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Posts from the ‘Conferences’ Category

Nov 21

Fall Conference #1: Indiana University Statewide IT Conference

This fall has been really busy. For the last couple of months, conferences of all sorts have occupied me more than I had anticipated. My original plan was to only attend the American Folklore Society meetings where I would pursue my work as a board member and promote the Open Folklore project. Other opportunities came along…  One of these was the Indiana University Statewide Information Conference. Here is the first in a series of brief reports on these conferences.

At the very end of September, I participated in the Indiana University Statewide Information Technology Conference. I was encouraged to propose a presentation by Robert McDonald, Associate Dean for Library Technologies and Digital Libraries at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. I shared a one hour slot with William Cowan, a developer on the EVIA (Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis) Digital Archive who was discussing the associated Ethnomusicology Multimedia Project. As noted briefly earlier, I gave my first overview of the Open Folklore project. The presentation was well received and it was great to have a chance to try out explaining the project to interested audiences before attending the American Folklore Society Meetings where we would be launching the OF Portal.

My presentation drew upon consultation with Open Folklore project team members Garett Montanez, Moria Smith, Jennifer Laherty, Tim Lloyd, and Julie Bobay.

This was my second time participating in, and presenting at, this IT conference. I enjoy it because it is so different from the normal events that I attend. One thing about it is that it is rather inspiring. IU has an excellent IT organization and this event has a pep rally quality that is very effective. The event extends beyond the core IT departments and encompasses a diversity of IU community members involved in information technology projects, issues, and infrastructure. As a faculty member, I am in the minority as a presenter but have been made very welcome. I certainly learn a great deal as a participant. Because my engagements are at the library-IT interface, I participate alongside my library collaborators and friends, which is always fun.

Oct 20

Open Folklore Slides from AFS 2010



Sep 29

Open Folklore at the IU Statewide Information Technology Conference #switc10

Just a quick note to record my appreciation for everyone involved in organizing the Indiana University Statewide Information Technology Conference. This was my second year attending and my second year presenting at the conference and it is a really great event. Today I spoke on behalf of the Open Folklore project team, describing the goals of the project and where we stand in addressing them. Everyone was really nice and it was good to have an additional chance to articulate what the project is and where it is headed as the team prepares to unveil the associated portal site at the upcoming American Folklore Society meetings in Nashville in October. Thanks to all the Open Folklore project team members for your support and your good work.

Sep 29

[New, Open Access] Culture Archives and the State: Between Nationalism, Socialism, and the Global Market

From a CFS News Release:

The Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University is delighted to announce the online publication of

Culture Archives and the State: Between Nationalism, Socialism, and the Global Market

Proceedings of an international conference held May 3-5, 2007, at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus. Ohio.

Columbus: The OSU Knowledge Bank, 2010. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/46896

The papers address the political uses of ethnographic archives from the late nineteenth century to the present. Archives keep tabs on populations, define and discipline national identities, shape and censor public memories, but also shelter discredited alternative accounts for future recovery. Today their contents and uses are tensely negotiated between states, scholars, and citizens as folklore archives become key resources for the reconstruction of lifeworlds in transition.

Case studies and reports come from China, India (Bengal), Afghanistan, Spain, Finland, Estonia, Romania, Croatia, the US, and the German-speaking lands.

In a keynote address, Regina Bendix provides a general account of “property and propriety” in archival practice.

Sep 27

Klassen, Ingalsbe Awarded Research Support

Congratulation to Teri Klassen on being named the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology’s Harry M. and Alma Egan Hyatt Graduate Fellow for 2010-2011. Teri is completing work on her dissertation, a historical and material culture studies focused project that explores quilting by African American and European American members of a rural community in western Tennessee.

Congratulations to Suzanne Ingalsbe on being awarded a travel grant from the Council for Museum Anthropology. This CMA funding will help Suzanne attend the 2010 American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans in November. At these meetings she will present collections and archival research that she conducted at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. The focus is on so-called “prayer rugs” in the NMNH Collection, particularly those collected for the museum by Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting. Suzanne is a doctoral student in the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology focused on the architecture and material culture of religious spaces vis-a-vis museum spaces.

Aug 3

Folktales and Fairy Tales: OA Book Published in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa

A folklore essay collection has just been published in an open access institutional repository. The collection is Folktales and Fairy Tales: Translation, Colonialism, and Cinema edited by ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Noenoe Silva, Vilsoni Hereniko, and Cristina Bacchilega. It is available in ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa at the following stable URL: http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/15609

In their Preface, the editors write:

We chose ScholarSpace as a publishing venue because it allows for wide accessibility to scholars across disciplines and because its reduced production timeline enables us to make the collection available in a more timely manner. We thank UHM librarian Beth Tillighast for her support.

Congratulations to the folklore minded editors, authors, and librarians involved in this significant project.

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.

Jun 30

AcademiX Presentations on Open Access Now Online

I am happy to report that the videos from the AcademiX 2010 conference on “Learning in an Open-Access World” are now online.  One can get to them via this page on the MacLearning.org site or one can just go into iTunes University in iTunes and search on AcademiX or a particular presenter’s name. While they are embedded in iTunes, they are free to all those who wish to consult them.  As discussed here earlier, my presentation is titled: “Innovation and Open Access in Scholarly Journal Publishing.” The other presenters and their titles are:

  • John Wilbanks (Creative Commons) Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship – The Next Layer of the Network
  • Ben Hawkridge (Open University) New Channels for Learning – Podcasting Opportunities for a Distance University
  • Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Education for a Mobile Generation
  • Nick Shockey (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) The Digital Natives are Getting Restless – The Student Voice of the Open Access Movement
  • Richard E. Miller (Rutgers University) and Paul Hammond (Rutgers University) This is How We Think – Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift

I hope that our presentations are useful to the community in their this new form. Thank you to Apple for hosting the gathering and making these materials freely available online.

May 28

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Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

The following essay is adapted from a talk given on March 6, 2009 as part of the symposium “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions” organized by the Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio. At the time, I discussed my participation in this event here. This essay builds upon three reviews of open access issues in folkloristics that I authored for the weblog Open Access Anthropology in winter 2008 (Jackson 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Inspired this week by the Hacking the Academy project and by Ted Striphas’ recent examination of scholarly communications issues within the field of cultural studies (Striphas 2010a, 2010b), I decided not to leave the essay sitting on the back-burner. In lieu of doing something more formal with it later, I am publishing it here in the hope that it will prove useful to a colleagues in folklore studies and neighboring fields.

Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies)

Jason Baird Jackson
Indiana University, Bloomington

The system of scholarly communication in which folkloristics is a small but important part is quickly changing in some dramatic ways. The phenomena falling under this rubric become more diverse and interconnected everyday and the good and bad news seems to come at an every quicker rate. To begin with a tangible example, a key publisher in our field and the home to three of its four main English-language introductory textbooks is Utah State University Press. When I prepared this essay in the spring of 2009, our field feared that the press would cease operations in the context of its university’s response to the current global economic crisis (Howard 2009; Jaschik 2009; Spooner 2009). On the brink of disappearance, Utah State University Press was instead made a unit of its university library (Utah State University 2009). It is not unique in undergoing such a dramatic transition. The present economic climate will almost certainly accelerate further various processes of change that were well already underway. Many of these shifts are positive, but whether for the good or for the bad, they are prompting some fundamental reconsiderations of: (1) of the genres of scholarly production, (2) of the paths down which we circulate our work, (3) of the publics whom we seek to address, (4) of the hierarchies of value that we used to judge and reward good work, (5) of the partners with whom we collaborate, (6) of the technologies that we harness, and (7) of the means by which we pay the bills.
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May 21

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Slides from AcademiX 2010

This is my first attempt at using SlideShare.

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