ANTH245

ANTH 245 -- The Anthropology of the Information Society

Professor Rafael Alvarado

STUDENTS: Please use Blackboard to access course information. This site is available through Blackboard as well.

Fall 2007

Lectures

Culture as Information

Cybernetic Anthropology

• Sep 03 -- Bateson
• Sep 10 -- Rappaport
• Sep 17 -- Levi-Strauss

Computational Anthropology

• Sep 24 -- QDA and the HRAF

Information as Culture

Ethnography of Computing

• Oct 01 -- Suchman and Forsythe

Informational Cultures

• Oct 08 -- Postmodernism
• Oct 22 -- Databasification
• Oct 29 -- Virtual Community
• Nov 12 -- Into the Blogosphere
• Nov 19 -- Ethnography of Blogging

Readings

Note to students: this section is experimental; please do not use these for your readings at this point.

• Anderson, 1997, Imagined Communities (Excerpts)
• Biggs, 1986, "Cybernetics in a Post-structuralist Landscape"
• Forsythe, 1993, "The Construction of Work in Artificial Intelligence"
• Frankfort, 1986, "On Bullshit"
• Levi-Strauss, 1951, "Language and the Analysis of Social Laws"
• Levi-Strauss, 1955, "The Structural Study of Myth"
• Lyotard, 1979, The Postmodern Condition
• Manovich, 2001, "Database as Symbolic Form"
• McGann, 2004, "A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship"
• Suchman, 1988, "Representing Practice in Cognitive Science"
• Tonnies, 1887, "On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft"

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