A common complaint of anthropologists, especially the traditional type, is that while you are in the field you really don’t get “time off.” You don’t go there only during business hours. It’s where you live. There’s no easy way to commute between your home institution and, lets say, a mountain village in China.

For those of us doing internet research it’s in theory a little easier. However, you can also get lulled into a false sense of security. And it’s that sort of liberal headed nonsense that gets one botted again.

MRZ, an old friend with a wicked sense of humor, just botted me. Basically he took my comments and fed them into Eliza, a classic AI program, and reposted them to my other site. And I just kept responding.

What this wonderfully illustrates, other than my general gullibility, is how important identity is in the mix. Because I knew that MRZ is a real person, I projected the rather odd posts that he was making onto him. And because of that I noticed, but failed to connect the obvious grammatical hints contained there in.

This issue of “laminated” identity is going to be a critical aspect to the overall formula for my analysis.

Without a doubt Batman Begins is the big summer comic book movie. Marvel’s Fantastic Four (not the low budget Corman version… which may turn out to be a better movie), directed by the guy who did Barbershop will be a blip on the radar (let’s face it, The Incredibles has already done it better than they can ever hope to).

However, the award for the most concienciously adapted comic movie for the year, if not ever, will go to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City. Adapted from Miller’s comics, this will be one of the most abmitous artistic projects of the year, not to mention one of the most star studded. Rumor is that they used Miller’s comic books as the direct story boards.

So my suggestion is check out the film noir, Chiaroscuro (an Italian cinema term for light and dark), inspired art and then watch this trailer (or if you’re feeling lazy, just keep the charater to the left in mind when you see Bruce Willis). All I can say is wow.

update (3/9): I’m apparently a visionary. Yahoo Movies just set up a site for Sin City that does a side by side art to image comparison. It’s pretty amazing… take a look.

One of my theories is that Blogs replaced Life Cams (1:many broadcast cams like JennyCam) as an optimal performance method of sharing one’s day to day existance on the internet. As part of looking into this, I did a lexus/nexus study of the major media impressions for the phrases “Webcam” and “Blog”. The trends are pretty interesting. Note that webcams move into media decline in 2002 as blogs spike.

Also note that 2004 reports on blogging take a major jump. As the data shows a more than 2x jump on the back half of the year, I think it’s pretty safe to attribute this to election coverage. In particular, political blogs got a lot of coverage as a part of the Rather/CBS erronious Bush report. I expect that the number of media impressions in 2005 will be below these numbers.

Here’s a different view of the same data:

If you’re interested in toying with the data, here’s it in Excel format. Just let me know how you use it.

This past Friday was full of lots of ups and downs. To begin with, we ran out data collection for Social Psychology. For our experiment, we conducted 48 interviews. All of our participants were recruited from the Reynolds Club, the closest thing to a Student Union, here on campus.

This is my group: Andrea, Shewta, Eric.

This is one of the essays that we had people read. The crucial thing in all of this is the picture. Some had Jordan (this rather punky picture), others had Irene (more conservative) and some had no picture.

Here I am with my researcher face on.

48 surveys… Rock On! Of course now its time for data entry… bleh

On the downside, I had my car vandalized. Some jerk bashed in my driver’s window. Strangely nothing was stolen. Even more strangely I would have felt better if something was. Having an item stolen would have provided me with a sense that there was a purpose to the attack on my poor Subaru. Thankfully I was able to get the window fixed on Saturday. Here’s a shot of the car-nage

Tomorrow this begins in earnest. The goal of this blog is for me to situate and theorize on publicly sharable headnotes and fieldnotes over the course of my research.

I’m also going to capture research issues pertaining directly and indirectly to “cyber-anthrology” (and I promise that will be the last time I use that phrase.