Introduction: Configuring Anthropology

The authors present examples of how anthropologists are presently using computers to advance ethnographic research in new directions while building on what has come before. All the methods, protocols and tools created by the authors are free, open source, and available on the internet. The contributions are the authors’ attempts to address greater complexity through greater ‘control’ over the data and structures within which we work. These methods are suitable to a large number of problems, basic and applied, across the range of anthropology from its humanities axis to its science axis. Anthropology is what we make of it, and each author is attempting to make a little bit more of anthropology, to configure anthropology for addressing old problems in new ways, and positioning anthropology to address new problems and new opportunities to influence others through anthropology.