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Posts from the ‘Scholarly Societies’ Category

Sep 12

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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.

Sep 3

42 Cents? Really?

When Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Education published an article about Museum Anthropology Review (MAR) on February 28, 2008 he cited roughly the same costs comparison that Alex (Rex) Golub has  noted in his September 2, 2010 Savage Minds post. At least a few commentators on the IHE story in 2008 questioned the validity of the ridiculous figure that was being attributed to (and by) me as the (then) cost of publishing MAR.  I should have explained it then but Golub has given me a second chance. (thanks!)  Here goes as quickly as I am able.

As I noted in discussing Bill Davis’ recent post, most journals edited by employed scholars benefit from some kind of subsidies. Usually a rich and diverse array of subsidies. As with my earlier editing of Museum Anthropology, Museum Anthropology Review has benefited in a variety of ways from my being employed at Indiana University Bloomington. As things stand in 2010, the most important subsidy for the journal is the remarkable-super-awesome support provided to the journal by the Indiana University Blooming Libraries (and Librarians!) through the IUScholarWorks program.  The IUB Libraries are now MAR‘s publisher. They make this possible with the use of an amazing open source software program called Open Journal Systems (it does editorial work flow and publishing) and, very importantly, significant (but not insane) amounts of technical (and librarian-skills) support.  Set this wonderful background aside because it is not relevant to the source of the 42 cent thing.

It was the launch of the OJS-based, IUB Libraries-published instance of MAR that the IHE story was profiling/discussing. In other words, that story was about the version of MAR that exists today. In the IHE story I was quoted (accurately) as saying I spent “about $20” last year to publish a journal reaching many more people [than were being reached by Museum Anthropology].  What this meant literally, was that I spent about $20 out of my own pocket in 2007 to publish the content issued during 2007. This was the first year of a thing in the world called Museum Anthropology Review. What were the these costs?  I would have to take more time than I have now to figure out what went into the $20 figure, but I think that it was only a single expense (getting an ISSN is free, btw).  It was to purchase the domain name http://museumanthropology.net and to map it onto the free WordPress.com site that was used to get MAR up and running on the cheap.

That was it.  All other costs came were Indiana University Bloomington supports (thanks IU!).  For doubts and grouchiness as well as a fruitful discussion from IHE commentators on the economics of open access see most of the 19 comments that appeared in the wake of the IHE story. All I want to say about these comments now is that I never tried to suggest that the total cost of publishing a gold OA journal was $20 per year. I think that I have been completely obsessive about endlessly flagging for notice the important subsidies that host institutions provide to the publishing processes as hosts to academic editors. I discussed this issue in AAA editors meetings and I have spoken and written of them often. It is why I try to say thank you to the IUB Library staff at least once a week. (thank you!)  Put most simply in the MAR case, for the period from 2007 to 2010, those (library, department, college) subsidies (combined with a free blogging platform in 2007 and an open source software program in 2008-2010) were (together with the generous help of an authorial and peer-review community and a great editorial board) all that was required to publish MAR. It is likely that MAR‘s subsidy model will change and new partners will be hopefully be recruited in consortial fashion to help extend and expand the work we are doing, but what we have now is very stable and (I think) very successful. The IUScholarWorks team and I have plans to do a careful cost analysis of how much it costs to make MAR happen but it is undeniable that the costs are many orders of magnitude less than any current AAA publication. And they are being willingly taken up by the best research library in the United States. Why? Because the system we have known is broken and the librarians at IU want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Oh yeah. And the journal is freely available to rich and poor.

To finish this up.  Golub is citing, for his MAR cost information, not the IHE story but the paper that I gave at a conference on circulation (ie. The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions) at the Ohio State University that was organized by Dorothy Noyes and Charles Briggs (thanks go to my hosts). This paper [Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies] was circulated via my website. The per page cost figure ($202) that I cited there for Museum Anthropology were my own estimates of the per page costs during the time of the publishing contract with the University of California Press. (Insert expression of deep appreciation to the nice people at UC Press Journals here.) Those figures were available to me as editor and were not covered by a confidentiality agreement (as my time as a Wiley editor is). At the time from which they come, everyone in the AAA was doing everything possible to make sense of the costs associated with AAA journal publishing because these costs were being paid directly by individual publishing sections.  The Council for Museum Anthropology had charged me with figuring out how to make Museum Anthropology work or to prepare for what to do when it died a financial death.

The paragraph in which I cite the $202 per page cost and the loss figure of $79 per page for Museum Anthropology was followed by the paragraph where I mention the 42 cents per article cost for Museum Anthropology Review. Unlike now, MAR did not (in its 2007 WordPress guise) have pages. It just had digital “entries” or (blog posts). This cost was (roughly, if memory serves) calculated by dividing the $20 out of pocket cost by the number of items (versus pages)  published that year at the time I made these calculations.  The more one published, the lower the per item cost would be.  I acknowledge that this has a rhetorical dimension, but that does not change the facts of the matter.  MAR reached and reaches a vast number of people and costs very little.  While MAR matured from its WordPress format (see the legacy site here) to the use of grown up, full-functioned Open Journal Systems, the WordPress version of MAR inspired Trickster Press (for instance) to shift publication of Folklore Forum to a similar WordPress arrangement.  This costs nothing and allows for the publication of color images, video, audio, conference posters, etc.–lots of good stuff.  Like MAR version 1.0 Folklore Forum content is preserved reliably in library approved ways in IUScholarWorks Repository (which uses DSpace and is fully compatible with Google Scholar).

This post is not intended as a complete unpacking of the history of Museum Anthropology Review.  That can come later.  I hope that it does explain the cost structure of the journal and contextualize the $20 or 42 cent business.

For those following the AAA story line, I will say one more thing.  Museum Anthropology Review is many things.  One of these is a purposeful experiment designed to generate reliable research findings on the viability of gold open access publishing in anthropology and neighboring fields.  It is not rocket science to see that it is structured to provide a very easy to grasp comparison with Museum Anthropology. (I did all that I could to succeed with Museum Anthropology and I am doing all that I can to succeed with MAR. The natural experiment aspect was highlighted in the IHE story.) MAR was founded with the blessing of the Council for Museum Anthropology as a possible successor to Museum Anthropology had that journal died during the section/cost crisis that preceded the Wiley partnership.

The deal with Wiley meant that Museum Anthropology would not end and, for the time being, it would continue as it had been. As a person who gave a vast amount to save that journal, I am glad that it still exists. My happiness in this is greatly reduced though knowing what I sacrificed to my Dean and others in order to gather additional subsidies aimed at balancing its books AND by my bitterness (yes, it is bitterness) at having these subsidies (and self-sacrifices of a significant professional sort) enclosed by Wiley and the AAA Executive Board without my having any voice in the matter.

So.  Museum Anthropology Review is, as Golub has sought to argue, a (modest and fallible) demonstration that another world is possible.  I cannot speak for them, but every sign suggests that the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries would have been happy to publish Museum Anthropology just as it now publishes Museum Anthropology Review.  Had such an alternative future been realized, Museum Anthropology might have generated no revenues, but it also might have generated no costs.  And, its content would have been freely available to everyone with the capacity to get online.

Neither MAR nor Museum Anthropology are flagship journals with impact factor rankings (yet).  It is easy to imagine that the American Ethnologist (for instance) somehow just has to be different, more complicated, more expensive.  But if it were published using Open Journal Systems in a AAA+Library partnership in an open access format available to all of the world, it would not loose its status as a premier journal with an impressive impact factor ranking.  It would not have to stop publishing four issues a year. The best authors and peer-reviewers and editors would still, presumably, want to be involved with it.  There would be additional costs, but they would be totally addressable with dues money and other subsidies. (For example, AE does and MAR does not yet use DOI numbers. This is a cost and benefit that MAR needs to start taking on soon.)

Anyone who has read this far belongs to the choir and I will stop preaching now. My thanks go to everyone who is working to solve the massive problems that the scholarly communication system and the scholarly society system and the research library system are facing.

Sep 2

2 Comments

[On] Free [AAA] Journal Access as a Public Issue

A discussion of the future of scholarly publishing within the American Anthropological Association is underway in a small way on the AAA’s blog, where an editorial by AAA Executive Director Bill Davis (“Free Journal Access as a Public Issue”) has been posted. I have made a couple of comments there but do not want to overwhelm the conversation that might (I hope) happen there with an additional long comment post. For anyone who might be interested, here is a comment that can be spliced in after the first note offered there by AAA Director of Publishing Oona Schmid.

…

Bill Davis begins with a discussion of green OA deposit mandates and then transitions pretty quickly to a discussion of gold OA journal publishing. The literature on varieties of OA makes clear that these are rather different matters and readers of this discussion may (as often happens) conflate them. Advocates of green OA deposit frameworks outside anthropology have noted that the AAA author agreement has been, for several years now, a fully green one (in SHERPA/RoMEO terms) and thus the AAA is fully ready, in legal terms, to enable AAA authors to easily comply with any of the kinds of (funder and institutional) mandates that have been discussed or implemented.

Green OA generally involves making pre-prints or post-prints (these are terms of art that can be unpacked at the SHERPA website) freely available online, not final publisher versions. Very few AAA authors are exercising their deposit rights at present and, when the do, they are typically doing so in less than ideal ways–that is, they are placing the final published PDF online (the author agreement does not allow for this) and (generally) they are not using reliable institutional repositories, opting instead for personal websites. (That the AAA is not policing author misappropriations of the value-added published PDFs just increases confusion about what is and is not legal, thereby stymying better understanding of the important issues that the AAA and its publishing system  faces and producing more low level lawlessness.)

The concerns that Bill Davis is evoking do not actually stem from government mandated gold open access (there is no such thing, even as a proposal) but from a hypothetical future situation in which actual use of green OA deposit (if mandated) becomes sufficiently ubiquitous that people stop needing or wanting toll access, value-added publisher versions. I think that such matters are worthy of thinking about, but they are not happening right here right now and it does not help us to think about these matters to evoke a more direct linkage than actually exists.  There is not an open access lobby working hard to push through U.S. law aimed at forcing the AAA or anyone else to give away value-added publications in a gold OA framework (i.e. free online journals). The national legal and policy questions are about open accessibility of manuscript versions of federally funded research articles. Davis’ own essay provides evidence showing that 2/3 of AA authors would not be affected by such U.S. mandates. Low use of the pre-print deposit options provided by the AAA author agreement suggests that there is no immediate danger stemming from voluntary author-by-author pursuit of green OA deposit.

Lobbying for OA (both green and gold) among anthropologists, by anthropologists is a different matter altogether. It is not about federal mandates, it is about (discussing, at least) larger matters relating to the ethics, technology, and political economy of scholarly communications and engaging with the future life of scholarly societies, including the AAA. This is a point that Chris Kelty has made over and over again and that was the focus of the article that he and others (I was one) published in Cultural Anthropology. That paper had much positive effect on the discussion in other societies but apparently no impact of any kind within the AAA ($4000-$6000 wasted, I guess). [Impact here is being measured not in terms of shaping ideas and actions, but much less impressively in terms of anyone involved in AAA governance acknowledging that something had been said.]

Oona Schmid reports that the AAA does not produce any surplus revenue from the publishing program.  That is a straight forward answer to a complicated question. Engaging with the details at issue is difficult even for those AAA leaders who have access to a lot of lines of data.  Separate from that important and difficult work, it is possible to observe that our publishing partner would not be our publishing partner if we were not a source of surplus revenue for it. It reported 2009 revenues of over 1.6 trillion dollars and net income of 128 million dollars.  The many subsidies that Oona and I have discussed above (i.e. in earlier comments on the Davis post) contribute, across all disciplines and fields, to enhancing this profit position. Institutional subsidies, along with the free labor of anthropologists, their consultants, (and other scholars), along with our dues money, along with the investments of research funders and the students whose tuition dollars pay the bills at college and university libraries enhance the earnings picture in an industry that has seen very steady rises in revenue and income growth. As an association, we made a decision to more fully join this part of the system. We did so for particular reasons in a particular moment in association and world history.

Doing so opened some opportunities and foreclosed on some others. I think that we will discover that the benefits of doing so accrued at the beginning of this current period and that the hidden costs will come further down the line. Kim Fortun has written of such themes more eloquently that I can. She is hardly alone in trying over the past several years to participate in a conversation aimed at formulating “a strategy to sustain AAA’s traditional journal publishing role as we engage with a world that expects scholarly content to be “free.”” No past efforts along these lines have ever been acknowledged, or even condemned as completely wrongheaded by the AAA leadership. The more elaborate and engaged the intervention, the greater the official silence it generates. Maybe this new invitation to dialogue and the work that CFPEP and the Board did at the May meeting can stand as a turning point.

This comment was written (and sat on overnight) before the second comment by Barbara and the first comment by Chris Kelty.

Aug 24

Library Babel Fish on Open Folklore and Neighboring Discussions

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.

Aug 13

1 Comment

What can the Open Folklore project help me do now? [2]

This is a second in a series of postings describing things that can already be done with folklore studies scholarship that has been made available through the efforts of the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. These various projects are being brought together in the Open Folklore project. While it will soon provide a portal to this diverse range of this content at http://www.openfolklore.org/, a great deal of content has already been made available. The first post described accessing folklore books via the Hathi Trust Digital Library. This post explains accessing several bundles of materials via the IUScholarWorks Repository.

IUScholarWorks Repository is a DSpace-based institutional repository for Indiana University Bloomington.  Folklore studies materials that have been incorporated within it include the following items and groups of items. While I could describe how to access these materials, it will be easiest for new users to just click the links given and explore the repository.

The journal Folklore and Folk Music Archivist (1958-1968) can be accessed here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/706

[As discussed here previously] a range of reports, monographs and working papers published by The Fund for Folk Culture can be accessed here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850

The back files of the journal New Directions in Folklore (1997-2003) can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/6614

Newly added, and of special interest, are several special publications issued by the American Folklore Society, including the book 100 Years of American Folklore Studies: A Conceptual History edited by WIlliam M. Clements and published by the Society during its centennial year, 1988.  These materials can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/9004

The motherlode of folklore scholarship in IUScholarWorks Repository are the back files of the journal Folklore Forum.  Published since 1968, forty years of journal content (1968-2008), constituting 1314 items, is available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/1168

Folklore Forum is a publication of Trickster Press, the student-run publishing house in Indiana’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.  Trickster continues to publish Folklore Forum as a gold open access journal (see here). In addition to making its back files available in IUScholarWorks Repository, the Trickster Press team, working with the IUB Libraries has also made available content from the Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series (87 items), which can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2567

Books from the Folklore Forum Monograph Series, can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2569

In addition to these Folklore Forum-related materials, Trickster Press has also opened four of its out of print book titles.  These are:

Log Buildings in Southern Indiana by Warren Roberts (1996) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3775

Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh edited by Carl Lindahl and Nikolai Burlakoff (1980) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3774

Fields of Folklore: Essays in Honor of Kenneth S. Goldstein edited by Roger D. Abrahams (1995) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3773

and The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls, George H. Schoemaker, Jennifer Livesay, and Laura Dassow Walls (1989) available here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3137

In classic institutional repository mode, various materials produced in IUB’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology are also available in IUScholarWorks Repository. These materials, which include conference proceedings, post prints, MA theses, sound recordings, and syllabi can be found here:
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/28

This heterogeneous corpus of folklore scholarship is continuing to grow and it is anticipated that the Open Folklore portal will make consulting it easier in the years ahead.  In the meantime, there is plenty for the early adopters to read, study and enjoy.

Thanks to all who have worked to make these resources openly available.  Thanks as well to the many people who have expressed support for the Open Folklore project.

Aug 12

On “Five Suggestions for the Open Folklore Project”

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).

Aug 4

1 Comment

Savage Minds on Scholarly Communication

Significant posts appeared today on Savage Minds related to scholarly communications in my two fields of study. Chris Kelty writes about the latest developments within the American Anthropological Association, focusing on (and releasing) an important memo by former Cultural Anthropology co-editor Kim Fortun. Alex Golub writes about the Open Folklore project of the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society (with which I am involved and about which I have been writing here).

Read all about it.

Jul 28

1 Comment

Open Folklore

Open Folklore–The announcement. I will write of it more later but for now I just want to highlight the announcement last night by the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries of the formal start of the Open Folklore project. Read all about it here http://www.openfolklore.org/ Quite a lot of work has already been accomplished during the quiet phase. Thanks to everyone who has work to make this happen, especially the AFS and IUB Library leadership for supporting it. Thanks too to the rights holders who are freely sharing the content under their stewardship.

The earlier post on Opening Three More Established Folklore Studies Journals can be understood more clearly in light of this broader project.

Jul 4

AFS Executive Board Issues Arizona Statement

[As noted in today’s AFS email newsletter] After a period of discussion and review, the American Folklore Society‘s Executive Board [on which I serve] has issued a public statement on recent Arizona immigration legislation. The Society will distribute this statement to relevant public officials and bodies in Arizona, and to other learned societies.

The statement reads:

The American Folklore Society, the US-based professional association for the field of folklore studies, with a membership of 2,000 people and institutions, and an annual meeting that draws more than 700 participants from around the world, has historically supported policies that prohibit discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and our field has long been concerned with the well-being of immigrant populations.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society takes notice of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring all local law enforcement officials to investigate a person’s immigration status when there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States unlawfully, regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime. We also take notice of Arizona House Bill 2281, that prohibits public schools in the state from offering, at any grade level, courses that advocate ethnic solidarity or cater to specific ethnic groups.

More than a century of research in the field of folklore studies (and in other fields in the humanities and social sciences) has detailed the cultural, political, and social impact of discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, and race.  Based on that research, the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society considers these laws just identified, and the ways they may be implemented, to be discriminatory.

The Executive Board of the American Folklore Society resolves that the Society will not hold a scholarly conference in the State of Arizona until such time that Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and Arizona House Bill 2281 are either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid and thus unenforceable by a court.

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