We have approval from the University committees for a course to introduce first year students of anthropology to computers. Michael Fischer has devised it, and will teach it from October 1985.
The first few weeks are practical: how to access Lucy, how to use standard facilities and Kent ones. Students are then thrown into the middle, asked to use and comment on an elementary simulation of an ecological system. They progress to more complex work on computer-based modelling and end with an introduction to artificial intelligence and expert systems.
Michael Fischer's general aim has been to familiarise students with the computer, so they can do fairly simple things with it and have a foretaste of the more complex things it can do for anthropologists. His approach is that computers are endowed with models of reality (by their programmers), and that these models (e.g. the model of a text held by a text-processor; of a genealogy held by Lucy) are as open to question and elaboration as unmechanised ones (e.g. of a kinship or productive system) are.
The course has some peculiarities of a Kentish kind: it is supposed to occupy no more than one fifth of a first year student's time; it is fairly closely integrated with the concurrent course 'Introduction to Anthropology' - so that students do something about ecology, say, simultaneaously in each course. Nevertheless it might be interesting or useful to colleagues in other universities contemplating something similar. Write to Michael Fischer or John Davis.
We have received a copy of CAAN (Computer-Assisted Anthropology News) which is edited by Lee Sailer (Pittsburgh) xi and Dow (Oakland, (Rochester, Michigan)).
Vol 1. No. 1 contains an editorial, a discussion of field note management by Lee Sailer, and a section of short notes called 'Hunting and Gathering Tales' 'devoted to what anthropologists are doing with computers'. It will be a permanent feature of the newsletter. In this issue it contains sixteen items ranging from an account by an archaeologist of how he uses Apples to assist in planning and controlling excavations, to an announcement of funds available from the National Science Foundation. There's a note by a graduate student who has taken a computer to the field (he studied staff interaction on an archaeological field school 'in the South-West'), and a note on a Fortran program which compares representations of three-dimensional objects (e.g. skulls). Most of the lively and friendly notes concern personal computers.
CAAN is available at $5 p.a. for three issues from: Lee Sailer, CAAN, Anthropology, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
World Cultures is a new 'journal' published on floppy discs
and based on HRAF principles (the General Editor is D.R. White, associate
of G.P. Murdoch at the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Centre).
The discs can be formatted for any personal computer.
Subscriptions are: a one-off $95 entrance fee, plus $60 p.a. for double-sided
discs; $80 p.a. for single-sided ones. Students at an institution
which has a subscription can pay less: no entrance fee, and $30 p.a.
Copyright is obscure: hard to tell what the rules are about converting
the floppy data to mainframe use.
Current Anthropology will carry a descriptive note in a forthcoming
issue. Kent is taking out a subscription, and we will review the
first year's issues (1985) in the next number of BICA. Meanwhile,
the address for inquiries is World Cultures, P.O. Box 12524, La Jolla,
CA 92037-0650.