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Posts from the ‘Scholarly Societies’ Category

Aug 18

Fighting the Big Deal [Fighting Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier]

Reminder. Commercial scholarly publishing is an adversarial rather than collaborative undertaking. As an author, editor, peer-reviewer, and/or scholarly society decision maker, you get to choose which party to the contest you will serve and support.

British Libraries Push Back [Against Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell] from Inside Higher Education

Whose healthy corporate balance sheet / straining public budget have you impacted this week?

Aug 2

1 Comment

@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

 

Feb 3

Kim Fortun Reflects on the Open Folklore Project

Anthropologist and science studies scholar Kim Fortun has written an essay discussing the Open Folklore project for Anthropology News. Her piece is currently accessible (toll free) via the AAA website. Kim is the outgoing co-editor of  Cultural Anthropology and a thoughtful advocate for rethinking scholarly communication work in anthropology.

Jan 28

1 Comment

Outstanding Collaboration Citation for Open Folklore

The Open Folklore project, a collaborative effort between the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, is the recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Collaboration Citation. The honor comes from the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services within the American Library Association.

The award recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials, as well as a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and assist with the management of library collections.
Open Folklore debuted in October 2010 to provide open online access to many useful — but heretofore difficult to access — research materials in the field of folklore studies, including books, journals, “gray literature” (unpublished) and web sites.

“Open Folklore is extraordinary in its vision and its promise. A true example of the spectacular things that can be achieved together but which are entirely impossible alone,” said Julie Bobay, Associate Dean of IU Bloomington Libraries.

“Ultimately, Open Folklore will become a multifaceted resource, combining digitization and digital preservation of data, publications, educational materials and scholarship in folklore; promoting open access to these materials and providing an online search tool to enhance discoverability of relevant, reliable resources for folklore studies,” said Kurt Dewhurst, president of the American Folklore Society.

“As it grows, Open Folklore will provide a vehicle — guided by scholars — for libraries to re-envision our traditional library services centered on collections — selection, acquisition, describing, curating and providing access to a wide range of materials, published or not,” said Brenda Johnson, Dean of IU Bloomington Libraries. “The progress of this experiment will, in a very real way, illuminate the path academic libraries must take in supporting collection development in the digital age.”

Primarily, Open Folklore was developed so quickly and productively because of the close match between the collection development and scholarly communications priorities of the IU Libraries and the American Folklore Society, Dewhurst said.

Barbara Fister of Inside Higher Ed blog Library Babel Fish, said the project is drawing “a terrific map for societies unsure of how to proceed” with open access.

“Partnering with Indiana University Libraries, the American Folklore Society is identifying where their literature is and how much of it is accessible, bringing attention to existing and potential open access journals, asking rights holders if material can be set free, digitizing gray literature so it will be preserved . . . these folks are sharp,” Fister said. “And they’re doing what scholarly societies should do: promoting the field and sharing its collective knowledge for the greater good.”

“As a librarian deeply involved in building digital collections of the future, I view Open Folklore as a stunning example of the value of, and opportunities presented by, new developments in scholarly communication,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust Digital Library.

The award will be presented at the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services Awards Ceremony at the Annual Conference in June 2011.

(From an IU Bloomington press release.)

Jan 26

Diane Goldstein Elected President of the American Folklore Society

Congratulations to my colleague Diane Goldstein on her election to the Presidency of the American Folklore Society. Here is the Indiana University press release, just issued:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Diane Goldstein, professor of folklore and ethnomusicology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, will be the fourth IU faculty member to be elected president of the American Folklore Society.

As president-elect this year and president in 2012 and 2013, she will help preside over the organization’s 123rd annual meeting when it convenes this October at Bloomington. She had been a member of AFS’ board from 2004 to 2007.

Goldstein also is following in the footsteps of her late father, Kenneth Goldstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who had been a student at the renowned IU summer folklore institute in 1958 and taught at it in 1966. He was president of the AFS in 1976. Read more

Jan 15

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Exciting New Presentation Formats for #AFS2011

Work on the 2011 American Folklore Society Meetings is now in high gear. The AFS meetings next fall will be held on my home campus at Indiana University Bloomington. As we get ready to host the meetings, I have been particularly involved in getting ready to introduce a new quick format presentation format and to re-boot the poster format along museum exhibition lines.  These new possibilities are described in the document circulated today by the Society. I hope that a large and diverse group of scholars takes an interest in attending the meetings and that these two new presentation formats appeal to scholars of all levels of seniority and to those working across the full breadth of folklore studies and its congeners. I want to personally express thanks to those senior scholars who have agreed to attend and host the poster exhibitions opening event and to my colleagues participating in the trial run for what are now (in AFS-speak) being called “Diamond” presentations at the 2010 meetings in Nashville. Here are the details from the home office:

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Dear Colleagues,

In the next few weeks we will post online the Invitation for Participation for the American Folklore Society’s 2011 annual meeting, set for October 12-15 at the Biddle Hotel and Conference Center in the Indiana Memorial Union complex on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. We encourage participation by folklorists throughout the world in our gathering.

This will be AFS’s first meeting on a university campus since our last meeting in Bloomington in 1968. Our hosts will be the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and the theme of the meeting, on which presentations are encouraged but not required, is “Peace, War, Folklore.”

All proposals for the annual meeting program will be due by March 31. The entire process includes registration for the meeting, payment of the registration fee, and submission of your proposal.

We’re sending you this message to bring you up to date on two new developments within our annual meeting. The first has to do with an improvement in the proposal submission process, and the second involves the introduction of two new presentation formats.

But first, here is a link to a video documenting the Bloomington annual meeting committee’s musical “Invitation to Bloomington 2011” performed at our annual business meeting in Nashville last October.

Now to the news:

1. No More Long Abstracts Required from Individual Presenters in Pre-Organized Sessions

Beginning with the 2011 annual meeting, people who will be making presentations in pre-organized paper and Diamond sessions (for more information on Diamond sessions, see below) no longer have to submit long (500-word abstracts) for their presentation, just short (100-word) ones.

As in the past, individuals participating in organized paper and Diamond sessions will provide their short abstracts to their session chair in advance of the March 31 deadline. Session chairs will submit long and short abstracts for the session as a whole, and short abstracts for all presentations, as part of the session proposal.

2. Two New Presentation Formats at AFS 2011

While our meeting will feature the presentation of papers, discussion forums, media works, and professional development workshops as it has done for many years, in 2011 we are giving special emphasis to two new forms of presentation.

Re-Imagining the Research Poster in Folklore Studies: AFS Research Poster Exhibitions

The 2011 Annual Meeting Program Committee and the Society are making a special effort to capitalize on the research poster’s special virtues for folklorists. AFS Executive Board member and Indiana University Associate Professor of Folklore Jason Jackson will curate the 2011 Research Poster Exhibitions.

Posters, a vital means of scholarly communication in many fields, allow for the integration of graphic and textual information. They share the strengths characteristic of the informal settings in which folklorists often learn, teach, and study. Many folklorists are deeply involved in studying topics that lend themselves to the poster exhibition framework.

The current digital moment has created new opportunities to extend the power of this genre. Posters can stand alone as documents of scholarly research in folklore studies, and can also be augmented through informal oral presentation or the use of multimedia enhancements. They can also be repurposed after a conference into gallery and web-based exhibitions. Like conference papers, posters can also serve as a foundation for other genres of scholarly communication, including articles and book chapters. Posters themselves have begun to be peer-reviewed, revised, and published in scholarly journals.

This year, in lieu of poster panels organized by the membership, we are soliciting individual proposals for poster presentations on one of four broad topics: Peace, War, Folklore (the 2011 annual meeting theme), Folklore and Folklorists Making a Difference, Folklore Studies and the Digital Humanities, and Musical Cultures.

Poster presentations selected for each grouping will be brought together to comprise one of four formal exhibitions, which will be initially presented at an opening reception on Thursday morning. At that time, a distinguished scholar with special knowledge of the exhibition theme will host each exhibition, and will make public remarks about the exhibition’s posters.

Steve Zeitlin from City Lore will host Peace, War, Folklore

Marsha MacDowell from the Michigan State University Museum will host Folklore and Folklorists Making a Difference

Kimberly Christen from Washington State University will host Folklore Studies and the Digital Humanities

Jeff Todd Titon of Brown University will host Musical Cultures

The reception will also provide time for presenters to dialogue informally with each other, with interested conference attendees, with the hosts, and with other special guests. The posters will remain on exhibition throughout the conference.

Post-conference publication of selected posters is a possibility. We have invited a number of journal editors to attend the poster exhibition opening as special guests. Editors so far agreeing to attend include Regina Bendix (co-editor of Ethnologia Europaea), Kristina Downs (co-editor of Folklore Forum, which is interested in receiving submissions from participating poster exhibitors), Rob Howard (editor of Western Folklore), Jason Baird Jackson (editor of Museum Anthropology Review), and Tok Thompson (co-editor of Cultural Analysis).

AFS Diamond Presentations: An Invitation

On the basis of their increasing popularity among scholars and with the inspiration of a successful experiment undertaken at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Nashville, the American Folklore Society invites individual and organized session proposals in what we are calling the Diamond format, a formalized presentation genre structured by time and images:

Individual Diamond presentations are seven minutes long and are organized around 21 slides that are set to advance automatically every 20 seconds.

Audience response to such presentations have been very enthusiastic, and the format offers a number of specific advantages:

· As with the highly structured expressive genres that folklorists have often studied, this format calls upon presenters to be creative and selective in organizing their presentations.

· Focused presentations and images aid and engage audiences, even those unfamiliar with the topic or those whose first language differs from that of the presenter.

· This format is valuable not only for presenting image-based topics (such as studies of material culture or cultural performance), but also for all presenters concerned with visual communication and those who wish to experiment with visual techniques to enhance communication.

· This format is an easy starting point for the creation of audio slidecasts and small digital exhibitions—more durable modes of scholarly communication valuable to diverse online audiences—as well as in such settings as media kiosks in gallery exhibitions.

· The brevity of the format allows extra time for discussion.

· Brief but structured, the format supports multidimensional, open-ended presentations, making it very appropriate for the presentation of new projects or works-in-progress.

You may submit proposals for individual Diamond presentations, which the Program Committee will group into sessions, or organized Diamond sessions of six to ten presentations. All Diamond sessions will be constructed with an initial seven minutes allotted for preparation and introduction of the session as a whole, seven minutes for each Diamond presentation, and the balance of the available time dedicated to discussion of the full set of presentations. At the discretion of the session chair, the discussion time may be used for response by a formal discussant, open “full room” questions and answers, break-out time in which presenters can confer with interested audience members, or a combination of these discussion formats.

For those who would like to know more about the sources of inspiration for this format, there is much discussion around the web of a variety of similar (but not identical) formats, including the format known as Pecha-Kucha, developed in the design fields in Japan. Some of these are associated with formally trademarked brands of presentation events. Also available online are videos and slidecasts of presentations made in these related formats:

A YouTube version of Jason Jackson’s AFS 2010 Diamond presentation on the Open Folklore project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBUfYuVlBZE

A Pecha-Kucha presentation on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZOt6BkhUg

“Hate Long, Rambling Speeches? Try Pecha-Kucha” by Lucy Craft [NPR on Pecha-Kucha]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130698873

A discussion of Pecha-Kucha in anthropology with links to examples and information: http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2010/pecha-kucha

The Pecha-Kucha Organization: http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

On Lightning Talks: http://perl.plover.com/lightning-talks.html

On the Ignite Format and Events: http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Search also “Pecha Kucha” in YouTube, “Death by PowerPoint,” “Ignite,” “Lightning Talks,” and Wikipedia.

——

Please feel free to circulate this email to your non-AFS-member colleagues who may not have received it directly. We look forward to seeing you in Bloomington this October. Thank you for your support of our field and Society.

Dec 16

1 Comment

This Post is a Reply to #AAAfail as PR Meltdown

I respect Strong when he comments that the AAA is fine.  I certainly agree that anthropology is fine.  The AAA may or may not be fine. At an empirical level that is an open question about which there is evidence-based disagreement among thoughtful people. Rather than offer another long-winded plea for our association to rethink its most basic assumptions, here is a simpler observation and a open/positive proposal for the AAA leadership to consider.

The AAA website suggests that the home office staff hovers around 15-17 people at any one time.  At any one time, only a small number of these folks are likely to have some background in anthropology. If they do have such background, it will likely have been at the B.A. or maybe M.A. level and this experience will have been seen as a “added” strength that augments a core competency in accounting, public relations, publishing, grant writing, etc. Its just not the case that a person with an extended set of career experiences in applied anthropology, college or university anthropology teaching, or anthropological research is going to wind up working in the association business office.

What does this mean in an instance such as this one? While the AAA staff can get on the phone with the (certainly very busy) AAA elected leadership, there is probably not an experienced anthropologist in the building on a day to day basis.  (If I am guessing wrongly about this, I hope that a AAA staff member will correct me.)  This means that there is no in-house expertise about anthropology to turn to when the professional staff needs greater understanding of the intellectual, conceptual, methodological, interpersonal, historical, etc. background of the field.

How might this absence be addressed short of hiring another expensive staff member whose day to day responsibilities would, under present conditions, remain nebulous?

Under the kind of conditions that Rex has described (and that have been illustrated in the case of the phenomena now known as #AAAfail), I suggest that the association as a whole would be strengthened if (following the lead of the NSF and its program of augmenting its program officer staff with shorter term appointments of faculty on leave from home institutions) there could be established something like an “Anthropologist in Residence Program” in the AAA home office. With four or six month terms tied to academic semesters, the Anthropologist in Residence would be selected from a group of applicants. There would always be one in the office and they would be given a modest work office in Arlington (desk, internet, etc.).  Much of the time, they would be free to pursue their own work–writing or doing research in the DC area–but they would also have modest obligations in the home office.  They would do professional development activities (informal teaching) with the AAA staff, the aim of which would be to strengthen the staff’s knowledge of the field. They would also be available to (and would be chosen in part because of their capacity to) assist the staff leadership in such areas as lobbying on behalf of anthropology and representing the field in wider discussions that take place in Washington.

As importantly, they would be informally accessible as a consultant and sounding board to the staff as a whole.  They would also be chosen with an eye towards those who are prepared to, and are willing to, help the staff connect better with the rapid and mediated conversations that are now a constant background presence and, as in this case, sometimes a very precarious foreground matter.  This would not just be blog (etc.) posting, it would also be a matter of listening and translating and explaining.

This description frames the matter mainly in terms of translating the field for the benefit of the staff, but the matter would work in the other direction too–fostering understanding of the staff and its work by the membership.  To have a series of Anthropologists in Residence would contribute to the kind of ethnographic analysis of the field and its institutions that Rex has urged while, at a simple level, the staff would come to have a growing number of better-informed interlocutors and perhaps advocates in the membership at large.  Whether the Anthropologist in Residence were a primatologist, a discourse analyst, a social network specialist, an Egyptologist, or whatever, they could all contribute to strengthening the association and its self-understanding.

If this role were mainly filled by people granted the luxury of a sabbatical (and I know that this institution is under greater pressure for those who even still have access to it), the costs associated with this scheme would not be the same as the “full salary and benefits” costs attached to an actual staff member.  Washington, DC is a really wonderful place for anthropologists to be and I think that it would be an appealing challenge and an appealing opportunity for mid-career and senior scholars in our field to be at a key nexus in the field where they could be making a major difference.  Selfishly, they would have an opportunity to connect in depth, for instance, with many of the key elected leaders in our field, most of whom are also key intellectual leaders in our field.

Were such a scheme to become institutionalized, Anthropologists in Residence could be recruited to help advance particular strategic goals, such as outreach to archaeologists or preparing for a major grant initiative (such as the RACE exhibition) or consulting with the publication staff on implementing a significant change. In other words, expertise of a diverse sort could be recruited for strategic and tactical purposes.

There are people in our field who have experience setting up visiting fellowship programs and similar kinds of arrangements who could be called upon to use past experience elsewhere to help properly plan such an initiative, including calculating its costs realistically.  It might be possible to set up such an arrangement in partnership with relevant units of the Smithsonian and/or local Departments of Anthropology.  That could be good and could help distribute the real costs.  It would just be important not to loose sight of the key “in Residence” dimension.

Previous to the so-called #AAAfail event, I had written about the kind of PR problems that open discussion of AAA policy on the web was fostering. It was claimed to me after I had posted “Ignored” that most of the AAA elected leadership was actually reading postings like it and the regular AAA-related discussions at Savage Minds and elsewhere (and just not commenting).  I am not sure if that is actually true. (I am doubtful.)  If anyone in a policy-considering role within the AAA elected leadership reads this post, feel free to sign the guest book (so to speak) or to send me an email.

Sep 29

Open Folklore at the IU Statewide Information Technology Conference #switc10

Just a quick note to record my appreciation for everyone involved in organizing the Indiana University Statewide Information Technology Conference. This was my second year attending and my second year presenting at the conference and it is a really great event. Today I spoke on behalf of the Open Folklore project team, describing the goals of the project and where we stand in addressing them. Everyone was really nice and it was good to have an additional chance to articulate what the project is and where it is headed as the team prepares to unveil the associated portal site at the upcoming American Folklore Society meetings in Nashville in October. Thanks to all the Open Folklore project team members for your support and your good work.

Sep 12

6 Comments

Ignored: past participle, past tense of ig·nore (Verb) Refuse to take notice of or acknowledge

In a recent comment on a Savage Minds post by Chris Kelty,  I asserted that there is a disconnect within the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in that the organization often (and I think sincerely) calls upon the membership at-large to collectively fact-find, discuss, weigh, evaluate, and solve big questions that are before the Association but then does little to actually attend to the efforts or inputs that follow from such promptings. I think that I am obligated to make clear why I think this.

Weblogs (blogs) provide a distinctive domain for collective discussion, one that some people appreciate, others do not appreciate, and others still do not know much about.  While I think that a noteworthy amount of useful conversation about AAA governance, policy formulation, and problem solving has unfolded on various weblogs without prompting any signs of engagement by AAA leaders, it is probably not fair to assume that this audience knows about and is comfortable operating within this venue. While it is strange, I am not going to hold up the ignoring of weblog discussions as evidence for my point.  (Such evidence is particularly easy to amass if anyone wanted to catalog it.)

Here are a three large scale interventions that have provoked remarkable silence. I offer them as illustration for my contention. None are blog based.

Kelty et al.’s “Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies” appeared in the pages of one of the society’s most prestigious journals–Cultural Anthropology–and was intended to be a direct and useful contribution to a discussion of vital importance within the association. While it prompted significant discussion outside of the AAA, this article-length work precipitated, to my knowledge as a co-author, no rebuttal, no acknowledgment, no nothing in a AAA context. Being disagreed with completely and fully would have been a meaningful experience. Going unnoticed or being ignored is dumbfounding, especially when we describe our association’s journals as the key means by which we communicate with one another as professionals about those matters that are of shared professional interest.

As the person who was then editor of Museum Anthropology (another AAA journal), I played (with a sense of deep sadness) a key role in one of the most dramatic and durably transformative moments in the history of scientific/scholarly communication in anthropology.  It was time consuming and really terrible and terrifying but I tried to do it in a way that would be therapeutic, as well as fair to all involved. In publishing our field’s first Expression of Concern (and not a temporary one but a eternal one), I pleaded in the pages of the journal that the CSC (now ACC) would take this moment seriously and reflect on where we were and where we were headed. If the matter has been given even a moment of consideration, this would be a relief and would come as news to me.

In an email, I recently asked Kim Fortun (outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology) if anyone had addressed her thoughtful memo (available here, see discussion here) to CFPEP. She reported that she had received no reply at all, but that the Section Assembly-based committee (or task force) of which she is now a part had been asked by CFPEP to create a new memo that integrated her memo with the six or so other memos compiled by other committee members on behalf of their constituencies. I wonder how this would even be done? If we imagine a brief memo from one member who is reporting that her/his section and colleague-friends are all really happy with the new revenues that our association publishing program is generating for sections, does that just negate Kim’s hard work bringing attention to voices that express concern rather than happiness? Why wouldn’t someone involved in vital decision making not want to read and at least acknowledge and think about the memo that Kim wrote? It sure looks and feels like Kim is being ignored. As co-editor of Cultural Anthropology, she (and her co-editor Mike Fortun) worked as hard as one can work to advance the cause of this AAA journal and the association as a whole. Along the way, she gained important insights that make her a better, and more useful, member of the association.  Is there any sense in alienating her and driving her out of involvement in the association by not acknowledging, let alone reading, a report that she clearly invested hours and hours in compiling for the sake of the association? Because she took her job seriously and polled a wide circle of colleagues, the matter is even more grave. This (risk of alienation) does not make sense, even if substantive analysis were to show that every concern raised by Kim and the many people that she consulted with were unequivocally unfounded.

This dynamic has already harmed the AAA. As a final piece of evidence, I propose the following test based on the specific case that I have followed most closely–the scholarly communications/publishing program. Find the early programmatic (and inspirational) documents about AnthroSource in Anthropology News and elsewhere.  Make a list of people involved in the early days, then search for them now.  How many are still involved in AAA scholarly communications policy?  Are they still talking publicly about AAA scholarly communications policy or have they moved on to other pastures?

I deeply appreciate all the good work that the AAA does to support me today and all that it has done for me in the past (meetings, news of the field, advocacy, employment listings, etc.). It is an important organization to which I have tried to contribute meaningfully. It is this durable sense of investment, appreciation, and concern that prompts my observation. When other commentators take an increasingly sarcastic, impatient, and confrontational tone in their one-sided dialogues on AAA policy, I understand this (and they may understand it differently) as a common human response to the perception of being ignored. The frustration of being un-acknowledged is amplified with each new call for feedback, input, and involvement.

Coda: While I purposefully did not discuss this dynamic as it relates to weblog discussion, I think that it is fair to say that when the AAA staff posts an item on its own blog for the overt purpose of promoting discussion, that item and the discussion that it generates should be entered into the official record of the society’s business and should attended to in the same way that a official letter, memo, or other communication ideally should. The headnote for William Davis’ August 31, 2010 post to the AAA weblog says: “If you have any comments, you are welcome to post them below.” What is the status of these comments?  Who might be expected to read them? Will they serve any purpose? It is a very rare blog that actually attracts comments from readers. This does not mean that it is unread or unappreciated. (I appreciate the AAA blog and am grateful for its introduction.) Blogs that do attract (sensible) comments are ones managed by people trying to cultivate discussion. This is very, very hard work and I do not expect anyone to invest that kind of labor in the AAA weblog, but when a call for comments actually generates them, there should be some signal as to what the nature of the transaction is. One minimal way in which this can be achieved is by someone (the chair of a relevant committee, for instance) joining the conversation at least to say “thanks all for your comments, I will make sure that they get shared with the other members of the [relevant] committee.” Scan the AAA blog looking for posts with more than one comment.  They are few and far between, thus the response to William Davis’ August 31, 2010 post is noteworthy. Did that exchange increase or decrease alienation among those who participated as commentators or readers? If, in such episodes, facilitating more discussion is going to generate more alienation, it is not a good path to take. It would be better to turn the comments function off (both literally and figuratively) and to ask for input less rather than more often.

Sep 8

Open Folklore, MAR Roundup

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.

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