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Posts from the ‘open anthropology’ Category

Oct 20

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Why Michael Wesch’s “Blogging” Should Count

In his essay “Blogging for Promotion: An Immodest Proposal” anthropologist Greg Downey outlines a clear set of actionable proposals for reform at the intersection of scholarly communications practices and academic tenure and promotion practices. I commend his essay, which was published today (10/20/11) on Neuroanthropology, a compelling and influential PLoS (Public Library of Science) weblog that he runs with Daniel Linde. Rather than discussing this important contribution here in depth, I am going to try enacting one of its proposals. (For reference, see especially the discussion that follows Downey’s section heading “An immodest proposal (not an indecent proposition)”.)

First the set up. I am working extensively right now preparing a new course for spring 2011. This course was devised as part of my participation in a two year think-tank funded by the Teagle Foundation (a funder supporting projects designed to foster innovation in undergraduate teaching and learning) and organized by the American Folklore Society. The AFS project was built around the theme “What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?” Colleagues teaching in a range of institutions, from community colleges and private liberal arts colleges to large research institutions gathered to explore the frontiers of research-based teaching, changing curriculum practices, and the wider contexts of our work in a small border discipline bridging the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the academy and the public sphere. As part of our work, we developed plans for new courses and teaching resources. Part of my work focused on working out plans for the course that I will initially teach next spring (it opens for enrollment today).

I have mentioned the course here previously. In a nutshell it uses the toolkit of folkloristics (and by extension my other field–cultural anthropology) to consider human responses–including aesthetic, expressive, customary, and communal responses–to a range of recently emergent and highly contested human social problems. Called “The New Social Problems: Communal and Expressive Responses” the new problem domains to be considered include such things as the digital divide, genetic engineering, intellectual property contests, and nanotechnologies. I am sure that I will be discussing the course further as it moves forward. The important point in this context is noting the influence that one colleague–whom I do not know and whom I have not yet met–has had on the shaping of my plans for this experimental course.

Michael Wesch, on his website/weblog Digital Ethnography (which is a key node in the digital infrastructure of his undergraduate-based research group), has regularly and effectively documented the pedagogical experiments and research work that he has been pursuing (over many years) with many successive groups of Kansas State University students. Wesch has been appropriately recognized and celebrated for the innovative work that he and his students have been doing. What I want to highlight here is that the manner in which he has documented and explained this work has made it richly available for the wider scholarly community. Because he has used http://mediatedcultures.net as a venue for reporting on his work, his strategies and experiences are openly and immediately accessible to me (and to my students) as well as to everyone else able to surmount the digital divide. Essays like “Our Class on How We Run Our Class” in which Wesch and his students describe (and enact) the technical and intellectual strategies through which a standard U.S. undergraduate course is turned into a deeply meaningful research collaboratory for social scientific investigation are just not available in the conventional published literature in our field. It is on the basis of the inspiration provided and the information conveyed by Wesch and his students that I am able to imagine a very different kind of course to pursue with my own students in January.

Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography efforts represent the kinds of “blogging” work that deserves to count as a substantive scholarly contribution (bridging teaching, research, and service) in such areas as annual review and tenure and promotion considerations.

Oct 7

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New Open Access Tools, Resources, Partnerships, and Content Announced @openfolklore

I am happy to report that real and significant progress in the Open Folklore project continues to be made. A year ago (October 13, to be exact) the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries launched the Open Folklore project and its associated web portal. Open Folklore is about promoting open access in the field of folklore studies (/ethnology) and about fostering partnerships among those working towards the goals of open access in the field. On behalf of the OF project team, I was the author of a news release/project report on the most recent accomplishments of the project and the most recent content additions accessible via the portal site. This was published this morning and is available from the Open Folklore portal.

As readers of the news release will discover, highlights over the past six months include making programs and reports related to the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society (going back to 1889) freely accessible, the launch of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, and the continued growth in the number of AFS section journals being made freely accessible in digital form. The big picture is that the community is continuing to come together to advance the goal of making folklore scholarship and resources more discoverable and accessible to community members, students, tradition bearers, and scholars worldwide. As was recognized this summer when OF was recognized with the Outstanding Collaboration Award by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) during the American Library Association meetings, folklorists have a lot to be proud of. We are pioneering in many parts of the scholarly communications world, from the development of open access journals, books, repositories and archives to developing generalizable collaboration strategies for organizational partnership, especially between libraries, non-commercial publishers, and scholarly societies.

I encourage everyone to get caught up with what OF has been up to over the past six months and to continue to spread the word about the project while putting the tools and resources available at http://openfolklore.org to use in your work.

Sep 12

Folklore Studies and Anthropology Journals included in JSTOR Early Journal Content Program

Among the folklore and anthropology journals included in the JSTOR Early Journal Content Program are the following key titles. Journal of American Folklore (1888-1922), American Anthropologist (1879-1922),  The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1848-1869) and the International Journal of American Linguistics (1917-1922),  Today JSTOR released an announcement indicating that the release of content was complete and providing an announcement that included lists by discipline and title.

Numerous other titles of relevance in archaeology, history, geography, etc. are also included, of course.

Aug 5

AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus Now Part of @openfolklore

An exciting development in the Open Folklore project is the inclusion of the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus within the Open Folklore portal. This great advance was announced on the AFS website and at the Open Folklore portal. The ET is a valuable resource for folklore studies, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and other ethnographic disciplines. Thanks to everyone at AFS, LoC, and IU who worked to make this next phase of both projects possible.

Aug 2

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@Kerim on AAA Abstracts Revisited, Being an Instance of Advocacy for Using the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Liberation of Already Digitized Content by Rights-holders

This post sat half written for a really long time. I just discovered it and decided to finish it off.  Some readers of this blog will recall a post by Kerim at Savage Minds on the subject of making the paper abstracts from the annual AAA meetings available online. What follows is an FYI post on this subject. It relates to my comments regarding the HathiTrust Digital Library, a resource that many in my circle are encouraged to learn about and to learn how to use.

You Now Have Access to the Abstracts from 37 Annual AAA Meetings

Remember Kerim’s earlier post about the publishing of AAA meeting abstracts? This note is a simple follow-up. If you would like to search an almost complete set of published abstracts since the 1970s, here is how to do it.

Get online and go to the HathiTrust Digital Library. If you go to this link (link: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000525675 ) you can see the abstract holdings that are presently available in the digital library.

If, for some reason, you wish to search in the abstract for a particular year, you can click on it.  You can then use the “Search in this text” tool to find what you are looking for within that particular volume. For instance, if you click on the link for the 1976 volume, you can search on the word “Sahlins” and discover that it appears on page 155.

This volume is theoretically in copyright and thus the AAA would have to give the HathiTrust Digital LIbrary permission to make full text available. (This was the point of my comment on Kerim’s original point—doing this would cost the AAA nothing and would instantly create a scholarly resource of much enhanced value.) As things stand now, copyright is all that stands between you and full-text. Under present conditions, what HathiTrust is doing for you is (in this instance) telling you that something having to do with “Sahlins” appears on page 155. (Presumably an abstract by Marshall Sahlins.) Still, this can be very helpful. For instance, you now are better prepared to consult a particular page and volume in the library or make an informed ILL request. If one did a search on a topical phrase like “debt” or “gift” or “New Guinea”, this could be especially useful in tracking down fugitive research. [The “Find in a Library” link will help you track down physical copies to consult.]

If, for some other reason, you wished to search the whole group of abstracts, you can do that too. Just use the main search tool at the HathiTrust Digital Library homepage and search “Sahlins” adding “American Anthropological Association” and “Abstract” to reduce the amount of material returned. Of course, searching the whole full text library is a very powerful tool in general.  Thankfully a large and growing portion of the library IS available in full text.

Hopefully more rights holders will (as with material liberated through the Open Folklore project) work with HathiTrust to make their content freely available.  The materials are already digitized and in the system.  Permission is the only thing still needed to make the most of this valuable resource.

Check it out.  Information on HathiTrust in general is available here: http://www.hathitrust.org/about .

Cool Update!!  As indicated in the comment’s section here, one awesome reader has built a dedicated collection in HathiTrust providing easy searching just against the abstracts: Try it out here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?c=129534190;a=listis

 

Jun 30

On HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

I have been meaning for several weeks to highlight the announced/upcoming launch of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory on ambitious OJS-based open access journal project. One can read all about it here: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/index. I look forward to the first issue and to hopefully working with the organizers on common projects in the service of open access scholarship in anthropology and neighboring fields.  Hau’s editorial board and announced initial papers are quite impressive.  Check them out.

Mar 20

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Anthropologies

Thanks to everyone who is working to create new ways of communicating and discussing the pressing issues of our time. As has been discussed by Kerim at Savage Minds and Daniel at Neuroanthropogy, a new project in anthropology has just debuted:  Anthropologies edited by Ryan Anderson. It is blog based magazine focused on exploring:

contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence “anthropologies.”  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences.

I have just begun my reading of the first issues with Keith Hart’s “Kant, Anthropology and the New Human Universal.” It is a an accessible, compelling, valuable, and brief essay that builds upon the key arguments about the promise/necessity of anthropology that he has been developing in recent work, including The Human Economy, which I am now reading. It certainly has motivated me to remedy my failure to have read Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Thanks Keith and the other authors. Thanks to the editor and everyone else who is fostering this project.

I would like to offer one suggestion, by way of a coda. Having been down a similar path before, I know how handy blog software like blogger is for getting such a project off the ground quickly and cheaply. All to the good. The only costs are that there is no built in preservation framework and the site does not allow for Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Without an OAI compliant framework, broadly used tools like Google Scholar will not be able to harvest metadata and, along the way, put works published in Anthropologies on scholarly radar. More specifically, OAI-PMH allows more topically focused projects, such as the Open Folklore project on which I work, to harvest and thereby promote the discovery of, content published in places like Anthropologies. There are many ways to address this matter inexpensively. A place to begin would be UKnowledge, the University of Kentucky Institutional Repository, which appears to be gearing up to support journal like projects, among other things. Such repositories make materials available in harvestable ways while also insuring longterm preservation. It would be possible to deposit PDF copies of Anthropologies content after the fact without giving up the basic blogger-based format.

 


Mar 16

Share Anthropology!

Share Anthropology is the brand new place to go when you want to share anthropology. The site is for “sharing and disseminating open access anthropology.” What does that mean?

The simple site has a “submit” button at the upper right. If you click it you can get some clear and helpful guidance.

Please help share and disseminate open access anthropology articles, books and dissertations by linking to blog posts, reviews, and discussions about that work. DO add a short “description.” DON”T link to the primary Open Access works themselves. Rather, link to blog posts, reviews, and discussions of that work. (Linked discussion should contain at least one link to an Open Access anthropology article, book, or dissertation.)

So, what this new tool is built to do is to aggregate and circulate open access discussions of scholarly works in anthropology that are themselves made available in open access form. It is not an aggregator of the scholarship itself (as the Open Folklore search tool is in the neighboring field of folklore studies) but is instead an aggregtor of value-added discussions of that underlying open access scholarship. Thus is it a place to discover, but also to call attention to, articles, blog posts, etc. that build on or comment upon open access works. (As open access scholarship continues to expand, this distinction might break down, but for Share Anthropology’s startup phase, it seems clear.)

The other main part of the site is an RSS feed so that you can learn about what others are sharing via a feed reader.

Congratulations to Kerim Friedman for getting this going! Kerim has introduced the project in a Savage Minds post. Check it out and check out Share Anthropology.

Very promising!

Dec 11

Wenner-Gren Foundation Takes Major Step for Open Access

Anthropologists have reason to cheer with news from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research that the biannual symposium proceedings published by the Foundation as an extension of the journal Current Anthropology will now be made available in open access form. Wenner-Gren Foundation President Leslie Aiello describes the move and the rationale behind it in a [toll wall protected] contribution to the latest issue of Current Anthropology [volume 51, page 727, December 2010] See: DOI: 10.1086/657920.

The two supplements published in 2010 are freely available via the journal’s page at the University of Chicago Press.  Formatted like the journal, these are book-sized edited collections organized thematically. Discussing the history of the Foundation’s Symposium efforts, Aiello writes:

The first Wenner-Gren Symposium was in 1952, and since then, more than 170 symposia and workshops have been sponsored by the foundation. Many of these have resulted in landmark edited volumes that have made significant contributions to the development of our field (see http://www.wennergren.org/history). In today’s electronic age, the foundation wants to ensure that its symposia continue to have a significant impact and reach the broadest possible international audience. We believe that open-access publication in Current Anthropology is the best way to achieve this goal.

This is wonderful news and a real advancement. One more reason to say thank you to Wenner-Gren for its dedication to the discipline of anthropology. Wenner-Gren joins other scholarly foundations working to advance the cause of a more just, rational, and effective system of scholarly communication.

Note:  While there is not a press-release on the Foundation website regarding this shift, there is a discussion of the move to publishing the symposium in connection with the journal (rather than as edited books). This announcement also discusses several recent symposium volumes.

Dec 1

Checkout Paleobot.org

Open access folks in anthropology, folklore, and museums/archives who do not follow paleobotany should still check out the start of paleobot.org.

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