humanities or interdisciplinary projects. Collaboration can be incredibly difficult. “Production” often happens at a snail’s pace. Yet it’s the problem areas, the problematic, where care is most needed, where care is practiced – open-ended process characterized by “various hands working together (over time) towards a result” (Mol, 2009).

What might it look like to turn my sideline into ethnographic project? Living as a digital anthropologist instead of managing editor + ethnographer of contemporary care + adjunct professor + …

Ali Kenner is managing editor and program director at Cultural Anthropology, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She also teaches Vinyasa and Kundalini yoga in Upstate New York.