SE300 Part Three

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SE300 - Computing for Anthropologists
September 2003

Part 3: Assessment Exercises

Michaelmas Term

The deadline for this work is the end of Week 12, Friday 19th. December. Your files should all be organised into appropriate folders inside your www folder on Stirling, and properly linked to your home page. Your home page should be a file named index.html inside your www folder. Work not submitted in this format will not be marked. The Michaelmas work will count for 40% of the total coursework mark, which in turn counts for 50% of the total course mark.

1. Home page/Cultural Context/Blog (15% of Michaelmas mark)

On your home page, index.html, write a brief paragraph describing yourself. Where are you from? What part of the world? What are your interests? What is your cultural heritage? What do you want people to know about you?
Establish links to at least three sites that have contributed to who you are: the city, town or country where you grew up, an organisation related to your cultural heritage or your schooling, and a special interest group (climbing, horse riding, sport, music etc.)
Using a search engine, establish links to web sites about at least three of the following:

- a daily newspaper of your choice
- a political party of your choice
- a television show of your choice
- a film of your choice
- a sports team of your choice
Keep at least a bi-weekly blog (See: online resources for blog details). The blog content can take any form ... you can keep a public diary (day in the life of a ....), a political diary (for any area/country/region), or just your adventures in Canterbury (there will be a few).

This page will be marked for content, appearance and functionality (i.e. do the links work!)

See: online resources for web making and design

2. Kinship (40% of Michaelmas mark)

Using the KinEditor program, prepare two kinship diagrams. Both diagrams should be neatly laid out, labelled and annotated. Link these to your web page. The first should be of your family. (If you really do not want to use your own family for this exercise, you may substitute any well-known family, real or fictional.) Include at least three generations and a minimum of fifteen to twenty people overall. The second should be a diagram showing kin terms used in your own society, and how they relate to each other. Again you should include at least three generations and a minimum of fifteen terms.

Write a brief essay about the obligations and rights associated with marriage in your own society, and compare this with marriage among the Yanomamo.

These pieces of work should be in a folder named 'kinship', which is in your www folder. Inside the kinship folder there should be at least three files, a KinEditor file containing your family tree, and two Visual Page files, one containing your essay and one providing the link to your family tree. How you name these files is up to you, but they should be linked in such a way all your kinship work can be accessed from your home page

3. Ethnographic Research (45% of the Michaelmas mark)

Use the searchable online notes on Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) (http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/sindex.html) to address the following:

Select 3 societies from different areas of the world.
Situate these socieities geographically and economically.
Compare occupation and work between the three socieities.
Compare approaches to socialisation/education in the three socieites.
Compare the life cycle in the three socieities

Write a brief set of web pages that address the following questions:.

How are the socieities similar? How are they different? What might account for some of the similarities and differences? How does doing a comparison differ from looking at a socieity in isolation?

This material should be in one or more files, inside a folder called 'hraf', which is inside your www folder. The files should, of course, be accessible from your home page

Lent Term
There are two deadlines this term: the Bibliography and the Statistics pieces should be submitted by the end of Week 20, Friday 27th February and the remaining work should be submitted by the end of Week 24, Friday 26th March. As for your Michaelmas work, your files should all be organised into appropriate folders inside your www folder on Boas, and properly linked to your home page. Work not submitted in this format will not be marked. The Lent work will count for 60% of the total coursework mark, which in turn counts for 50% of the total course mark.

A. Bibliography (10% of Lent mark)
Many of your other courses will have required you to write an essay. Select one of the essays that you will write. (The subject does not have to be anthropology. It can be in any of the courses you are taking. It should, however, be an essay that you plan to write.)

Briefly (two or three sentences) describe the topic and argument of your essay.
Using online searches of available bibliographic materials provide a sample bibliography in standard bibliographic format for the essay.

This file should be linked to your home page, but it does not need to be in a separate folder.

B . Statistics (30% of the Lent mark)
The assessment sheet for this section (weeks 14-17) must be picked up at a class or lecture.
This will be a brief essay, a questionnaire design, and a report, and will be available at the beginning of Lent term.

C. Classification and Comparison (35% of the Lent mark)
1: Classification See Assessment Description
2: The Ethnographic Atlas

a: Life Histories
Go to the Ethnographic Atlas. Look at the section labelled 'Cultural Summaries.' Choose a society. What would you be like if that was your society, your culture. What would your father do? Your mother? How did they meet, and marry? Describe your life up to the present moment. Be as creative as you wish, but make sure you include descriptions of major life events (birth, marriage, birth of children, death), subsistence activities, religious beliefs etc.

b: Cross-tabulations
Use the section of the Ethnographic Atlas that allows you to make cross cultural tables. Tick the box marked 'Expected'. This will contrast the 'expected' values you would find if the distribution is due to chance and the actual distribution of values.

a) Why might you want to compare actual versus expected distribution values?

b) Make the following cross tabulation:
Number of Cousin marriages by Transfer of Residence at Marriage
What is the result? What happens if you merge categories? What basis did you use to merge categories?

c) Make a hypothesis about the relationship of each of the following:
marriage and inheritance
slavery and the importance of agriculture
agriculture and the gender division of labour
Choose variables from the list and see if your hypothesis appears to be confirmed.

D. Expert System and Simulation (25% of the Lent mark)
1: Develop a basic expert systems that models a cultural domain of your choice. It should have at least 20 rules, and distinguish between at least 8 possibilities.

2: Prepare a short essay (500 words) detailing what we learn from the simulations we used in the class. Include your own impressions and assessment of simulations as a tool for anthropologists.

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