Glossographia

I just used the fascinating Up-Goer Five Text Editor, named after this XKCD cartoon, to write an abstract of my book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, using only the ‘ten hundred’ most common words in the English language.  It was a bit of a challenge since I couldn’t use ‘history’, ‘numeral’, ‘system’, or ‘math’, but it seems to be pretty sensible and complete:

Number Writing: All the Ways Humans Did It

There are a lot of different ways to write numbers, but you can put them all into five types. Let’s look at about a hundred different ways that humans have written numbers. Some people think that over time, bad ways of writing numbers die and good ways live, so that the way we have now is the best one. But when we look at all the different ways together, we see that lots of ways that are now dead actually were used for hundreds of years. Were people just stupid back then, to use such a bad way of writing numbers? No, that is a stupid idea. The only way to know if a way of writing numbers is good is to see whether it is good for the things it was actually used for, not what people today think they were used for. It does matter how the human mind works, so there are lots of ways of writing numbers that you can imagine, but that no one has ever actually used. This is why there are only the five types, and this tells us a lot about the way that the mind works. And it’s true that some ways let you write big numbers with only a few signs, and others let you write bigger and bigger numbers. But that doesn’t matter as much as people think. As it turns out, most number writing was used to write down answers, but not to use numbers to figure out the answers. Only in the last five hundred years, when numbers were really important for big states that like money, did our way of writing numbers beat the others. One of the best ways to know if a way of writing numbers is going to live is whether lots of important people use it already.

And, as evidence that my speculation yesterday that the job market was better than the numbers indicated, there were 10 (!!) new postings on the AAA site today, all of which are tenure-track or tenured anthropology jobs and one of which actually is two separate jobs. 

Every year, for the past several years, I’ve been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn’t really change much with the overall trends. As a proxy for the health of the job market in anthropology, though, the AAA listings are ideal, since, at least historically, most tenure-stream positions in the discipline get listed there (but see below). So here we have it, including the 2012 figure:

2006: 190
2007: 186
2008: 168
2009: 78
2010: 112
2011: 117
2012: 109

While this looks like a slight decrease from last year, I actually think that actually there are around the same number of jobs, or possibly even trending slightly up, for several reasons:

First, there are definitely fewer postdocs or nationally-advertised one-year positions listed on the AAA site than in the past.    In the past, upwards of 20% of jobs posted were postdocs or visiting positions or jobs outside the academy; this year, fewer than 10% of the posted jobs are non-tenure-track.  So that’s a good sign.

Second, I’ve noticed a lot more institutions posting tenure-track anthropology jobs on more general sites (like the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed) rather than the AAA.  One possibility is that this may reflect a decline in the AAA’s prestige, but I don’t think that’s too likely.  Alternately, I’ve heard that the their AAA’s job listings are quite pricey, so maybe they’re just getting priced out of the market. 

Third, my sense (anecdotal, admittedly) is that while formerly many if not most jobs were posted in September, now lots of tenure-track positions get posted in October or later.  This may partly be because deans/provosts don’t approve searches as early, although I’ve heard that jobs in English lit are decidedly up already by this point, which would work against that idea.  More significantly, anthropology departments are definitely less likely in the past to interview candidates at the November annual meetings (relying on Skype or phone interviews instead), because of the cost of national searches and the ease of video interview.  Thus, positions can be advertised later and with a later closing date.   This will be confirmed or refuted within a few weeks as we see how many new postings come in October.