Turing Tests and ChatGPT’s Sleight of Hand
One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents…
Author: Samuel Gerald Collins
AAA Abstract Proposal: Summerland, Otherwise and and the Ghosts of Alternative Futures: the Limits of Multimodality in Anthropology and Spiritualism
As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and sou…
Multimodal Interrogations of Anthropologically Unintended Media – Video link
Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab. Multimodal…
NPS Ethnographic Report on Hampton Mansion National Historic Site
An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell (https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/) reminded me about the…
CFP: 13 Ghosts of Multimodality
CFP: AAA 2025 13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scoll…
Cybernetics and Anthropology – Past and Present
I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology – and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital. https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-…
Network Ghosts in the Age of Generative AI
What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the…
Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno’s Paradox
By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754 I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It’s the successful coloniz…
The Last Moon Village: A Proposal for a Multimodal Anthropology
You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drown…
Multimodal Methods in Anthropology
Today (April 26, 2024), our book, “Multimodal Methods in Anthropology” is released into the world. Here’s a song I’ve created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative…
Anthropology’s Seen and Unseen
In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”:…
Science Fiction’s Emergent Anthropologies. SF Beyond Anthropological Science Fiction
My contribution to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in Rivista di antropologia contemporanea (2023). Abtsract: Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects,…
SETI: Signs in space/ Enacting space
[From the SETI project, “A Sign in Space” (https://asignin.space/)] “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of…
Agan, the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics
Here’s a recent conference abstract submission, prompted in large part by Geoghegan’s 2022 “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory” (Duke, 2023). The characteristics of our digital world—algo…
Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
I published this review with “TheGeekAnthropologist” – such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety. Book Review: Played Out…
20th Anniversary of HBO’s "The Wire"
In 2011, we started a project entitled “Anthropology By the Wire” with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with…
Ghostly Encounters on Google: Spirit Photography, Reverse Image Search and Urban Critique in Baltimore
In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology…
A piece for Anthropology Day
Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures By Samuel Gerald Collins In the face of climate disaster, a continuing pandemic, and endless global conflict, it’s difficult to be optimistic about…
Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (center), actor Robert Redford (left), and historian Lola Van Wagenen (right) attend “A Future With Alternatives,” a symposium held in 1978 in New York City.…
Where’s #Anthropology? Hashtag mayhem at #AAA2021Baltimore
The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination…
Anthropology and the Twitter Challenge
For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data” represents a threat. Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can…