Methods & Tools
Fieldwork and analysis methods with worked examples: sampling, free lists, consensus analysis, coding and simple statistics.
Galton's problem, or why cultures are not independent data points
Why cultures are not independent data points: Galton's 1888 objection to Tylor, a worked toy example, and the main fixes from careful sampling to phylogenies.
Cultural consensus analysis, explained with five informants
How cultural consensus analysis uses agreement among informants to estimate both what each person knows and the answer key, with a worked five-person example.
Teaching kinship with a spreadsheet, one row per person
Build a small genealogy in Excel or Google Sheets: one row per person, formulas that find grandparents, siblings and cousins, and a lookup that names relatives.
Network density and centrality, worked by hand
Density, degree, closeness and betweenness computed by hand for a seven-household network, and what each number can and cannot tell an anthropologist.
How to draw a kinship diagram, step by step
The symbols of a kinship diagram, a three-generation example drawn from a hypothetical interview, kin-type strings, and the mistakes beginners make most.