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Posts from the ‘Digital Projects’ Category

Aug 1

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What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [1]

While one way to think about Open Folklore is as a website or as a scholarly portal (that will live at http://www.openfolklore.org/ ) another way to think about it is to see it as a branding effort or as a unified (unifying) label for a mixed collection of projects, efforts and services being pursued by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society aimed at making more of the scholarly literature and a greater range of scholarly resources in folklore studies openly available for those who need them. This post is the first in what I hope will be a series in which I show as quickly as I can what some of these resources are and how to access them independently. I am drawing here upon what we might call the “quiet phase” projects that provide the current core of content around which the Open Folklore portal or (viewed somewhat differently) the Open Folklore banner can be wrapped.

In this, context, “What can the Open Folklore project help me do now?” Here is a first and (I hope) simple answer.

Answer 1:  Open Folklore can enable you to consult the full text of out-of-copyright books from the Indiana University Libraries’ famed Folklore Collection in the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

The IU Folklore Collection was digitized by the Google Books project in partnership with the libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). It constitutes the first “Collection of Distinction” to be digitized in this partnership.

Much of the content (books and journals) from the Folklore Collection has already appeared in Hathi Trust. For works that are no longer under copyright, the full text of the original work is both full text searchable and full text readable. So, if you want to consult and read or search a particular book in the collection, you can now do so online. If you wish to try it out, here are the stable URLs for some sample works in the collection.

George Bird Grinnel’s The Punishment of Stingy and Other Indian Stories (1901)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.39000005892356

George H. McKnight’s St. Nicholas: His Legend and His Role in the Christmas Celebration and Other Popular Customs (1917)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.39000005678284

Arthur Mitchell’s On the Popular Weather Prognostics of Scotland (1863)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.32000001681875

Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Religion: With a paper on Buddhist Nihilism and a Translation of the Dhammapada or “Path of Virtue” (1872)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000050315583

Paul Radin’s El Folklore de Oaxaca (1917)
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000118485246

The stable URL for these works also enables you to reliably cite these work when writing or creating new scholarly projects building on this older work. They can be used in citations in new written (and perhaps printed) works such as books and articles, but also in websites, blog posts, and other scholarly new media.

There are (as of today) 2425 other works from the Folklore Collection itself available in full text via Hathi Trust. Hathi Trust as a whole provides full text access to over a million volumes that are in the public domain (representing about 19% of the collection as a whole.) [More on using the in-copyright volumes later.]

Find a volume of relevance to you and try out the folklore studies offerings of Hathi Trust, made possible by our friends at the Indiana University Bloomington libraries, the librarians of the CIC, Google Books, and the other Hathi Trust partners.

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 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!

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 17

AcademiX 2010: Learning in an Open-Access World

The second conference of the week was AcademiX 2010, an event sponsored by Apple and MacLearning.org (an Apple affiliate organization comprised of people interested in educational uses of Apple technology). The event’s complex structure made it a real learning experience for me. I had not previously participated in an event of this type. I was at Northwestern University, one of two primary sites for the conference. The other main site was at MIT. These two sites were connected with each other, with the Apple HQ in California, and with secondary sites at Duke University, San Diego State University, the University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota, and the University of New Mexico. Beyond these physical conference sites, there were a great many conference participants experiencing the conference online from their desktops. Video and audio linked all of these places and people together.

The focus of the event was “Learning in an Open-access World.” My mandate was to speak about academic open access in the scholarly communications sense relating to peer-reviewed scholarly literature, but the program was broader than this area. John Wilbanks (Creative Commons) spoke of “Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship: The Next Layer of the Network.” Ben Hawkridge (Open University) presented “New Channels for Learning: Podcasting Opportunities for a Distance University.” Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin-Madison) discussed the findings of his research on “Education for a Mobile Generation.” Nick Shockey (SPARC) presented “The Digital Natives Are Getting Restless: the Student Voice of the Open Access Movement.” In the final slot, Paul Hammond (Rutgers University and Richard Miller (Rutgers University) co-presented “This is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift.”

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May 2

The Museum Anthropology Weblog 2.0

Early in my time editing Musuem Anthropology, I started a weblog to support the work that we were doing with the journal. That journal’s new editors–Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash–have updated the blog and are continuing with it in a very good way. I recommend it to everyone interested in the fields of museum and material culture studies. I am taking this opportunity to especially thank them for noting the publication of the past couple issues of Museum Anthropology Review.

I am happy to return the favor by noting that their first issue as c0-editors has also recently appeared in print and online. It is a great issue and it is the debut of the journal’s long-needed redesign. The new issue thus combines great style with great substance.

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