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Michael D. Fischer is an anthropologist who has worked mainly in the Punjab and Swat in Pakistan, and the Cook Islands. His major interests are in the representation and structure of indigenous knowledge, cultural informatics, and the interrelationships between ideation and the material contexts within which ideation is expressed.

Fischer is Professor of Anthropological Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kent and is currently Director of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Email address: M.D.Fischer@ukc.ac.uk

Surface Mail:

Department of Anthropology
The University of Kent at Canterbury
Canterbury, CT2 7NS
United Kingdom

Tele: +44 1227 823144/823942
FAX : +44 1227 827289

Michael Denley Fischer

Degrees.

  • B.A.1974, M.A 1980, Ph.D. 1986, University of Texas, Austin, Texas in Anthropology and Linguistics.

Posts and Positions.

  • 2005 - Professor of Anthropological Sciences, University of Kent.
  • 2002 - Reader in Anthropological Sciences, University of Kent.
  • 1993- Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent.
  • 1990- Director, Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent.
  • 1985-92 Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent.

Selected Publications

  • 1991 Fischer. M. and A. Finkelstein. A case study in social knowledge representation: arranging a marriage in urban Pakistan, in Qualitative Knowledge and Computing, eds. N Fielding and R Lee. Sage. (with A. Finkelstein)
  • 1994 Applications in Computing for Social Anthropologists, ASA Research Methods Series, Routledge.
  • 1994 "Modelling Complexity: Social Knowledge and Social Process". in When History Accelerates: essays on the study of rapid social change ed. C. Hann.
  • 1995 "Computer-assisted Ethnographic Research". in Information Technology in Social Sciences Research, ed. R. Lees, UCL Press.
  • 1997 Fischer, M., O. Kortendick and D. Zeitlyn. The APFT Content Coding System.. CSAC Monographs, Canterbury.
  • 1998 Counting Things and Interpreting Ideas: Anthropological Conventions in the Use of "Hard" Versus "Soft" Models, in Postmodern Applications to Natural Resources Development. ed. M. Fischer, CSAC Monographs, Canterbury.
  • 2000 Fischer, M. and W. Lyon "Model Marriage in Pakistan". Kinship and substance in South Asia. ed. Rao and Boeck.
  • 2002a "Indigenous knowledge and Expert Knowledge in Development". The contribution of indigenous knowledge to economic development, ed. Silatoe and Bicker. Harwood.
  • 2002b "Integrating Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Culture : The "Hard" and the "Soft"`. R. Trappl (ed), Cybernetics and Systems, Vol 1. Vienna.
  • 2002c Classification, Symbolic Representation and Ritual: Information vs meaning in cultural processes R. Trappl (ed), Cybernetics and Systems, Vol 1I. Vienna.
  • 2002 Bharwani, S., M. Fischer and N. Ryan 'Modelling Adaptive Dynamics and Social Knowledge' R. Trappl (ed), Cybernetics and Systems, Vol 1I. Vienna.
  • 2002 Fischer, M., O. Kortendick and D. Zeitlyn. The CSAC Context Coding System.. CSAC Monographs, Canterbury.
  • 2002 Zeitlyn, D. and M. Fischer `Ritual, ideation and performance: A Case Study of Multimedia in Anthropological Research - the Mambila Nggwun Ritual' R. Trappl (ed), Cybernetics and Systems, Vol 1. Vienna.
  • 2004 'Integrating Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Culture : The "Hard" and the "Soft"'. Cybernetics and Systems.35:2/3 pp147-162
  • 2004b 'Culture and Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Emergent order and the internal regulation of shared symbolic systems' Cybernetics and Systems Research 2004
  • 2005a 'Culture and Indigenous Knowledge Systems: Information, Symbol and Knowledge' Cybernetics and Systems, November 2005
  • 2005b Editor (with Dwight Read and Stephen Lyon (UCLA)) Structure and Instantiation - Special Issue of Cybernetics and Systems to appear November 2005.
  • 2005c Kinship Algebra Expert System (with Dwight Read). A computer program and documentation for formal modelling of kinship terminologies and the simulation of populations that under these models. http://Kaes.anthrosciences.net. CSAC Monographs, Canterbury.
  • 2005d The CSAC Context Coding System. with O Kortendick and D Zeitlyn. CSAC Monographs, Canterbury
  • 2006 Editor - Special Anthropology Issue of Social Science Computing Review to appear spring 2006.
  • See also http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk

Grants

I have received grants from the ESRC, AHRB, SERC, MRC, HEFCE, JISC, Leverhulme and Nuffield, on topics including ethnography of Pakistan and the Cook Islands, formal analysis, multi-media databases, coding methods, virtual reality, performance and large scale networked databases, historical anthropology and textual markup

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About the Ethnographics Gallery

The Ethnographics Gallery is a project of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing. It is the direct descendent of the oldest online resource for Anthropology, dating to 1986. While we are giving the Gallery a face lift, please remember there are 20 year old pages within these halls.

We have no funding stream for this site, and so little time to maintain older material so it well may have a bit of a museum effect. Newer material will be appropriately wizzy.


What is the Ethnographics Gallery?

The Ethnographics Gallery is a publication of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing. This site contains reports on CSAC research, Teaching materials, and Resources that can be used for planning and executing research, including bibliographic materials, databases of ethnographic material, fieldnotes, descriptors, and software for working with ethnographic data. Suggestions always welcome, but we have no funding stream for this website. It contains materials created since 1986, and many of them are rather unfashionable by today's standards. We do, however, want everything to work! mail suggestions to csac@kent.ac.uk

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History

Our first internet service was begun in November, 1986, followed by our first web site in May, 1993, one of the first 400 web sites. The Ethnographics Gallery was founded in Feburary 1994. Our mission at that time was to provide a forum for anthropologists on the internet, and we helped to launch a number of organisations into cyberspace. Today, we are mostly concerned with novel forms of online publishing, disseminating our research, promoting learning resources, and disseminating information about using computers in anthropological research.

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Updated Sun Jan 22 20:00:14 GMT+00:00 2006
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