I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years.
My starting point is that it would be helpful to explore how people are responding to ChatGPT in terms of genre, that people’s reactions to ChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it is a g…[Read more]

This article is a report of a roundtable discussion organised by the authors at the UK Classical Association conference, Cambridge, April 2023, under the aegis of #WCCWiki, the Women’s Classical Committee’s Wikipedia-editing project. It presents a summary of the participants’ wide-ranging uses of Wikipedia editing at schools, universities, and…[Read more]

This year marks the tenth anniversary of PoLAR‘s publication of Ilana Gershon’s “Critical Review Essay: Studying Cultural Pluralism in Courts versus Legislatures.” This essay serves as a foundation for this conversation about anthropology’s interventions into legislative studies more broadly. Gershon’s argument that anything and anyone can…[Read more]

Just how bleak is the academic job market for anthropologists? Job ads over the past twenty years reveal some surprises and point to ways departments are seeking to change themselves and the discipline

Zoom is the least of our problems

Trump Gives Fascism a Bad Name

Pyramid Scheme. #hautalk

Forget the tut-tutting of politicians: The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search.

The quitting economy

“A Friend of a Friend” Is No Longer the Best Way to Find a Job

Job Search 101: Debunking 5 Popular Myths that No Longer Apply

Don’t Post So Close To Me

Книга представляет собой первый на русском языке систематический обзор метаэтики – дисциплины, которая пытается ответить на наиболее важные и глубокие вопросы относительно морали. Существуют ли моральные ценности? Какова их природа? Объективны ли они? Что означают наши моральные высказывания? При ответе на данные вопросы затрагиваютс…[Read more]

This is the first of a series of 12 blog posts published in 2019, discussing open problems in computational diversity linguistics. It presents a list of 10 problems on computational diversity linguistics.

In 2023, a new museum opened in Tbilisi, at the Writer’s House of Georgia that previously house the Soviet Writers’ Union: The Museum of Repressed Writers. The museum honours the executed poets from Georgia’s Soviet past, poets whose identities Soviet authorities tried to destroy. This article examines the story the museum tells about Soviet l…[Read more]

In this provocation, I investigate the notion of long term thinking, as a notion of ‘sustaining time’, which identifies failures in dominant conceptions of time and proposes an alternative that is thought to be better suited for responding to current environmental crises. Drawing on close analyses of two examples, I argue for a deeper und…[Read more]

More detailed discussions on Thomas Biggs: Sown Men and Rome’s Civil Wars. Rethinking the End of Melinno’s Hymn to Rome (Mnemosyne 76.3) and Gerlinde Bretzigheimer: Intertextualität und Intratextualität in Ausonius’ Epitaphia heroum (Wiener Studien 135).

In der Einleitung zum Sammelband Auditive Wissenskulturen – Das Wissen klanglicher Praxis stellen die Autoren zuerst die Diskrepanzen der jeweiligen Beziehungen des Visuellen und des Auditiven zu Wissen anhand einiger Beispiele vor. Sie exemplifzieren auch, wie sowohl auditive Praxis als auch die Hervorbringung und Vermittlung von Wissen in s…[Read more]

In this homage to David Graeber, I turn to Americans’ experiences working in person during the pandemic as an ethnographic lens for understanding how workers respond when implicit social contracts are violated and when ideas about the common good are being contested. Because the United States federal government and many state governments refused t…[Read more]

Digital Economy and Labor