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Jul 28

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Open Folklore

Open Folklore–The announcement. I will write of it more later but for now I just want to highlight the announcement last night by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries of the formal start of the Open Folklore project. Read all about it here http://www.openfolklore.org/ Quite a lot of work has already been accomplished during the quiet phase. Thanks to everyone who has work to make this happen, especially the AFS and IUB Library leadership for supporting it. Thanks too to the rights holders who are freely sharing the content under their stewardship.

The earlier post on Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals can be understood more clearly in light of this broader project.

Jul 25

Worldwide List of OA Journals in Anthropology

Thanks to antropologi.info for compiling a worldwide list of (gold) open access journals in anthropology and neighboring fields. (Many folklore and ethnology titles are included.) In addition to listing known journals with links, a search utility has been set up on the site. Find the OA anthropology journal list here: http://www.antropologi.info/links/Main/Journals . This is a great resource for a number of reasons, including the presence here of titles such that have not been included in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The listing should be of special value to higher education librarians and the students and faculty that they support.

Antropologi.info had already established itself as the best blogroll in anthropology (see here), so this was a logical and wonderful next step.

Jul 19

Folklore Studies and the Big Digital Humanities

(As John Laudun has already noted) warm congratulations are due to our UCLA folklore colleague Timothy R. Tangherlini who (with Peter Leonard of the University of Washington) has secured a Google Digital Humanities Research Award for their project Northern Insights: Tools and Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books. Tim is a leader in digital humanities research whose focus is on big projects that explore ways of dealing with large amounts of folklore data. This is important work and I am glad that Google is recognizing the work that Tim and his colleagues have been pursuing. Congratulations!

Jul 15

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Congratulations Dr. Jessica W. Blanchard

Another successful dissertation defense to report and celebrate. Jessica Walker Blanchard (a.k.a. Dr. Blanchard) is a wonderful person and scholar whom I have known and respected for many years. She has just completed her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma (where I was proud to be one of her teachers). I am little behind in reading her dissertation (about a chapter short of finished) but I can say that it is a important contribution to anthropology and Native American studies.  Jessica’s focus in her study are the activities of Southern Baptist missionaries (church “planters”) of diverse Native American backgrounds who establish mission congregations in (i.e. “targeting”) particular and specific local Native American communities. Her work was undertaken in congregations in Central Oklahoma, near the communities of Little Axe, Shawnee, and Earlboro. When she is not dissertating, Dr. Blanchard is a researcher at the Center for Applied Social Research at OU. She has been involved in a wide range of complex and important research projects, mainly focusing on the sociocultural aspects of health and wellness in Oklahoma and in general. Congratulations Jessica!

Jul 14

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Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals

More excellent news from the effort to make more of the scholarly literature in (and beyond) folklore studies freely available. This account comes from Simon Bronner (re-posted from his H-FOLK announcement), who led the effort to open up the three important titles discussed here. This effort was done in collaboration with the IUScholarWorks project in the context of broader efforts undertaken with the American Folklore Society. (More about these soon.)

The only point I would add to Simon’s account is that the content will not cease being available in Hathi Trust when it also becomes accessible via Google Books. This is reassuring and useful in a number of ways, including the fact that Hathi Trust is a major digital library managed in the public interest by a large and growing consortium of libraries and universities. Indiana University is a leading partner in it. Thus this content (and so much else from the digitization of the important IU Folklore Collection) is not solely being stewarded–and made useful and accessible online–by a corporation whose time horizons and motivations are understandably different from scholarly ones. That said, Google has been an invaluable partner by providing the digitization (or digital creation) of these resources and it will be very useful to be able to search and use such content in two contexts, each with different sets of digital tools and built for different purposes. Thanks go to Simon and the relevant scholarly organizations/communities for the years of effort that went into these titles and for the work of making them available to the world. Folklore studies is stronger for these efforts.

Penn State Harrisburg, which features a doctoral program in American Studies with a folk cultural area of study, in cooperation with Indiana University ScholarWorks and Google is happy to report the availability online of back issues for three important journals in folklore studies: Folklore Historian, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review, and Keystone Folklore. The material is available at no cost in HathiTrust Digital Library at the moment until it migrates to Google Books (where it will still be available gratis). All the material is viewable as full-text with the exception of some issues of Keystone Folklore Quarterly, which are at present have limited search functionality.

The URLs are:

Keystone Folklore:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000496431

Keystone Folklore Quarterly:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006090454

(Keystone Folklore was the publication of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society and featured important early works in folklife and material culture, public folklore, and ethnic-urban folklore, many produced by students at the folklore and folklife program at the University of Pennsylvania).

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006931628

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Newsletter:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006929769

(Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review was the publication of the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology section of the American Folklore Society, before the establishment of the Jewish Cultural Studies series published by Littman. It featured many special-themed issues, including Yiddish folklore, material culture, folk dance, foodways, pilgrimage, Israeli ethnography, folk literature, and Jews in the Heartland).

Folklore Historian:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006811508

(Folklore Historian is the still active publication of the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. Back issues feature essays on the history of folklore studies globally as well as studies incorporating or reflecting on historical methodologies; special issues include “Theorizing Folklore,” “Symposium on the Contributions of Francis James Child to Folklore Studies,” “Martha Beckwith: The First American Chair of Folklore Studies.”

Sincerely,

Simon Bronner

Other folklore, ethnology, and ethnomusicology titles that have been made available through the work of the IUScholarWorks project include:  the Folklore Forum backfiles (see new content here), New Directions in Folklore, and the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist. In addition, IUScholarWorks Journals publishes (with its partners) the titles Museum Anthropology Review, Anthropology of East Europe Review, and the Inter-American Journal of Education for Democracy.

Jul 14

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Congratulations to Dr. Kate Hennessy

News arrived today of Kate Hennessy‘s successful dissertation defense. Kate is an awesome scholar that everyone should know about. She has just finished her doctorate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, which I can recommend on the basis of firsthand experience, is titled: Repatriation, Digital Technology, and Culture in a Northern Athapaskan Community. It is excellent. It is an an important contribution at the intersections of visual anthropology, museum anthropology, digital culture studies, media studies, indigenous studies, and applied anthropology. It is a companion to the award winning media project Dene Wajich–Dane-zaa Stories and Songs, which Kate produced with a impressive group of Dane-zaa and non-native collaborators. (Including our mutual friends Pat Moore and Amber Ridington.) More could be said, but for now three cheers for Kate!

Jul 11

Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office Seeks Archaeologist

The Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office is seeking to hire an archaeologist. The AAA job page has the ad, which can be found here.

My friend and former doctoral advisee, Dr. Brice Obermeter coordinates the tribe’s historical preservation work from Emporia State University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Jul 11

Brian Gilley Named Director of IU’s First Nations Educational and Cultural Center

Congratulations to Dr. Gilley, IUB and the FNECC.

Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology and director of the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies program at the University of Vermont, has been selected as the first director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.

Read the full IUB Press Release here.

Jul 4

AFS Executive Board Issues Arizona Statement

[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.

The statement reads:

The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.

More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race.  Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.