I have always been envious of my social science comrades who get to use spiffy graphs and statistical data to cleanly “prove” their arguments. Us anthropologists have to construct all our arguments ground up through narrative because really how the hell can one “represent” culture? (Ok, Levi-Struass had some pretty wild graphs of the “totemic operator” but really it is a hard sort of enterprise).
But every night, while lying in bed, my mind has wandered to the neat land of the graph and chart to see whether I could wrangle up some graphical processes to capture the deep processes of ethical doing and ethicalized labor that I am writing about in my dissertation that is so evident on the Debian project. I can now sleep in peace. My friend has depicted the subtleties, the force, the doing, that is ethical doing on the Debian project. Oh the power of the image…
