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Posts from the ‘American Folklore Society Business’ Category

Aug 1

New Topics for the Open Folklore Screencast?

Its time to start work on one or more new informational screencasts for the Open Folklore portal site and project. The first (posted below in case you have not seen it) focused on using the search tools at the Open Folklore portal site. What topics would be most useful to the folklore studies community? To students? To interested folks in general? Your feedback is welcome in comments here or via the Open Folklore project email address openfolklore(at)gmail(dot)com.

Mar 22

AFS Meeting Program Proposals: Final Reminder

From an email circulated by Lorraine Cashman, AFS Associated Director:

This is your final reminder: the deadline for all proposals for the AFS 2011 annual meeting program is March 31.

If you intend to submit a proposal, please do so as soon as possible. The high volume of submissions increases the likelihood of difficulties in the final days of March. Please allow extra time for our part-time administrative staff to respond to your questions during business hours.

Remember, submitting your proposal requires registration, and to receive the members’ registration rate, you will have to Sign In at www.afsnet.org.

If you don’t know your password, you can reset it from the Sign In screen. If you don’t know your username, use the “Forgot your password?” link and enter your email address. If that address matches the one we have on file, you will still be able to sign in. If you have any trouble, please use the website to “Contact Us” — http://www.afsnet.org/general/?type=CONTACT.

When you are ready to submit your proposal, you will start the registration/submission process on the 2011 Annual Meeting page — https://afsnet.site-ym.com/?page=2011AM

Finally, please note that you can use the 2011 Annual Meeting Forum (www.afsnet.org/forums/) for meeting-related discussions. In particular, you can use the “Accommodations” forum topic to coordinate housing, transportation, childcare, or other local arrangements. If you have any suggestions for new annual meeting forum topics that will be useful later this year for those attending the meeting, please let me know.

Thank you for your support of our field and Society.

Lorraine Cashman
Associate Director

Feb 3

Kim Fortun Reflects on the Open Folklore Project

Anthropologist and science studies scholar Kim Fortun has written an essay discussing the Open Folklore project for Anthropology News. Her piece is currently accessible (toll free) via the AAA website. Kim is the outgoing co-editor of  Cultural Anthropology and a thoughtful advocate for rethinking scholarly communication work in anthropology.

Jan 28

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Outstanding Collaboration Citation for Open Folklore

The Open Folklore project, a collaborative effort between the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, is the recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Collaboration Citation. The honor comes from the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services within the American Library Association.

The award recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials, as well as a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and assist with the management of library collections.
Open Folklore debuted in October 2010 to provide open online access to many useful — but heretofore difficult to access — research materials in the field of folklore studies, including books, journals, “gray literature” (unpublished) and web sites.

“Open Folklore is extraordinary in its vision and its promise. A true example of the spectacular things that can be achieved together but which are entirely impossible alone,” said Julie Bobay, Associate Dean of IU Bloomington Libraries.

“Ultimately, Open Folklore will become a multifaceted resource, combining digitization and digital preservation of data, publications, educational materials and scholarship in folklore; promoting open access to these materials and providing an online search tool to enhance discoverability of relevant, reliable resources for folklore studies,” said Kurt Dewhurst, president of the American Folklore Society.

“As it grows, Open Folklore will provide a vehicle — guided by scholars — for libraries to re-envision our traditional library services centered on collections — selection, acquisition, describing, curating and providing access to a wide range of materials, published or not,” said Brenda Johnson, Dean of IU Bloomington Libraries. “The progress of this experiment will, in a very real way, illuminate the path academic libraries must take in supporting collection development in the digital age.”

Primarily, Open Folklore was developed so quickly and productively because of the close match between the collection development and scholarly communications priorities of the IU Libraries and the American Folklore Society, Dewhurst said.

Barbara Fister of Inside Higher Ed blog Library Babel Fish, said the project is drawing “a terrific map for societies unsure of how to proceed” with open access.

“Partnering with Indiana University Libraries, the American Folklore Society is identifying where their literature is and how much of it is accessible, bringing attention to existing and potential open access journals, asking rights holders if material can be set free, digitizing gray literature so it will be preserved . . . these folks are sharp,” Fister said. “And they’re doing what scholarly societies should do: promoting the field and sharing its collective knowledge for the greater good.”

“As a librarian deeply involved in building digital collections of the future, I view Open Folklore as a stunning example of the value of, and opportunities presented by, new developments in scholarly communication,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust Digital Library.

The award will be presented at the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services Awards Ceremony at the Annual Conference in June 2011.

(From an IU Bloomington press release.)

Jan 26

Diane Goldstein Elected President of the American Folklore Society

Congratulations to my colleague Diane Goldstein on her election to the Presidency of the American Folklore Society. Here is the Indiana University press release, just issued:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Diane Goldstein, professor of folklore and ethnomusicology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, will be the fourth IU faculty member to be elected president of the American Folklore Society.

As president-elect this year and president in 2012 and 2013, she will help preside over the organization’s 123rd annual meeting when it convenes this October at Bloomington. She had been a member of AFS’ board from 2004 to 2007.

Goldstein also is following in the footsteps of her late father, Kenneth Goldstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who had been a student at the renowned IU summer folklore institute in 1958 and taught at it in 1966. He was president of the AFS in 1976. Read more

Jan 17

#OpenFolklore Presentation from #AFS2010

At the 2010 AFS meetings I gave a presentation about the Open Folklore project. It was part of an experimental panel built around 7 minute talks keyed to 21 slides set to auto-advance every 20 seconds. This format is the one that will be introduced at-large at the 2011 meetings under the name Diamond presentations. (See the recent AFS announcement here.) In the video here, I re-recorded my talk as an audio track with the slide show.  Acoustically, my voice is hardly dynamic or interesting, but I have hope that the words and images help explain what Open Folklore is all about. Converting the slides to a short movie and uploading it to YouTube was good practical experience.

Thanks to everyone who attended the original session at AFS 2010. The panel of these short format presentations was really exciting.

Jan 15

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Exciting New Presentation Formats for #AFS2011

Work on the 2011 American Folklore Society Meetings is now in high gear. The AFS meetings next fall will be held on my home campus at Indiana University Bloomington. As we get ready to host the meetings, I have been particularly involved in getting ready to introduce a new quick format presentation format and to re-boot the poster format along museum exhibition lines.  These new possibilities are described in the document circulated today by the Society. I hope that a large and diverse group of scholars takes an interest in attending the meetings and that these two new presentation formats appeal to scholars of all levels of seniority and to those working across the full breadth of folklore studies and its congeners. I want to personally express thanks to those senior scholars who have agreed to attend and host the poster exhibitions opening event and to my colleagues participating in the trial run for what are now (in AFS-speak) being called “Diamond” presentations at the 2010 meetings in Nashville. Here are the details from the home office:

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Dear Colleagues,

In the next few weeks we will post online the Invitation for Participation for the American Folklore Society’s 2011 annual meeting, set for October 12-15 at the Biddle Hotel and Conference Center in the Indiana Memorial Union complex on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. We encourage participation by folklorists throughout the world in our gathering.

This will be AFS’s first meeting on a university campus since our last meeting in Bloomington in 1968. Our hosts will be the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and the theme of the meeting, on which presentations are encouraged but not required, is “Peace, War, Folklore.”

All proposals for the annual meeting program will be due by March 31. The entire process includes registration for the meeting, payment of the registration fee, and submission of your proposal.

We’re sending you this message to bring you up to date on two new developments within our annual meeting. The first has to do with an improvement in the proposal submission process, and the second involves the introduction of two new presentation formats.

But first, here is a link to a video documenting the Bloomington annual meeting committee’s musical “Invitation to Bloomington 2011” performed at our annual business meeting in Nashville last October.

Now to the news:

1. No More Long Abstracts Required from Individual Presenters in Pre-Organized Sessions

Beginning with the 2011 annual meeting, people who will be making presentations in pre-organized paper and Diamond sessions (for more information on Diamond sessions, see below) no longer have to submit long (500-word abstracts) for their presentation, just short (100-word) ones.

As in the past, individuals participating in organized paper and Diamond sessions will provide their short abstracts to their session chair in advance of the March 31 deadline. Session chairs will submit long and short abstracts for the session as a whole, and short abstracts for all presentations, as part of the session proposal.

2. Two New Presentation Formats at AFS 2011

While our meeting will feature the presentation of papers, discussion forums, media works, and professional development workshops as it has done for many years, in 2011 we are giving special emphasis to two new forms of presentation.

Re-Imagining the Research Poster in Folklore Studies: AFS Research Poster Exhibitions

The 2011 Annual Meeting Program Committee and the Society are making a special effort to capitalize on the research poster’s special virtues for folklorists. AFS Executive Board member and Indiana University Associate Professor of Folklore Jason Jackson will curate the 2011 Research Poster Exhibitions.

Posters, a vital means of scholarly communication in many fields, allow for the integration of graphic and textual information. They share the strengths characteristic of the informal settings in which folklorists often learn, teach, and study. Many folklorists are deeply involved in studying topics that lend themselves to the poster exhibition framework.

The current digital moment has created new opportunities to extend the power of this genre. Posters can stand alone as documents of scholarly research in folklore studies, and can also be augmented through informal oral presentation or the use of multimedia enhancements. They can also be repurposed after a conference into gallery and web-based exhibitions. Like conference papers, posters can also serve as a foundation for other genres of scholarly communication, including articles and book chapters. Posters themselves have begun to be peer-reviewed, revised, and published in scholarly journals.

This year, in lieu of poster panels organized by the membership, we are soliciting individual proposals for poster presentations on one of four broad topics: Peace, War, Folklore (the 2011 annual meeting theme), Folklore and Folklorists Making a Difference, Folklore Studies and the Digital Humanities, and Musical Cultures.

Poster presentations selected for each grouping will be brought together to comprise one of four formal exhibitions, which will be initially presented at an opening reception on Thursday morning. At that time, a distinguished scholar with special knowledge of the exhibition theme will host each exhibition, and will make public remarks about the exhibition’s posters.

Steve Zeitlin from City Lore will host Peace, War, Folklore

Marsha MacDowell from the Michigan State University Museum will host Folklore and Folklorists Making a Difference

Kimberly Christen from Washington State University will host Folklore Studies and the Digital Humanities

Jeff Todd Titon of Brown University will host Musical Cultures

The reception will also provide time for presenters to dialogue informally with each other, with interested conference attendees, with the hosts, and with other special guests. The posters will remain on exhibition throughout the conference.

Post-conference publication of selected posters is a possibility. We have invited a number of journal editors to attend the poster exhibition opening as special guests. Editors so far agreeing to attend include Regina Bendix (co-editor of Ethnologia Europaea), Kristina Downs (co-editor of Folklore Forum, which is interested in receiving submissions from participating poster exhibitors), Rob Howard (editor of Western Folklore), Jason Baird Jackson (editor of Museum Anthropology Review), and Tok Thompson (co-editor of Cultural Analysis).

AFS Diamond Presentations: An Invitation

On the basis of their increasing popularity among scholars and with the inspiration of a successful experiment undertaken at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Nashville, the American Folklore Society invites individual and organized session proposals in what we are calling the Diamond format, a formalized presentation genre structured by time and images:

Individual Diamond presentations are seven minutes long and are organized around 21 slides that are set to advance automatically every 20 seconds.

Audience response to such presentations have been very enthusiastic, and the format offers a number of specific advantages:

· As with the highly structured expressive genres that folklorists have often studied, this format calls upon presenters to be creative and selective in organizing their presentations.

· Focused presentations and images aid and engage audiences, even those unfamiliar with the topic or those whose first language differs from that of the presenter.

· This format is valuable not only for presenting image-based topics (such as studies of material culture or cultural performance), but also for all presenters concerned with visual communication and those who wish to experiment with visual techniques to enhance communication.

· This format is an easy starting point for the creation of audio slidecasts and small digital exhibitions—more durable modes of scholarly communication valuable to diverse online audiences—as well as in such settings as media kiosks in gallery exhibitions.

· The brevity of the format allows extra time for discussion.

· Brief but structured, the format supports multidimensional, open-ended presentations, making it very appropriate for the presentation of new projects or works-in-progress.

You may submit proposals for individual Diamond presentations, which the Program Committee will group into sessions, or organized Diamond sessions of six to ten presentations. All Diamond sessions will be constructed with an initial seven minutes allotted for preparation and introduction of the session as a whole, seven minutes for each Diamond presentation, and the balance of the available time dedicated to discussion of the full set of presentations. At the discretion of the session chair, the discussion time may be used for response by a formal discussant, open “full room” questions and answers, break-out time in which presenters can confer with interested audience members, or a combination of these discussion formats.

For those who would like to know more about the sources of inspiration for this format, there is much discussion around the web of a variety of similar (but not identical) formats, including the format known as Pecha-Kucha, developed in the design fields in Japan. Some of these are associated with formally trademarked brands of presentation events. Also available online are videos and slidecasts of presentations made in these related formats:

A YouTube version of Jason Jackson’s AFS 2010 Diamond presentation on the Open Folklore project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBUfYuVlBZE

A Pecha-Kucha presentation on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZOt6BkhUg

“Hate Long, Rambling Speeches? Try Pecha-Kucha” by Lucy Craft [NPR on Pecha-Kucha]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130698873

A discussion of Pecha-Kucha in anthropology with links to examples and information: http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2010/pecha-kucha

The Pecha-Kucha Organization: http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

On Lightning Talks: http://perl.plover.com/lightning-talks.html

On the Ignite Format and Events: http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Search also “Pecha Kucha” in YouTube, “Death by PowerPoint,” “Ignite,” “Lightning Talks,” and Wikipedia.

——

Please feel free to circulate this email to your non-AFS-member colleagues who may not have received it directly. We look forward to seeing you in Bloomington this October. Thank you for your support of our field and Society.

Nov 21

Fall Conference #3: American Folklore Society

A couple of days after returning from Oklahoma, I turned around and headed out again to the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society.  Three main tasks filled my time during these meetings.  As was the case when I went to the American Anthropological Association meetings as a society editor, my AFS meetings are now mainly composed of business meetings taking place within the time and space of the scholarly meeting.  I saw very few scholarly presentations and I ate all of my lunches out of boxes inside the conference hotel, but the meeting was really productive from a work point of view.  The domains of my activity were focused on:  (1) the AFS Executive Board (of which I am a member), (2) the Teagle Foundation funded “Big Questions and the Disciplines” project on improving undergraduate instruction in folklore studies and (3) the launch of the Open Folklore portal site.

It is a honor to represent the AFS membership as a member of the society’s board. The crux of the story from my perspective as a board member is that the society and thus the board are in the midst of a very very busy and very positive time.  The broader context of our work as scholars in North America and in the United States is troubling, but our society has never been stronger. At the meetings, we heard an abundance of good news from the field, recognized many excellent people and projects with well deserved awards, and pushed forward on a number of initiatives. The Teagle grant project is one of these and Open Folklore is another, but great progress is being made on many fronts. I am thankful for all of the people who are helping the society thrive.

As a participant in the Teagle project, I had the pleasure of participating in a lively and rich panel discussion and then a working lunch meeting in which we reviewed our work of the past year and planned for further efforts in the year ahead. I am learning from all of the project’s participants and am especially grateful to Dorothy Noyes and Tim Lloyd for leading our efforts.

I have discussed the Open Folklore project and the portal launch in previous posts. I’ll just note again here how exciting I think that this project is and how appreciative I am for the chance to participate in it.  I had planned on discussing the Southeastern Native American Collections Project as part of an experimental panel in which colleagues and I were trying out a seven minute-twenty-one slide speed format panel. As the conference approached, I proposed a change in which I would present on Open Folklore instead.  The slides are available here and I hope to work up an audio slidecast very soon.  The experimental panel was a big success and we are planning to include the format in the 2011 AFS meetings in Bloomington.

Thanks to everyone who worked to make the Nashville meetings a success.

 

Oct 20

Open Folklore Slides from AFS 2010



Oct 19

Open Folklore Goes to Nashville

Many folklorists in the United States have just returned from the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society, which were held in Nashville, Tennessee. The meetings were intellectually rich and diverse and they were characterized by a sizable quantity of good news for the field.  We learned about growing membership numbers, academic program enlargement, a new AFS website, numerous national projects and strengthened international collaborations. Quite inspiring!  While it seemed like I was in business meetings during every waking hour, everyone else seemed to have a healthy mix of work and play.  A good time seemed to be had by almost all.  The few papers and presentations that I got to hear and see were uniformly excellent.

One of the things that I was involved with was the launch of the Open Folklore portal site:  www.openfolklore.org

While we spoke of launching the site at the AFS board meeting on Wednesday morning, we actually flipped the switch (so to speak) on Tuesday afternoon.  We did this just in case there were technical problems to resolve, but everything worked great and by the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday the site was live.  Wednesday morning, Indiana University issued a press release announcing the launch.  You can find it at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/15922.html

Wednesday morning, Moria Smith and Julie Bobay (both fellow Open Folklore project team members from Indiana University Bloomington Libraries) gave an overview of the OF project and the OF portal site to the AFS Executive Board (of which I am a member).  That went very well, I think.  In the afternoon, the gave a similar overview to the leaders of academic and public sector folklore programs. While few had a chance, by this point, to actually use the site, there was uniform enthusiasm for its purpose and promise. The project was mentioned by AFS President Kurt Dewhurst during the conference’s opening ceremonies Wednesday night. On Thursday at noon, the OF team had a very fruitful meeting with representatives of Utah State University Libraries (including the Utah State University Press and USU Special Collections) and the Utah State folklore program. Utah State is the Open Folklore project’s first strategic partner. On Thursday afternoon I presented a brief overview of OF in a panel of which I was a part and Moria Smith and I demonstrated the site to interested visitors to an Open Folklore table near the book room.  Thanks go to all of these interlocutors and audiences.

Open Folklore’s Facebook presence continued to get the “like” treatment from supporters and we reached and surpassed our goal of 250 Facebook supporters during the meeting.  Folklorists aren’t very big on Twitter yet, but the ranks of Open Folklore’s Twitter followers also grew during the meetings.  It was a tough week to launch in a sense because it was a week prior to Open Access Week and the AFS meetings co-occurred with the Association of Research Libraries meeting and the Educause meeting. Both of these meetings are of special relevance to audiences sympathetic to the goals of the Open Folklore project.

The first review of the Open Folklore site came in during the meetings. On his weblog Archivology, Creighton Barrett offered a very careful study of the architecture and functionality of the Open Folklore portal, one that extended his earlier pre-launch discussions. The Open Folklore team is very appreciative of the careful attention that he has given the project.  The portal site was also highlighted in an October 14 Library Journal essay by Barbara Fister. In addition, the portal site has also gotten a good bit of link love, for which we are also thankful.

Thanks go to everyone who has tried the site out, put it to actual use, or suggested either additional content for liberation or improvements to the portal itself. We look forward to following up on the suggestions that many made during our time in Nashville.  Thanks to all who spoke up so enthusiastically about the project and its potential. The project team is certainly more enthusiastic than ever.

Happy Open Access week!

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