Sep 14
The transformation described by Adam Fish in this Savage Minds post can almost certainly be generalized even further to other mediated realms of communication. The Pioneer Age of Internet Video (2005-2009)
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.
While the project partners (the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries) continue building the inaugural Open Folklore site, discussion of the project has continued in several places. Here is a roundup of links. I especially wish to highlight the very detailed post published recently at Archivology.
Archivology (9-7-2010) Open Folklore, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing
Library Babel Fish (8-23-2010) Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work
Archivology (8-9-2010) 5 suggestions for the Open Folklore project
Indiana Daily Student (8-4-2010) Open Folklore to uncover ‘gray literature’
Savage Minds (8-2-2010) Open Folklore
Museum Anthropology Review is published by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries as part the IUScholarWorks program. I edit it in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology also at Indiana University. It thus lives within the ecology of the current core of Open Folklore and will get indexed, linked to, etc. along with other Open Folklore content. (Lots of folklorists contribute to the journal too, by the way.) The recent round of discussion about scholarly communication in anthropology has led to some new discussion of Museum Anthropology Review. In addition to my own posts (below), I can note:
John Hawks Weblog (9-5-2010 ) Why don’t universities cut out the middleman?
Savage Minds (9-2-2010) Gourmet vs. All Things Considered: The anthropological edition
See also Archivology (9-7-2010) and Library Babel Fish (8-23-2010) given above.
Thanks to everyone who has been following, and offering encouragement to, these experiments.
Barbara Fister in her regular column on library and scholarly communications issues for Inside Higher Education (Library Babel Fish) has focused today on Open Folklore and a cluster of neighboring discussions, projects, articles, and memos relating to scholarly communications in folklore studies, anthropology, media studies, and in general. In addition to commenting on Open Folklore, she connects to (among other things) my IUB colleague (1) Ted Striphas’ article on scholarly communications in media studies [discussed here and oa here], (2) discussion of these issues at Savage Minds, (3) Kim Fortun’s memo on these matters within the American Anthropological Association, and (4) my essay on scholarly communications in folklore studies. That she could make these connections without having discussed the linkages with me (we have not communicated previously except for my comment on her post last week) is a testimony to the power of scholarly communications in a open and networked environment.
Her essay is titled Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work. It can be found here: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/open_to_change_how_open_access_can_work
Thanks to Barbara for highlighting these projects and discussions so prominently.
The author of the blog Archivology has offered “5 Suggestions for the Open Folklore Project.” This is a detailed and thoughtful contribution, one very worthy of the attention of those interested in scholarly communications issues in general and in folklore specifically. Together with Alex Golub’s discussion of the project on Savage Minds, these are valuable inputs for the early phase of the effort. Those involved in the early phase of the project are very appreciative of these commentators and also of those who have spread news of the project on twitter and in the media (see Nathan Miller’s story in the Indiana Daily Student here).
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:
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.
Jun 11
Compelling commentary on Nature Publishing Group versus the University of California by Dorothea Salo can be found here. The recent counter-reply by the UC leadership is awesome–careful and compelling.
While there are prominent pro-OA voices that are critical of boycotts and various other “wake-up people” approaches to changing scholarly communications, particularly as these efforts are deemed as ineffective and distracting relative to the full-steam-ahead implementation of green OA, I am personally gratified by the level of attention that faculty and researchers are paying to the NPG-UC dust-up. I think that this can only help on numerous fronts–serials crisis, budget crisis, enclosure, open access, IP, tax-payer awareness, administrator awareness, politician awareness, etc. If nothing else, it is revealing to new audiences how unbelievably hard and well academic librarians work on behalf of faculty, researchers, students, and staff. They deserve free, delicious, homemade cookies everyday simply for going regularly– on our behalf–into negotiation meetings with the representatives of NPG and the other mega-publishers. I know that that work is about as dispiriting as it gets.
I wish that the otherwise awesome Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) was not reliant upon Connotea, a product of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Peter Suber describes the project and why it uses Connotea here. The problems with NPG are discussed in the recent letter threatening a UC-system boycott of NPG. (See previous post.) Discussion in Insider Higher Education is here.
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.”
Craig Fehrman has published an essay in Nuvo: Indy’s Alternative Voice that looks at the state of the Google Books project through the lens of the Indiana University Library’s wonderful and legendary Folklore Collection. (Much of) the Folklore Collection has been digitized in partnership with the Google Book project. Its greatness as a collection stems from the efforts of long-serving Distinguished Service Professor Stith Thompson (1885-1976), the founder of what is today the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Fehrman uses the story to make a case for copyright reform and is particularly disturbed by the way that vernacular culture becomes enclosed through publication.
Shreds and Patches 