Thanks to @kopyor.bsky.social for inviting me to contribute this piece to @amethno.bsky.social's next issue!
We offer a primer on publisher expectations for the disclosure of AI use and consider local adaptations for a field like anthropology.
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
BTW, a couple compatriots & I just published an article abt fellow anthropologists & their efforts at schol comm experimentation & reform, starting w/ very different problems to solve vs your proposal. doi.org/10.3998/jep....
So my hesitation, or maybe flat out cynicism, is that atproto is a difference that won’t make much difference for the important struggles within & around research institutions. Go ahead & experiment w/ it; try to get others to as well; expect local adoption, not system transition.
In addition, my sense is that the strategy is to wrestle power away from the big commercial publishers by making all this data abt value open. But the next extractivist initiative will just start from there, ingesting the data into their proprietary evaluation systems to be sold to deans.
So the problem you are trying to solve—signaling value—is the unquestioned acceptance of the research manager’s view of the world: how to make it easier evaluate employees. For me, this is a quite partial, & managerialism, basis for reimagining schol comm.
Here’s the main problem you see atproto addressing: “A better system of reliable public signals that our work is valuable.” This assumes 1 particular & quite recent ideology of value in science. A great article describing this ideology & how it differs from an earlier regime. doi.org/10.1086/699152
I don’t know much abt atproto. What I do know quite a bit abt is the history of scholarly publishing & schol comm more generally, including its organizational & technical transformations & place within transformed research organizations. Within that frame, a new protocol doesn’t solve for much.
Another way to put this is that it really should be the management of research institutions demanding a seamlessly coherent schol comm system; scholars should be able to revel in their idiosyncrasies & local languages & infrastructures. Why do so many think like managers instead?
Absolutely: too much of utopian schol comm thinking imagines one coherent system replaced by another, more evolved, system. But that’s not what we’ve seen on the ground or should expect. Like the plurality of epistemic practices & communities, it should be messy & patchy.
Hey, I first went to grad school in the aughts, & the efflorescence of anthropology blogs was a boon to the discipline. It thankfully didn't coalesce around one platform. And it thankfully added something new & different to the journals, books, circulating manuscripts, talks, wikis, web 1.0, etc.
Hate the scholarly communication system dominated by an oligopoly of publishers? Just wait until it's dominated by a new oligopoly of tech providers, but now in the form of social media!
(I'm all for scholars experimenting w/ schol comm forms & tech; tech solutions fail to understand schol comm)
Delighted to be part of this special issue dedicated to Open Science and the HSS. Special thanks to the editors and their amazing work! Contribution with @c-bz.bsky.social, @yutong-fei.bsky.social, and @valentinefavel.bsky.social.
Data available on Zenodo: zenodo.org/records/1848....
speaking of ling anth AI and special issues: the introduction to a special issue edited by Webb Keane & Costas Nakassis that i contributed to is now up online too. great day for our niche little corner of anthropology / spoiler alert for my article within rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
early view of my article is out! it explores the twinned ideologies of referentialism that often subtend language and "AI" and how those ideologies break apart in the R&D pipeline, where the social-pragmatic dimension of both speech + data come to the fore rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Announcement: publication of 'Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences', new special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, edited by Samuel Moore (Cambridge), Jenni Adams (Sheffield) and Miranda Barnes (Cambridge).
journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/
Sarah Sharma has a super interesting, counterintuitive take on feminist technodeterminism. Fabulously enticing interview! Plus an amazing book and cover . . . @dukepress.bsky.social dukeupress.wordpress.com/2026/04/16/q...
Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history
Wow, I can only imagine how hard it would be to have a coherent conversation with Hopper. What kind of publications was your stepfather working for?
Watching Water World for the first time. I gotta say, Dennis Hopper does amazing work.
And I’d make the case that authors who want something different can’t just act like consumers waiting for something preferable. They need to work towards it by supporting it however they can: starting presses, finding ways to material support presses, getting their institutions to support them.
I think this is less & less the case, although easier to track for the first 3 than the second 2, & what is sustainable is much up for debate. Not mentioned are the really hard ones for authors: in my specialty & that will be recognized as valuable by those who evaluate me but don’t read my work.
New interview-paper dropped yesterday. I'm so grateful for @timelfen.bsky.social and @marcellaflamme.bsky.social's intellectual companionship, and to PECE/EMERGE/xcol for their amazing work. Complete interview transcripts also now live on the CADS DataverseNL instance: dataverse.nl/dataset.xhtm...
if you know me, you know i've been gassing up this special issue ever since it came out. i'm delighted to do so yet again at the online launch this Friday at noon EST. thanks @annaw.bsky.social, @mcastelle.bsky.social & Siri for the invitation and for the issue itself! tinyurl.com/languagemach...
Proud to have contributed this interview piece to the just-published MORPHSS special issue on openness in HSS.
We profile three initiatives in anthropology that are doing openness in the key of generative reuse rather than reproducibility.
journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/...
Our article is part of a great special issue of @jepub.bsky.social, itself part of the work of an exceptional project rethinking open research from the humanities & social sciences (@morphss.bsky.social), led by @samuelmoore.org. We are really excited to be able to contribute to this project.
The interviews are excerpted in the article & a link to the full interview transcripts is included. The interviews are the focus because, well, we’re ethnographers who find our interlocutors’ own words much richer than our summaries of them. Their vocabularies converge & diverge in interesting ways.
Audiences we hope this will reach:
Anthros suspicious of all things open (in the face of so many poorly conceived mandates);
Anthros experimenting w/ collaborations & infrastructures;
Open-science practitioners willing to engage w/ the messy consequences of the disunity of science for OS;
The 3 of us have long been considering the intersections of experimentation in anthropological research practices, & the reforms pursued by open-science advocates. The (dis)connections are useful to think w/, even w/ seemingly similar practices in sister disciplines (👇 sociological ethnography).
NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!
Andrew, Marcel, & I introduce & draw some conclusions from a series of interviews w/ anthropologists experimenting w/ data sharing, process documentation, intermediate publishing models, & infrastructure building to enable new forms of collaborative knowledge making.
Brad Bolman’s article on the Institute for Advanced Studies’ decision not to hire Bruno Latour, free for the next month for those (like me) without access.