Comment

Comment by Erin B. Taylor on July 30, 2012 at 10:39am

John, thanks for the profile. I had already googled you :-) You sound like a perfect person to help us with the marketing side of popular anthropology!

Just to fill you in, I'm a postdoc at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa. I taught for three years at the University of Sydney, where I did my PhD. Gawain is my husband and was an IT architect in his former life (a senior geek!) but sensibly left that career to work with me. We recently spent 6 months in the Dominican Republic and Haiti researching mobile phones and mobility-related issues. He is charged with all things technical and analytical (websites and data analysis), and makes a mean caiprinha.

Comment by Erin B. Taylor on July 30, 2012 at 10:34am

Greg, I would love to collaborate with you and Daniel. Your blog about 'branding anthropology' was very influential in propelling me down this path. I completely agree that we need different kinds of outputs for different kinds of audiences. If we can conceptualise better what those might be, then we can all think more clearly about what our objectives are and how to realise them. So, let's see if we can bring in some of the other bloggers and compare notes.

I would like to use the PopAnth website to actively promote other anthroplogists' work. While the site will probably need to have mostly original content, we can do all we can to feature authors' bios and links back to their own sites (have a look at the author profiles on the bottom of each blog entry). We will have a blogroll listing some of the more accessible (not so intra-disciplinary) blogs. I see PopAnth as a testing ground for how to best engage with a mainstream audience or audiences. We can colletively use it to try out new strategies of writing and engagement, and analyze the results.

Comment by Gawain Lynch on July 30, 2012 at 10:33am

A word about web stats, they closely mirror any other statistics: 78.32% are made up on the spot.  Humour aside, quite seriously web stats get so skewed by malicious crawlers and other automated activity that most of them are of little use past feathering egos or impressing advertisers.  I wrote the statistics tracking software for Erin's site in response to this, and the numbers are generally as much as 50-60% *lower* than commercial reporting packages for the same period (the exception being Google Analytics - highly recommended).

I think that initially reaching out to a variety of blogs and getting their input on what works for them is a good start, but as Erin points out there is a massive potential audience out there so what we need to better understand is what they want and how to reach and engage with them.

Most important though is to start produce content and see (and understand why) what works and what doesn't, and iteratively modify our written aesthetic/content to match what works.   This is one thing that I've been looking at with Erin this last week, we're close to having something to go with but it needs work.

Comment by Keith Hart on July 30, 2012 at 10:23am

Erin, if there were a like button, I would have pressed it for this reply. I don't have much to add to what have said here. Yes, write to the bloggers and work with those who like the idea. A question about relationship to anthropology could allow for several responses including categories between all and none.

Comment by John McCreery on July 30, 2012 at 10:22am

P.S. Minpaku is similar in many respects, albeit with a narrower focus on cultural anthropology and ethnology, to the Smithsonian Institution in the USA. If you explore their site you will see that they invest a lot of effort in public outreach, partly because they depend on taxpayer funding and partly because Minpaku's founder Umesao Tadao was an academic entrepreneur par excellence and became a cultural icon whose collected works are still in print and referred to in public debate. We might learn something from examining what he did and how he did it.

Comment by John McCreery on July 30, 2012 at 10:15am

Me? I am an anthropologist (Ph.D. Cornell 1973), an independent scholar who makes his living as an owner and partner in a small translation and copywriting business in Japan. For the past several years, I have been entertaining myself with a too-big project combining social network analysis with historical and ethnographic research on the world of top-ranked Japanese advertising creatives. At the moment that is on the back burner while I write a chapter on the keieijinruigaku (Anthropology of Administration) based at Minpaku, Japan's Nation Museum of Ethnology, for a new book by Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny, the founders of the Practica Group LLC. (Rita and I go back a long way. We both contributed chapters to John Sherry, Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook. Sage: 1995).

Comment by Greg Downey on July 30, 2012 at 10:15am

Hi Erin --

Daniel and I might be able to help. We get a fairly broad audience, I think, at Neuroanthropology. We probably do about 20-30k a week visits at the PLoS site, about 70% of them new visitors.We'd get another few thousands a week at the old site, even though we're not adding stuff there.

I don't know all the stats, but I'd say we're fairly successful at reaching a 'broad audience' but that it's mostly intellectuals, researchers, and people in related fields. I'm okay with that. I think that what I do is fairly substantial stuff, so I don't really think I'm going to be truly 'pop' in some senses of that word.

I think you're right in the sense that we want to, at least part of the time, reach non-anthropologists, but there are varying sizes of audience that we might pitch ourselves to, and not a single popular audience.

We might consider figuring out who's doing it well and then hold up positive examples. I get a little frustrated some time that we seem to be so negative to each other about each other's work. Some people are doing really good popular writing; we need to support them and feature them (and learn from them).

Comment by Erin B. Taylor on July 30, 2012 at 9:54am

Keith, I'd say that if the primary audience for popular anthropology blogs is other anthropologists, then we are doing something wrong. Popular science is huge with the general science. So is archaeology. Why not anthropology? People are obsessed with travel and other cultures, but it's mostly non-anthropologists who write about them. Surely it would make sense for the people with the most training and direct experience to be sharing their knowledge. It would lift the profile of anthropology, and might just improve the quality of information that's out there.

To me, the first step in changing this is to assess our current situation. If our blogs are already read by a wide audience, then we're on the right track. I suspect that most of my readers are non-anthropologists, but I'd like to know for sure. I imagine that there are plenty of bloggers out there who would rather not be writing into a complete void. I agree that a short survey on our blogs is the best way to go - but it has to be really short, which is why I suggested having one question.

I would also like to know which blogs are most popular with the general public and why. How does a blog in, say, Scientific American compare with a stand-alone personal blog, or a collective blog? What are the key ingredients that people like? Are they all about digging up bones, or does the socio-cultural stuff get equal hits behind the scenes?

Maybe we could do a small collective project: let all bloggers know that we're working on some collective analytics and strategising, and people who want to can get involved in figuring out what it is that we want to know and how to go about it.

Comment by Keith Hart on July 30, 2012 at 9:38am

Hi Erin, I can't begin to figure out how you would reach "anthropologists". I would be happy to share my Analytics data, but these vary considerable by month (low now). They distinguish between Visits (hits?) and Unique Visitors and supply some stats on these with which I am sure you are familiar. But there are only two ways I know of reaching an audience with a questionnaire: put it on the site for current visitors or sent an email message to subscribers. I have 7,000 subscribers, but I lost track of who they are long ago. I doubt if many of them have a substantive interest in my blog.

It is a lot of work and you would have to convince bloggers that you have a good reason for taking their time. We would find it easier to do that kind of research with OAC members, but so far we have backed off from the sheer labour involved.

If the aim is to reach out to the general public, why bother with classifying readers as academic anthropologists or students in the first place? Perhaps the reason is that the audience for popular anthropology is limited to other anthropologists. Certainly the OAC has found it hard to attract and retain non-academic members.

Comment by Erin B. Taylor on July 30, 2012 at 9:15am

Perhaps we can make up a one-question survey: Are you currently an anthropologist or a student of anthropology?

I absolutely agree that the results should be publicly available, but I imagine that some sites won't be prepared to release all their analytics. Possibly we ask them to choose their level of participation: 1) Hand over your stats for general analysis by all, or 2) Supply small number of figures: unique hits for a month; top 5 pages visited; answers to the audience survey.

That way, we'd still hopefully get enough responses for the general analysis, but further and richer data would be available for any of us to analyse and share.

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