
Jeffrey Himpele is a Lecturer in Anthropology and directs the Anthropology Department’s VizE Lab for Ethnographic Data Visualization, a unique hub of scholarship and resources that seeks to bring both data visualization and documentary film into the context of ethnography. As a collaborator on the NJFS Project, Jeffrey is working with the team to create the platform for the analysis of the big data set of ethnographic video. He is especially interested in creating forward‐looking methods for moving back and forth between the qualitative analysis of visual recordings of individual activity, while using the same video content to generate databases for interactive data visualizations.
Jeffrey is the author of Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes, a book based on years of field research in La Paz, Bolivia. His prize‐winning documentary films have been recognized by the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute. Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá has been named as one of the 50 most important films for teaching anthropology. His current film in progress is a musical documentary on the adventures of the steel guitar sound, starting with the lap steel in Hawaiian music and its evolution to the pedal steel in the honky‐tonks of country music and beyond.