![This is a close-up shot of a vibrant graffiti mural on a brick wall, divided into two distinct horizontal sections of abstract, calligraphic-style art; the lower two-thirds of the mural features thick, flowing, and overlapping lines in a deep raspberry red, outlined in black and highlighted with strokes of bright lime green, creating a sense of depth and energetic movement, while the upper third consists of a more dense and intricate pattern of thinner, interwoven lines in shades of purple, white, and black [gen AI description].](/media/wall.jpg "This is a close-up shot of a vibrant graffiti mural on a brick wall, divided into two distinct horizontal sections of abstract, calligraphic-style art; the lower two-thirds of the mural features thick, flowing, and overlapping lines in a deep raspberry red, outlined in black and highlighted with strokes of bright lime green, creating a sense of depth and energetic movement, while the upper third consists of a more dense and intricate pattern of thinner, interwoven lines in shades of purple, white, and black [gen AI description].")
Human experience practically writes itself. A detail of a mural painted by Alex “Defer” Kizu for Pow!Wow! 2020, a street art exhibition in Honolulu.
- In files of author, 2023
Hi, I’m Ryan Schram and this is a site for my anthropology teaching resources, notes, slide show presentations, details of my research publications, and other things.
Anthrograph: Not just another encyclopaedia of anthropology
For over ten years, I maintained a site called the Anthrocyclopedia (paedia?).1 When I created it, I wrote on the home page, “In the future, I am hoping this will grow into a constantly-updated encyclopaedia of anthropology.” Well that never really happened, but instead it became a home mainly for lecture outlines that could be automatically converted into HTML/CSS/JS slideshows. The content did grow, but that site became increasingly reliant on community-contributed plugins to the Dokuwiki project, many of whose development stalled and drifted out of compatibility with Dokuwiki itself. Now, finally, I’m rebooting. This is a brand new site, with brand new software to maintain it. Welcome, feel free to browse (and beware of bugs).
How is the information here organized?
Like the old web site, the pages in this site are managed using a wiki, and so they are meant to be browsed using hyperlinks. The new software has also allowed me to add some new features. Every page is added to a full text index and this index is used as a basis for first calculating relationships of similarity among pages, and then a network of words and phrases that occur in the articles as a corpus. Both networks are scale-free and observe the Pareto principle (or a power-law distribution). 20% (give or take) of the pages have 80% of the links (above a threshold of relatedness based on textual similarity, explicit hyperlinks, and clicks by users who have agreed to an anonymous tracking cookie). 20% of the words and phrases have 80% of the connections (documents in common) to other words and phrases in the corpus. They are the conceptual anchors. Both key terms and documents can be associated with them as hubs.2 On article pages, you will and the list of important conceptual themes for an article on the right (and the lists of the “vital few” pages and concepts for the whole site on the far right). The concept graph also informs the list at the bottom. Below, and on every page, you can see my desk, or a digital version of it. It’s a file pile, a single stack of recently edited documents in chronological order. But each item in the stack also links to other documents associated with the item’s major ideas. And if you just want browse aimlessly, you can use the mosaic. It’s a pseudo-Hilbert curve of all documents in the corpus based on similarity, each colored with a blend of its big ideas.
The point is the same: It’s messy but somehow it works. The documents may or may not be filed in folders, and they may or may not explicitly link to each other but they are in conversation with each other and an order emerges from that conversation.
Some of the pages are also displayed as slideshows using a system called S5. Presentations are stored as a single article in a page with a title, date and list of references. Unless otherwise noted, I am the author of the content here (for now, at least). While this site is aimed at students in my classes at the University of Sydney, if anyone else finds this information useful, please feel free to make use of it as a source, observing the CC-BY-SA license and the canons of scholarship and academic honesty (in other words, cite your sources).
What’s new?
If and when this site is operating as I intend, you won’t have to ask that because the site will be entirely self-organizing. For now, though, most of my activity is on sets of pages for these upcoming classes:
The logo
I’m not sure about the logo… Let me know if you have any ideas.
The logo of my older site was a picture of a mwali, one of two kinds of shell valuables used in kula exchange in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. The picture comes from the record for “Shell Armlet, Papua New Guinea, Oceania.” 1933. Pitt-Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/LGweb/body/1933_40_18.htm.
Get in touch
Comments are welcome. Please get in touch by sending an email addressed to this web domain.
Embarrassingly—and quite contrary to the spirit of a wiki—I don’t even actually know when I created Anthrocyclopaedia because I had to restart the site from a backup after at least a few years when a software upgrade failed. I guess I’m not a very good web master.↩︎
In the graph of terms, there are also groups which are tightly interrelated but do not connect with a hub. They are “stories” about lesser themes in the corpus and one or more documents can be tagged as participating in the links among these concepts.↩︎