Description:
Data is too big to be left to the data analysts. Here, Prickly Paradigm brings together five researchers whose work is deeply informed by anthropology, understood as more than a basket of ethnographic methods like participant observation and interviewing. The value of anthropology lies also in its conceptual frameworks, frameworks that are comparative as well as field-based. Kinship! Gifts! Everything old is new when the anthropological archive washes over big data. Bringing together anthropology s classic debates and contemporary interventions, this book counters the future-oriented hype and speculation so characteristic of discussions regarding big data. By drawing as well on long experience in industry contexts, the contributors provide analytical provocations that can help reframe what may prove to be some of the most important shifts in technology and society in the first half of the twenty-first century.
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Brief description: Tom Boellstorff is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.