Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Folklore Studies’ Category

Oct 2

1 Comment

Congratulations to Curtis Ashton!

Congratulations go to Dr. Curtis Ashton who very successfully defended his Indiana University Ph.D. dissertation in folklore today. The title of his important and innovative study is: Interpretive Policy Analysis in Beijing’s Ethnographic Museums: Implementing Cultural Policy for the 2008 “People’s Olympics”. I hope that everyone will be reading it as a book very soon.  In addition to finalizing his dissertation, Curtis has been teaching a course in museum anthropology at Brigham Young University.

Sep 30

1 Comment

Congratulations to Virginia Luehrsen!

Congratulation to Virginia Luehrsen on the successfully passing her folklore M.A. oral exams today. While a student at Indiana, Virginia pursued the joint M.L.S. degree in our School of Library and Information Science and M.A. in folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Her thesis project, which was discussed extensively in today’s exam, is a study of intangible cultural heritage issues in libraries. She builds upon work undertaken in ethnographic museum contexts (by museum anthropologists, indigenous activists and others) carrying the insights and experiences found in this domain into the neighboring–but less well developed–domain of library collections, including library special collections and archives. Virginia is already a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, she is studying with my friend and collaborator Patricia K. Galloway and is the co-organizer of the recent Engaging in the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (EPOCH) conference. Well done Virginia!

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.

Sep 23

Great News: Traditional Arts Indiana Brings Bluegrass to DC

This is an IU Press release from here:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The Not Too Bad Bluegrass Band has been selected to represent Indiana’s vibrant tradition of bluegrass music in the nation’s capital. Based in southern Indiana, the band will perform at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as part of the center’s 2010 Homegrown Concert Series.

Jon Kay, folklorist and director of Traditional Arts Indiana, will introduce the band to new audiences at their two D.C. performances. A nonprofit partnership between Indiana University and the Indiana Arts Commission, TAI’s mission is to document, preserve, and promote Indiana traditional arts.

TAI is a statewide folk arts program that exists to identify, document, preserve and present Indiana’s traditions. The organization and its supporters are pleased to see the Not Too Bad Bluegrass Band perform at these two high-profile venues, Kay said.

The band emerged out of a weekly jam session and has included some of the finest musicians in Indiana. Founding members Brian Lappin and Doug Harden lend their virtuoso banjo and mandolin picking to the solid bass-playing of Greg Norman, the sweet fiddling of Kent Todd, and the masterful guitar of Brady Stogdill.

Each band member traces a different path into bluegrass, through families, friends and festivals. The Not Too Bad Bluegrass Band continues to meld inspired instrumental and vocal harmonies. At performances they are always prepared to take audience requests, following in the tradition of Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe.

Their 2010 CD, Head Full of Memories, pays tribute to classic bluegrass songs and includes original music invoking love, whiskey and memories of home. A copy of this recording, along with an interview with the band, will be deposited into the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.

The band’s concerts in D.C. will take place at noon on Wednesday, Oct. 13, at the Coolidge Auditorium at the American Folklife Center and at 6 p.m. the same day at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Both events are free and open to the public.

There will be a welcome home celebration at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 5. The event will be held at the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology’s Lecture and Performance Hall (formerly the Indiana Avenue Church of Christ) at 800 N. Indiana Ave. in Bloomington. All are welcome to attend this free event.

Sep 13

Open Folklore Project Subject of First Savage Minds Podcast

A brief note expressing deep thanks to Alex “Rex” Golub for inviting me to participate in his experiment developing a podcast series for the group (anthropology) blog Savage Minds. Our topic was the Open Folklore project. At 42 minutes long, I am doubtful that anyone will have the patience to actually listen to me going on and on, but it was a good experience for me. It helped me clarify my own thinking and gave me practice talking informally about the project in the run up to the upcoming American Folklore Society (AFS) meetings.

One thing that I should have said is that my remarks represent my own (not always fully formed) thoughts and do not necessarily represent the views of my colleagues working on the Open Folklore project or the official policies of the AFS or IU Bloomington Libraries.

The podcast is available in iTunes here or directly from the Savage Minds website here.

Thank you Savage Minds.

Sep 12

What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [3] (The Community Arts Network Edition)

This post is the third in a series [1] [2] discussing what the efforts bundled as the Open Folklore project can do for the community now, before the portal site that will live at http://www.openfolklore.org/ is finalized.

A part of the Open Folklore effort that has not been discussed here previously concerns the plan to durably archive content-rich websites of relevance to scholars and practitioners in the field of folklore studies. Recently a need arose to put these plans to a quick test. The Community Arts Network (CAN), a not-for-profit service organization that had built up a large and widely used website found itself needing to cease operation of its elaborate site. On August 31, Debora Kodish of the Philadelphia Folklore Project contacted the Open Folklore team at Indiana about the possibility that the project might be able to assist in the preservation of the CAN assets.  Discussions and investigations quickly followed and the IU Libraries decided to pursue archiving the site. This work was complete before the time of the scheduled shut down on Labor Day.  It all worked and now we can see what a website archived in the manner that we anticipate using looks and feels like.  The words of appreciation that have been offered from the community arts and public folklore communities have been most appreciated and are a major source of encouragement for what we are trying to get going with Open Folklore.

To help explicate a bit further, this is a re-posting of an announcement being circulated by the Community Arts Network (CAN). It was crafted with input from the librarians at Indiana who are central to the current early-phase work on the Open Folklore project. Thanks go to everyone who has been involved in these efforts.  (See the CAN Facebook page for additional discussion.)

The Community Arts Network (CAN), Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, and the American Folklore Society are pleased to announce that the CAN Web site has been archived as part of the Open Folklore project (http://www.openfolklore.org/). Open Folklore is intended to be an online portal to open-access digital folklore content and plans to launch a prototype in October at the American Folklore Society meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

After CAN announced it would be forced to immediately shut down its Web site due to lack of funds, the IU Bloomington Libraries offered to capture the CAN Web site using Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive that allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born-digital content. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded in 1996 to build an “Internet library” with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to collections that exist in digital format. Because CAN is a content-rich Web site that is of great interest to folklorists, the IU Bloomington Libraries made use of their subscription to Archive-It to preserve the site without charge.

The archived CAN is static, but is fully text searchable, though some external links and some internal scripted functions may no longer work. It is, however, a unique and permanent record of the site as it existed at the time. Users may visit the archived site at http://wayback.archive-it.org/2077/20100906194747/http://www.communityarts.net/. The full text of the site may be searched at the Archive-It home site, http://www.archiveit.org/.

Art in the Public Interest, CAN’s non-profit, will continue to seek funding to develop the CAN materials into a sophisticated archive library.

Debora Kodish, founder of the Philadelphia Folklore Project first suggested that Open Folklore might have a role to play in preserving CAN, and this suggestion was enthusiastically and swiftly adopted. IU Bloomington Libraries Dean Brenda Johnson described this sequence of events as an excellent proof of concept for Open Folklore and for the value of collaboration between a research library and the scholarly community it serves. “This is a sterling example of why digital preservation efforts are so important. Without the active collaboration of the folklore community, and without IUB Libraries participation in Archive-It, a unique and valuable online resource would have vanished.”

I invite you to check out the archived CAN site.

Sep 11

Iñupiat Musical Heritage Repatriation Project

The first time that I taught the introductory folklore graduate course it was in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. Among the many nice and smart people in that class was Chie Sakakibara, then a doctoral student in geography preparing for dissertation research on the intersections of expressive culture and human-environment relations in the context of climate change. Chie has gone on the earn her doctorate and she is now an Assistant Professor of Geography at Appalachian State University. In addition to highlighting her work in general, I want to especially mention her work (with Aaron Fox and others) on a significant “musical heritage repatriation project” reconnecting recordings made by ethnomusicologist Laura Boulton (a big presence on my own campus as well as at Columbia University) with the Iñupiat community of Barrow, Alaska.  Learn about this important effort here.

Chie also discussed her work on NPRs Studio 360.  See: http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2009/10/09

Congratulations to Chie on her new post at Appalachian State and thank you for your collaborative work with the people of Barrow and our colleagues at Columbia.

Sep 4

1 Comment

DIY OA Superstar Laura Gibbs Making Stuff Happen for Lovers of Latin and Classical Folklore

And now for something else completely positive.

I got to know many nice and wonderful people during the time that I was on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. One of them is Dr. Laura Gibbs. Laura is a classicist and a folklorist with an interest in new approaches to both university-level teaching and scholarly communications. Among the many things that illustrate how cool she is, I would point out that she is the most passionate language teacher I have ever seen. And the language that she is passionate about teaching is Latin.  How cool is that?  She goes all out for her students (and everyone is a potential student) whether or not those students happen to be enrolled in one of her classes.  When we were both actually on the OU campus, I would usually see her doing language tutorials with students in a campus coffee shop or someplace similar. (I am not at OU anymore and she mainly teaches online now.)

She is probably most famous for her new translation of Aesop’s Fables published by Oxford University Press, but I want to point to one of her newer book projects, a cool DIY OA book worth checking out even if (like me) you know nothing about Latin.

In a best of times, worst of times (for scholarly publishing) email discussion, she mentioned this project, telling me:

This summer I experimented with self-publishing a book at Lulu.com AND giving it away in PDF format. It’s the most fun I have ever had doing a book: Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop’s Fables in Latin. The book is intended for Latin students and teachers; it’s a Latin language manual rather than a scholarly study, but it is based on a really serious survey of the whole scholarly and literary Latin Aesopic tradition, from ancient Rome up through the 19th century (including LOTS of Renaissance fables otherwise unavailable in any modern edition). It has worked out wonderfully, just as I had hoped. Some teachers have bought printed copies for themselves, but the main thing is this: thanks to teachers recommending the book as a free download for their students, there have been over 1600 downloads in just a few weeks. In the weird little world of post-classical Latin, that is a seriously large number. I am really happy! Plus, the fables look GREAT on handheld screens, so offering it as a PDF with the expectation that people might read the book on their iPhone or Android is something new and exciting for me.

The book itself is a celebration of public domain materials–basically me harvesting from GoogleBooks and other digital libraries–and now I am using my blog to link up the Latin texts to the hundreds of public domain images I have found at Internet Archive where the scans are good enough to justify reproducing the images for their own sake.

You can learn more about this project and see and get the book itself on her project website at http://millefabulae.blogspot.com/

When I asked Laura if I could share the story of her project, she replied enthusiastically and commented:

I love telling people about what I am doing because this is a time when people who love stories and music and art can learn and connect and share in ways that just were not easy to do even a few years ago. Now if somebody has a project they want to pursue, all they need is time and enthusiasm – that to me is why open access is important as a principle; if we can remove the access barriers, real education will take place, at last.

What more needs to be said?

In addition to the cool book and website, Laura has leveraged everyday blog features and other software to allow people to do such things as put a Latin fable of the day on their own blogs.  There is no end to what she has already created and tried to share with you (or at least with the vast world of budding classicists). Check out not only the 1001 Aesop’s Fable in Latin site, but also her main site where there are piles of stuff made just for you (and everybody else).

My elementary-age daughter and I have been systematically reading all of Andrew Lang’s so-called colored fairy books, thus I have to point to one more of Laura’s projects.  She has created a one-stop shop where you can go and not only get basic information on this series, but download (free) copies of all of the books in a very easy way.  Check that out at:  http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/

Thank you Laura for teaching in more ways than one! And thanks also to the folks at the University of Oklahoma who have supported Laura’s unusual and productive work as a teacher, technologist, and scholar.

Sep 3

Utah State University Press = Win

Take a break from grouchy discussions of scholarly communication, scholarly societies, and the destruction of the university press system and feast your eyes on a big pile of good news.  Utah State University Press is not only not going away (as it might have, as reported in IHE here) but it is moving on to great things as part of the USU Library. Its even better than I had hoped.  There will be more great news in the future, I think, but for now check this out.  Like old fashioned books?  They will sell them to you. Like e-books?  They will sell them to you? Like free PDFs of books? They will just give you some! How great is that?

For my folklore colleagues especially, check it out.  Among the OA offerings are:

Books from across USUP’s lists are available OA in the DigitalCommons@USU system. History and literature of the North American West, Mormon history, and works on teaching writing are other areas of strength in addition to folklore studies.

Three cheers for Utah State University Press. When other small university presses are dead or headed in the wrong direction, here is one that is finding a path to new accomplishment.  Thank you Utah State University administrators!

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »