User:Douglas R. White

Anthropologist at UC Irvine

--Douglas R. White 17:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC).

Short Bio
I am a complexity researcher (SFI external faculty) and ethno-sociologist, or social anthropologist with broad sociological as well as comparative and ethnographic interests in human societies and global historical processes. My PhD in Anthropology with a subfield in sociological theory was done with advisor E. Adamson Hoebel, University of Minnesota, although largely through the CIC Traveling Scholars Program that allowed transfer of seminar credits from the University of Michigan, Columbia, and Northwestern. My University High School education involved an immersion school-year in Madrid living with two Spanish families. My BA involved two quarters of transfer credits for ethnographic fieldwork under supervision at the University of Veracruz in Jalapa, Mexico.

I began teaching at the University of Pittsburgh (Anthropology, with involvement also in Sociology) in 1967, finished the PhD in 1969, and continued from 1976 to the present as a Professor at the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. I chair a research group on Social Dynamics and Complexity and lead a multicampus videoconference series in Human Social Complexity, supported by a research appointment with the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. The years of my 1990-92 Distinguished Senior U.S. Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation were largely spent at the Institute of Ethnology, Cologne, and the Maison Suger and EHESS (Center for Advanced Studies), Paris, and a third of my time since then was spent at various European research institutes and universities. I have worked extensively since 1999 at the Santa Fe Institute for Studies in Complexity and am currently on their external faculty. I serve on several professional societies that run the Complex Systems conferences in Europe and Internationally, taught in the 2007 Paris ISC PIF Complexity summer school, am Editor-in-Chief of the open access peer-reviewed anthro/soc and interdisciplinary e-journals for the University of California system, Structure and Dynamics eJournal of the Anthropological and Related Sciences.

My [http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/ contains numerous projects, the latest at the Intersciwiki Main_Page being http://socscicompute.ss.uci.edu (Galaxy / CoSSci) developed with help from Argonne national lab user facilities, which allow scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry to carry out experiments and pursue groundbreaking discoveries that would otherwise not be possible. The Intersciwiki documents open source codebooks, datasets and a Complex Social Science interface for R software by Malcolm Dow and Anthon Eff that enables modeling cross-cultural analyses of dependent and independent variables controlling for effects of proximity, common evolution and language, and ecology, i.e., solutions to Galton's problem.

As a supporter of the Wikipedia community I help out occasionally in upgrading/editing some of the anthropology, sociology, network, and complexity pages. As a result I have also joined and am one of the Anthropology editors at Citizendium and inaugurated a MediaWiki for complexity researchers.

My page at Citizendium