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Posts from the ‘Google’ Category

Nov 9

Google Celebrates Native Artist in November 9th Doodle

A guest post by Emily Buhrow Rogers.

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A carved bear by Amanda Crowe (Eastern Band Cherokee) from the collections of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, Indiana University. ca. 1973. Museum purchase. 7″ x 2″ x 4.75″ (1973-19-002)

In honor of Native American Heritage month, Google today celebrated renowned Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians artist, Amanda Crowe (1928-2004). Born and raised on North Carolina’s Qualla Boundary, Amanda Crowe is perhaps best known for her fluid and expressive animal carvings, which have been collected and praised by museums and art galleries across North America. She is also famous as an educator. After training at the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to North Carolina and took up a post as studio art teacher at Cherokee High School. Here, she trained hundreds of students from her community in the art of woodcarving and influenced generations of Cherokee artists. The Mathers Museum of World Cultures collected several of her works and displayed them in the 2015-2016 exhibition, “Cherokee Craft, 1973.” Her bear sculptures instantly became staff favorites. (Here is a screenshot from the Doodle. Here is a link to the Doodle video. https://youtu.be/Je2du-WEnPQ

Google Crowe Image

The Doodle video was made in cooperation with Amanda Crowe’s nephew, William “Bill” H. Crowe, Jr., and the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, from whom the Mathers Museum of World Cultures obtained its Cherokee collection in 1973.

Emily Buhrow Rogers is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at Indiana University, where she is also a research associate of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. She was the curator of the museum’s exhibition Cherokee Craft, 1973. Her dissertation research focuses on craft and environmental knowledge among the Choctaw people of Mississippi.

Sep 12

When Ads Attack

Sometime last week I happened to see what my website looks like when I am not logged in and I discovered the new [or new to me] feature in which wordpress.com serves up ads to [not-logged-in] wordpress.com visitors. As the WP folks note: “At WordPress.com, we sometimes display discreet AdSense advertisements on your blog to help pay the bills. This keeps free features free!”

I appreciate the service that wordpress provides to me but I also do not wish to have ads on my website, thus happily I discovered today that I can pay a yearly fee to remove the ads from the site. I have done this and hopefully this step will keep the ads away going forward. I apologize for the ads that have been present in recent weeks (months?). I did not see them on my side or I would have taken care of this sooner.

While it was already newly arrived on my radar, thanks go to Adam Fish for noticing this phenomena and highlighting the discordance of the ads in the context of my website given the kinds of open access, open source, public-interest topics that I often reflect on here. As a specialist in the cultures of media and media production, Adam would be better prepared than I am to reflect on the wider implications of the “discreet AdSense advertisements” (to use WP’s language) that are now a part of the wordpress ecology.

I value many services that are supported through underwriting and advertisements so I am not against ads in a wholesale way. Its just not what I want here and I am very glad that I have the option of paying to make them disappear.

WP.com users can learn more here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/

May 6

Ruth Finnegan’s New Book on Quotations Available in Gratis OA Form

Ruth Finnegan’s book Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation has just been published by Open Book Publishers, a not-for-profit, academic run publisher that combines no-cost online access to published works with the sale at modest cost paper and PDF versions. The no-cost online version is (interestingly) accessible via the Google Books platform. I highlight this book both because it is a contribution to the fields in which I work by a very senior and well respected scholar and because it is the first instance of an Open Book Publishers title that I have learned about and have had an chance to study. The business model, goals, and production framework of the publisher are all noteworthy and worth further study. It is important to note that the World Oral Literature Project, a “Friend of Open Folklore” organization is announced as a partner on the Open Book Publishers website where a new Oral Literature Series is announced.  These are major developments for the Open Folklore and open anthropology communities. Congratulations to everyone involved in these efforts.

(Thanks to D.N. for the tip.)

Dec 16

Books Ngram Viewer + Folkloristics

This is a big deal.  Google has released Books Ngram Viewer.  Massive digital humanities text mining for everyone.  Information on it is here. Try it out here.

Below is the graph for the word “folkloristics” in English. Folklorists will understand the interest in this way of labeling their field.

I ran a few classic tale type names through it and the lessons of that possibility were clear.  Who can use this productively in time for next year’s American Folklore Society meetings in Bloomington?

 

Update: I was not expecting this. “folklore studies” (red) versus “folkloristics” (blue):

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