Our editorial policy

Kin & Number publishes explainers: pieces that take an idea from mathematical or computational anthropology and set it out clearly enough for a student, a teacher or a curious reader to follow with a pencil. This page describes how those pieces are made and what you can expect from them.

What we cover

Kinship structures and terminologies, the arithmetic of genealogy, network analysis, models of cultural evolution, agent-based simulation, and the statistical and field methods anthropologists use to count and compare. We choose topics that come up in courses and in the published literature, and we favor ideas that can be shown with a small worked example.

We do not publish original research, and we do not carry out fieldwork, surveys, interviews or experiments. When a piece describes a finding, the finding belongs to the researchers named in it.

How a piece is researched

Each explainer starts from published sources: books, journal articles, university pages and public datasets. A writer reads them, works through the mathematics, and writes the idea in fresh words. Our rules for that work:

• Any number that is not our own arithmetic comes from a source named in the text or in the list of sources and further reading at the end of the piece.
• When we describe someone's argument, we put it in our own words and keep it short. Direct quotations are rare, brief and attributed.
• Worked examples are calculated by hand and then checked a second time before publication.
• If a claim cannot be traced to a source we have opened, it stays out.

Explainers use invented examples to make the arithmetic visible: a village of 40 households, five informants answering true or false questions, a family of twelve in a spreadsheet. These are always labeled as hypothetical. We never present an invented person, class or conversation as real.

Writing about communities

Many of the systems our explainers analyze belong to living communities. Aboriginal Australian section systems, Dravidian terminologies and Iroquois kin terms are intelligent social arrangements that people use, argue about and change, not museum pieces. In practice that means:

• We use the names communities use for themselves, following current scholarship, and we flag older labels that have fallen out of favor.
• We describe documentation as documentation ("recorded by a given ethnographer in a given year") rather than writing as if a system were frozen at the moment someone wrote it down.
• We do not reproduce sacred material or describe restricted ceremonies.
• Members of a community who think we have described their kinship wrongly, or in a way they find unwelcome, get a prompt hearing and, where they are right, a change to the text.

Corrections

Mistakes happen, in arithmetic as much as anywhere. If you find one, tell us through the contact page, saying which page and what is wrong. A source helps but is not required.

We check every report against the sources. Typos and broken links are fixed quietly. When a correction changes a fact, a number or a conclusion, we add a short note at the end of the piece saying what changed and when, and update the date shown on the page.

Illustrations

The images at the top of our pieces are illustrations generated with an image model from written descriptions. They are atmosphere, not evidence: desks with diagrams, old books, chalkboards, landscapes at dusk. They never show real, identifiable people and never depict the sacred objects or ceremonies of a living culture. Diagrams and tables inside a piece are drawn up by the writer to match the worked example.

Books and affiliate links

Our book notes and sources lists name books because they are useful, and the choice of a book never depends on whether a link to it earns anything. Some book links may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links to other retailers go through partner networks that work the same way.

Advertising and tracking

We do not run advertising that tracks you, and we do not use analytics trackers. What little the site does record is set out in the privacy policy and the cookie policy.

Questions about any of this go through the contact page, where they are read by the people who write and edit the site.

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