ANTH245 2007-10-01

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Business

• The Midterm is available on Blackboard
• Please send in your responses on time

Recap

• What is Coding?
• The process of converting texts into codes
  • A kind of transduction
  • A kind of reductionism
  • informal → formal
• A : B :: Text : Code :: Discourse : Ontology
• The reduction of A to B is structuralism

Segue

• Structuralism = Cognitive Science
• Just as information culture represents text as code, CogSci represents activity as plan
• Activity = ritual, work, practice = parole, event

Intro

• We are now officially turning the tables -- from "culture as information" to "information as culture"
• We will explore continuities and discontinuities between the two approaches
• Path:
  1. Computer as metaphor
  2. Computer as tool
  3. Computer as artifact
  4. Next week: Expanding the scope

Suchman 1983

Background

• Description of Lucy Suchman
• One of the pioneers of "corporate anthropology," but from a critical perspective
• Sets the method:
  1. Office as ethnographic site -- "village"
  2. Computer as core artifact -- the "churinga"
  3. Work as ritual
  4. What are the symbols and myths?
     • discourse, planning tools, documents
     • Management and Labor

Procedures

• What is the problem? The status of formal procedures ...
  • The "natives" view procedures as a description of work
  • But the anthropologist sees things otherwise
  • Note that here the denial of the native point of view does not strike as ethically problematic (as it did with Rappaport)
• What are the "real" procedures?
  • The description derived from looking at the transcripts and other empirical data
• So ... two kinds of description
  • A: Formal -- Standard Procedures; flowchart
  • B: Informal -- Ethnographic (thick) description; narrative
• Comparisons:

Author	A (Formal)	B (Informal)
Bateson	Purposive Mind	Greater Mind
Rappaport	Cognitive Models	Environment → Operational Models
Levi-Strauss	Myths → Structures	Event
Colby	Folktales → Templates	Experience
Suchman	Plans and Procedures	Practical action

Suchman 1988

• Ethnomethodology
• Method: to study representations of work and the work of representations

AI

• Compare to behaviorism
• Considers mentalist concepts -- memory, thinking, etc. -- without introspection
  • Instead, the computer serves as an objective model for thinking
  • Brain = Computer, Mind = disembodied Pattern
• Difference between organic and silicon substrates not relevant

The Turing Test and ELIZA

• Describe the test
• Describe ELIZA
• ELIZA does not really pass the test, but it illustrates that communication depends upon the listener imputes intentions to the speaker, even when there are none
  • Communication depends upon the "documentary method," where utterances are seen as indices, or documents, of inner mental states.
  • For AI these inner states are plans

Plans and Actions

• For AI, plans adequately describe actions
• But plans can't really do that
  • Actions are more complicated than plans
  • Plans orient people before they take action (e.g. canoing the rapids)
  • Plans are convenient to describe the results of actions after the fact
  • (The AI concept of plan elides the differences between conscious and unconscious thought as described by Bateson)

Human-Machine interaction

• H-M interaction is asymmetric: humans bringer greater "conversational resources" to the table
  • Humans read context
  • Inference of intent in conversation seem context dependent; more than matching plans with situations

Whiteboards and the "work of representation"

• ("work of representation" not Suchman's phrase)
• Whiteboard as "cultural model" (Colby)
• Artifacts like the whiteboard help construct conversations; they do not simply capture the information content of a meeting (for example)

Forsythe 1993

Background

• Influenced by Suchman
• Sadly died in 1997 at 50

Technology as a Cultural System

• Traditional cultural anthro; Clifford Geertz
• Not a practicioner of ethnomethodology
• Culture as "tacit knowledge" and that which is taken for granted

Subject: Knowledge Engineers

• Cognitive Science → AI → Expert Systems (ESs)
• Content of ESs acquired by "knowledge engineers" (KEs)
• KEs convert human knowledge to machine "knowledge"
  • Compare to the "coding" of Colby, HRAF

Falling off the knowledge cliff

• ESs have precipitous shortcomings, e.g. lack of common sense

What counts as "work"

• Forsythe found that KEs only regard actual programming as "real"
• Everything else -- from talking about epistemology to all social interaction -- is viewed as at best secondary and at worst irrelevant to the work of building ESs
• She calls this "deleting the social"

Effect of "deleting the social" on design

• Forsythe found that KEs project this narrow understanding of work onto the domains (e.g. medicine) for which they build expert systems
• They select one expert and interview this person in isolation from actual practice
• Thus, no reference to socially distributed knowledge or practical action
• She argues that the absence of this kind of knowledge probably accounts significantly for ESs falling off the knowledge cliff

Some general questions

1. Contrast the methodology of Suchman and Forsythe with Levi-Strauss and Colby
   • Language and sitaution = parole
   • parole has its own structure
2. What do Suchman and Forsythe inherit from the "culture as information" school?
   • Bateson and "context," Greater Mind
   • Consciousness vs. The Unconscious (Bateson, Levi-Strauss)
3. Compare the two kinds of anthropology:
   • What is order?
   • Where is order?

Culture as Info	Info as Culture
Formal	Informal
Context free	Context dependent
Categories	Discourse