Cool #AnthroHack

Our goals for the hackathon are to create an open educational resource as a WordPress plugin AND to foster collaboration, conversation and community among [student] computer scientists, social scientists, designers, hackers and others who want to learn more about this convergence!

We have chosen WordPress as a platform because it has been an industry leader in growing, developing and fostering collaboration within the open source movement. As we finalize the plugin, it will become a digital research tool that will be available to any researcher or student or curious individual anywhere in the world. Cool Anthropology and CUNY have a strong commitment to open educational resources and this project will be available to all in both the WordPress and CUNY repositories at no cost.

The plugin will allow research participants and students to take part in a virtual pile sort. Pile sorts are a research methodology used by cognitive anthropologists and other social researchers to collect data on how different people think about and classify different items in a certain domain that they are interested in knowing more about. We will use the tool as part of Cool Anthropology’s Shifting Stereotypes project, which Guttman students have been involved in developing and presenting.

Shifting Stereotypes is a project conceived to invite participants to think about, and interact with, the concept of stereotypes and stereotyping language from both a personal and anthropological perspective. It takes the form of live interactive installations in two parts: in the first, students recorded participants reading aloud from scripts of stereotyping language. They were then interviewed about their experience. In the second iteration, participants sorted terms taken from those interviews (the pile sort and inspiration for the plugin!) and answered questions about their stereotyping experiences.

The live experiences documented and digitally translated form an interactive documentary in progress at shiftingstereotypes.com. On the website, viewers participate and guide themselves through the journey into stereotyping, sharing their stories and viewing the data through an anthropological lens. It is our hope that they will also utilize the plugin we create during #AnthroHack Guttman 2018 so we can continue to collect data online and explore this concept with people all around the world!