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Jan 14

On the New Volume of Museum Anthropology Review

Museum Anthropology Review (MAR) has just published a new double issue—its first themed collection. Volume 7, number 1-2 of MAR collects papers originally presented at a January 2012 workshop titled “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge.” Hosted by the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and funded by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation and the Understanding the American Experience and World Cultures Consortia of the Smithsonian Institution, the workshop was organized by Kimberly Christen (Washington State University), Joshua Bell (Smithsonian Institution), and Mark Turin (Yale University). The workshop brought together scholars from indigenous communities, cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and collecting institutions to document best practices and case studies of digital repatriation in order to theorize the broad impacts of such processes in relation to: linguistic revitalization of endangered languages, cultural revitalization of traditional practices, and the creation of new knowledge stemming from the return of digitized material culture. Like the workshop itself, the peer-reviewed and revised papers collected in MAR ask how, and if, marginalized communities can reinvigorate their local knowledge practices, languages, and cultural products through the reuse of digitally repatriated materials and distributed technologies. The authors of the collected papers all have expertise in applied digital repatriation projects and share theoretical concerns that locate knowledge creation within both culturally specific dynamics and technological applications.

Find this special issue of MAR online at: http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/issue/view/233

As it has always been, MAR is an open access, peer-reviewed journal free to all readers. With volume 8, to be published in 2014, MAR is becoming the journal of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. It will continue to be published in partnership with the Indiana University Libraries with assistance from the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and other partners.

2014 will bring new enhancements to MAR. To keep up with the journal, please sign up as a reader, follow it on Twitter @museanthrev, and/or like it on Facebook.

Jan 12

Its Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) Applicaton Time Again

Its time for graduate students with material culture interests to think about, and follow through on, applying to participate in the 2014 Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology. This is a four-week training program focusing on the methods needed to incorporate museum collections into broader research efforts in cultural anthropology and in cognate ethnographic fields such as folklore studies.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and held at the Smithsonian Institution, the program covers students’ room, board, and tuition. Housing is provided as is a small stipend for food and other local expenses. Participants are individually responsible for the cost of travel to and from Washington, DC. This is an intensive residential program and the participants are expected to devote full time to the training. Anyone working with, or interested in working with, material culture collections in their research should check out the program. Details are on the SIMA website.

Applications are due on March 1, 2014.

For other NSF funded training programs in cultural anthropology, see the Methods Mall website.

 

 

 

 


Jan 2

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2013 at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures (MMWC) is Indiana University‘s museum of ethnography, ethnology, and cultural history. Yesterday, the museum began its 51st year. Today I begin my second year as the museum’s director. It was an honor to have been named to this role and, as I reflect on my first year, I am really happy about where the museum is in its journey.

In a pair of posts, I would like to reflect upon the year just concluded and the year ahead. Not everyone is an excited about the details as I am, so I will place them below the “more” button. For those just skimming, I wish to thank you for keeping up with Shreds and Patches and for supporting the MMWC and the various projects that I am involved in. Thanks go as well to the museum’s staff, collaborators, students, policy committee members, donors, friends, funders, visitors and supporters. I extend special appreciation here to the leadership of the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (the IU unit of which the MMWC is a part) and to Director Emeritus Geoffrey Conrad. Read more

Dec 31

Museums of Ethnography and Cultural History Celebrate Fiftieth Anniversaries and Welcome New Directors

I will say more detailed things about the Mathers Museum of World Cultures during 2013 in later posts. Here I just want to flag a few happy curiosities.

Today is the last day of 2013 and 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. This fact made it an extra wonderful year to begin service as the museum’s Director. The exhibition Treasures of the Mathers Museum was the centerpiece of our celebratory activities and a new strategic plan was the fruit of our reflections on the past and our goal setting for the future. We have made good progress on our goals for the second half century, but that is for a future post.

We were not alone among museums of ethnography, cultural history, and world cultures celebrating golden anniversaries in 2013. Joining us in such celebrations were the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Wake Forest Museum of Anthropology, and the Cherokee Heritage Center. (2013 saw other notable 50th anniversaries in the broader museum world, including the 50th anniversary of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee/Milwaukee Public Museum museum studies program.) Congratulations to all of the half century celebrants, especially to these museums in our corner of the field.

2013 was also a year for new directors among such museums. I am happy to be among them. My friend Candessa Tehee and I shared the experience of becoming directors during a 50th anniversary. Candessa is the new Executive Director of the Cherokee Heritage Center. Robert Preucel was named the new Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University and Patrick Lyons was named the new Director of the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona. The Cherokee Heritage Center was not the only Cherokee museum to get a new director, The Museum of the Cherokee Indian named James “Bo” Taylor as Executive Director. I am sure that I missed someone (please add them in the comments), but I want to wish all of these new directors well. It is an exciting time for our field and I look forward to seeing where we all collectively go during 2014.

Dec 30

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On The Journal of Folklore Research in 2013

2013 was a very busy year for me. It was a great year, but it was overly full at work and so-called work-life balance thus was not much in evidence. I am hardly unique in this regard and I continue to count myself among the very lucky–fully employed doing (scholarly) things that I both love and that I am reasonably good at.

One opportunity that made 2013 overly full was my appointment as Interim Editor of the Journal of Folklore Research (JFR). My work on JFR actually began in fall 2012, when I had worked in the role of (this is a mouthful) Interim Editor-Designate. In fall 2012 I was asked to step in as interim editor to span the end of Moria Marsh’s long editorship and the start (in January 2014) of Michael Dylan Foster’s more permanent editorship. (Michael was committed overseas during 2013.) What was needed was a faculty member in the Indiana University (IU) Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who already knew about journal editing and who could hit the ground running. That seemed to describe me and, although editing another journal was not something I was trying to do (I was already editing Museum Anthropology Review), it was clear that the team needed me. JFR is a key journal in folklore studies and I care about its future even if I had not anticipating having a direct role in that future.

(Parenthetical notes on JFR and open access… My advocacy for open access projects is pretty well known, thus observers may wonder about my having gotten entangled with a toll access journal. My work on JFR ran in parallel with my work on the Open Folklore project, my involvement in campus open access efforts at IU, and my role as a faculty advisory committee member for the IU Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP), the new campus organization that encompasses the Indiana University Press alongside IU Library-based campus open access efforts. JFR is published by the IU Press and relies on Project Muse and JSTOR. While JFR did not magically become a gold OA journal during 2013, its alignment with OA goals did increase to a degree. In 2013 JFR got a new author agreement that allows JFR authors some self-archiving rights. More importantly, larger conversations relating to the OSP will, in time, impact JFR and other IU Press journals. We do not know what this will look like with much certainty, but it is clear that JFR will change to accommodate changing publishing norms and scholarly practices. Serving JFR for just a year, my main assignment was to hold things together under the inherited model. I think that this goal was accomplished, but I would not have undertaken this stewardship role if I did not believe that JFR has a promising–and more open–future ahead of it. How to accomplish this is a big task for the future. In the meantime, I was devoting labor to a journal that was (at least) operating on a not-for-profit basis and one that was, as I took it on, being published by a new campus unit that has open access aspirations at its core.)

I had the honor of serving as JFR’s editor during its 50th anniversary year. I did not work alone. JFR 51(1) will include a published appreciation from me. Here I will just note the wonderful support that JFR has enjoyed from outgoing editor Moria Marsh, former managing editor Danille Christensen, current managing editor Steve Stanzak, current editorial assistant Miriam Woods, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (FOLK) chair Diane Goldstein, FOLK fiscal officer Sheri Sherrill, FOLK accounting associate Michelle Bright, the IU Press journals staff, and the IU ScholarWorks staff. Many people help make JFR a success. They deserve our collective thanks.

What got done on my watch as Interim Editor of JFR? When I took over the journal it was two issues behind schedule, thus two issues for 2012 needed to be published in 2013 alongside the three current numbers for 2013. (As journal publishers know, such a situation is dreaded but not uncommon.) This was accomplished and the first issue for 2014 also went to press during 2013. This means that the staff and I engaged with editing and production work on the following:

JFR 49(2)   132 published pages, six published items
JFR 49(3)   120 published pages, four published items
JFR 50(1-3)   299 published pages, eleven published items
JFR 51(1)   117 published pages five published items

In total this means that we did editorial work on 668 typeset pages of JFR content spread over 26 published items. During my interim editorship, JFR produced two years of content in the space of one year. The journal is now on track and on schedule to be handed off to its new editor in a few days.

On the editorial throughput side, JFR was somewhat challenged in 2012 due to a lack of accepted content. This contributed to (but not was not solely responsible for) the journal being behind when my work with it began in fall 2012. This difficulty was also addressed during my time as interim editor. During 2013, we read and processed fifty article manuscripts divided as follows.

20   Reviewed and Rejected in 2013
16   Reviewed and Accepted in 2013
14   Received in 2013 and Still in Process (ex: “revise and resubmit”)

At an average page length of 35 pages in manuscript form, this throughput for 2013 is approximately 1750 pages. Throughput is a very dynamic matter. It is easy for a journal to have too few submissions and too little accepted content and it is actually possible (especially, but not solely, with print journals with their fixed issue lengths) to have too many accepted articles (leading to long waits for authors). The sweet spot is hard to find and, once found, hard to stay in.

Every editor wants abundant submissions of excellent, field-defining quality, but even here it is possible to have too much. As in so many areas, attention is even more of a limiting factor than money. Authors of articles submitted to, but not accepted by, JFR during 2013 did not get from me the kind of careful feedback that JFR-submitting authors of the past benefitted from. I apologize here for this lack. Given other duties and the scale of the JFRs own work overall, it was not possible to provide meaningful developmental editing to all submitting authors. Given the changing scale, pace, and nature of scholarly publishing overall, I am doubtful that any medium scale journal will be able to consistently provide such feedback. On the smaller scale, it should remain possible for journals such as Museum Anthropology Review. On the larger scale, we see the rise of developmental editing as a fee-based, a la carte service. (We live in interesting times. Consider the example of Rubriq.)

Returning to words of thanks, I want to thank all of the authors who JFR worked with during 2013. Thank you for your engagement with the journal and the fields that it serves. Thank you for your patience and goodwill during a time of change. Thanks finally to the many peer-reviewers without whose labor and careful judgement the work of JFR would falter. Your contribution to the gift economy of academic publishing is priceless.

Dec 19

Notes on Thoughtfulness in Scholarly Publishing (3): In This, I Support Elsevier

[Updated] This series began in the wake of an instance in which I, to the irritation of most observers, questioned a case of self-piracy. Soon thereafter, self-piracy was a big deal among publishing scholars for a higher education news cycle or two. I have stated my views previously and do not need to belabor them again here. I was busy with other things and thankfully Alex Golub and the Library Loon [and Barbara Fister] have each done a better job of writing about it [=Elsevier going after its agreement breaking authors] this time that I could ever do. Please read them.

Don’t blame Elsevier for exercising the rights you gave them by Alex Golub on Savage Minds.

Pig-ignorant entitlement and its uses by The Library Loon on Gavia Libraria

[When You Give Your Copyright Away by Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Education]

While I am a Elsevier boycott participant and cannot ever imagine publishing with them, I 100% support the rights of Elsevier and other publishers to fully and legally exercise the copyright that they legally hold and to protect their property from illegal misuse by third party firms and from their author agreement-disregarding authors who mistakenly believe that because their name is on the byline of an article that they can do whatever they wish with value-added property that, despite their authorship, they do not own. Self-piracy is wrong and it is not helping build a better scholarly communication system. Instead, it further confuses the already confused into believing that [pseudo] open access is easy and it leads to painful ironies such as scholarly society leaders setting publishing policies that they do not understand and that they, even as they make them, are out of compliance with. No open access advocate should be out of compliance with their own author agreements. (This is true all the more for those who are actively doubtful about open access.)  If a scholarly author wants to share their work freely online, there are many legal (and preservation-minded, and discovery-minded) ways to do this. Breaking contracts that one has already entered into so as to steal articles which one then hands off to a for-profit website (here today, gone when?) is not the way to do it.

Unfortunately, doing things the way we should do them is presently harder than doing things the way we want to do them. Reading and understanding (and knowing how to legally modify) author agreements is part of the hard work that thoughtful authors are obligated to pursue.

Nov 10

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Notes on Thoughtfulness in Scholarly Publishing (2): Tim Elfenbein on the *Why* of a la Carte Pricing in Route to a Multivariate Thoughtfulness

If you find value or interest in the discussion initiated in my post on pay per view journal article pricing and its relevance to scholarly authors and general readers, then do not miss Tim Elfenbein’s comment on that post.

Tim is the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology and an all around great person to keep up with. Among many other things, he is a knowledgeable, well-positioned reader for my post. He is a great interlocutor for many reasons, including (importantly for me) that he kindly saw that I was bracketing out a lot of important stuff. Rather than calling me out for that, he saw the opportunity to extend the conversation, adding another “note” toward a more holistic set of considerations. It should be in this slot as a guest post, but you can find his comment here. I recommend it.

Tim puts an important range of considerations on the agenda. Most directly he tackles the need to understand something about the “why” of a la carte (or pay per view) pricing, but he also points to the nature and impact of platform choices, human appreciation to those who are paying for our publishing, appreciation for those who are doing the labor behind our publishing, and recognition of the reputation (and tenure) economy and its effects. Even the ways that digital, legal, and financial transformations have devastated the old interlibrary loan model is lurking in there. All deserve revisiting or visiting. I am glad that Tim recognized that I was biting off one arbitrary chunk and that there were others lurking beneath the surface (or sitting on the surface, as with my repeated use of the word legal).

Nov 9

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Notes on Thoughtfulness in Scholarly Publishing (1): A la Carte Pricing

Today a senior scholar whose work I greatly respect called me an asshole. This was in response to my being snarky in a social media environment. Snarky is probably never a good stance to take. This was a reminder. I will not revisit the episode except to acknowledge that, in a diffuse way, it motivates the post (perhaps a series of posts) initiated here.

One definition of “thoughtfulness” provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, characterizes things this way:

Showing thought or consideration for others; considerate, kindly.

I was not thoughtful in my snarky comment, although it was motivated out of concern for others.

This note on publishing thoughtfulness is not in first position relative to other notes in some kind of procedural or conceptual sequence. It is just a fragment from a bigger statement or recommendation that could be composed. Its is just one piece of the larger picture of scholarly publishing practices that is on my mind today. No one is obligated to follow this counsel, of course. For anyone who is interested, here is one thoughtfulness recommendation. (The post presumes academic publishing in scholarly journals without consideration of author payment. People writing for a living in magazines and newspapers have important and different concerns.)

Before submitting an article to, or agreeing to contribute a review to, a particular scholarly journal, find out how much the a la carte price to access that work is going to be.

This is easier said than done for a host of platform and PR reasons. Before I offer some tips on doing it, here are some arguments as to why this is a thoughtful thing to do.

As I discussed in an essay for anthropologies, only a tiny portion of the world’s population has institution-based access to the scholarly literature. (Even fewer have personal subscription-based access.) This means that most people will simply not be able to legally access your work. This opens the door to an open access discussion, but I am not going to open that door. Forget it. Forget about retaining your rights. Forget about green open access. Forget about all that stuff. Just focus on a la carte pricing.

If a person has the ability to discover your work but lacks the ability to read it behind a paywall, publishers have a solution. Pay-per-view is that solution. I call it a la carte because it involves paying money for a single item of scholarship, rather than some larger bundle of scholarship.

Depending on the publisher and platform, this price can be relatively modest or (by most people’s standards) rather high. For poor people, your “relatively modest” may count as rather high, but we are not dwelling too much on that here. (See the anthropologies paper for that kind of talk.)

If you do scholarship without any institutional affiliation whatsoever, it is actually easier to find the a la carte price. Use a smart phone or some other internet connecting device and drill down to the item you want (or that counts as your investigative test case) via whatever digital platform it exist on. When you get to the end of the line, you will be at a toll gate. Chance are good that there is a price tag attached to the item. Pay the amount and get through the gate. You may get to read it for a time period before it evaporates or you may get to “keep” a PDF for an extended period. There are many variations on the use rights you are buying at the gate. For now, the key thing is figuring out the price. (Just keep in mind that you are not really buying anything. You are leasing certain use rights. You cannot give your version away, for instance. Get the used bookstore image out of your mind.)

If you work at an institution of higher education with some kind of library funded access to the scholarly literature, the a la carte price may be hard to find. Those wonderful librarians are working to make your use as seamless as possible. This means not only do they struggle to find the cash (often tuition dollars) to pay for your access, but they also make keen technological arrangements to keep it easy for you. One of these is keying access to machine IP address. Access a journal platform from an on-campus machine or via a laptop that has been configured to act like one, and you may not see the paywall. If you get in seamlessly, you never see the a la carte price and thus may not even realize there is one. Publishers like this about their platforms. Its a design feature. One designed to keep you from thinking about how much is being charged to access their work.)

A thoughtful author can do a bit of work to find the a la carte price before making a publishing decision. Have you been asked to review a book? How much will your review cost? About to send out your manuscript. If you succeed, how much will someone pay to read you?

Were you asked to write a review for a Routledge journal like Folklore? Go to the site and see. That journal recently published a two page review of a book called Tales of Kentucky Ghosts. This two page review costs $37.00 plus local taxes. Forgetting the taxes, that comes to $18.50 per page. At Routledge, the price is flat per item, thus a 28 page article in a recent issue of Ethnos comes to $1.32 per page. [Why did I pick on that review of Tales of Kentucky Ghosts particularly? Well, consider this. The book itself can be purchased for $14.97 in a kindle edition from Amazon. Six cents per page for the book being reviewed in the $18.50 per page review.]

For Wiley journals “You can purchase online access to this Article for a 24-hour period (price varies by title).” To do this (or to see the price) you have to make a Wiley account and login. To purchase a review of the book Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside from the American Anthropologist costs $12 for 24 hour access to a 1 page review. City and Society content also costs $12 for 24 hours. Thus a recent 17 page article therein comes in at a just 70 cents for an entire day of reading. [One can get Dacha Idylls from Amazon for $15.99 for as long as the technology lasts…]

Considering Public Culture published by the not-for-profit Duke University Press, you can pay per view in it for $15 for two days of access. The editor’s letter in its recent number is four pages, making it $3.75 per page for 48 hours. Because the rate is flat, the price per page goes down as the page count goes up.

Social Forces published by Oxford University Press? $35 for 24 hours.

Of course, such a quest my lead to discovering that a journal does not provide a la carte access. (Ethnology seems to be one example of this. American Antiquity seems to be another.)

Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory? $0 for infinite hours. (Amusing myself with that one–of course there is no a la carte price at Hau–its a gold OA journal.)

You get the point.

One kind of thoughtfulness in publishing decisions focuses on the end price to legally access the scholarship that we give to publishers with the hope that they will get it before the eyes of interested readers. If I used only the data presented above, I cannot easily make a case for one toll access publisher over another. It gets easier when other considerations are brought into play. Still, if you recoil at the idea of someone paying $35 to read your book review or at the idea that someone would pay the same about to rent access to your article for a single day, then the thoughtful thing to do is to not publish in such venues or, if you must, to do so in a way that allows you to legally share your work in green open access ways.

Oct 21

Good News Roundup

There is way too much stuff going on in my life and work these days. Most of it is really good stuff, but it is hard to keep up. Before moving on to new reporting, here are some good news highlights from recent weeks.

Colleagues and I shepherded into print the 50th volume (=golden anniversary) of the Journal of Folklore Research, for which I serve as Interim Editor. JFR 50(1-3), a triple issue (!), is a special one titled Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice: The Legacy of Dell Hymes and is guest edited by Paul V. Kroskrity (UCLA) and Anthony Webster (Texas). The guest editors contributed a post about the issue for the IU Press Journals Blog and the triple issue itself is can be found on the Project Muse and JSTOR digital platforms. Thanks to all who have supported JFR over its first five decades.

The Open Folklore project recently released a new version of the OF portal site. The new site incorporates a range of new features and is built upon the latest version of Drupal. I hope that it is already helping you with your own research efforts. If you have not seen it yet, check it out at http://openfolklore.org/

In September, two scholars whose Ph.D. committees I chaired finished their doctorates. Congratulations to Dr. Flory Gingging and Dr. Gabrielle Berlinger!

I noted the award quickly previously, but I had a great time attending the Indiana Governor’s Arts Awards where Traditional Arts Indiana, led by my friend and colleague Jon Kay, was recognized.

The new issue of Ethnohistory is out and it includes a generous and positive review of Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era. The reviewer is Marvin T. Smith, author of several key works on the archaeology and ethnohistory of the Native South. Find it (behind a paywall) here: http://ethnohistory.dukejournals.org/content/60/4.toc

A while back, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures opened a fine exhibition curated by IU Folklore graduate student Meredith McGriff. It is Melted Ash: Michiana Wood Fired Pottery and it is a sight to behold. If you have not seen it, stop by the museum and check it out.

Open Access week just kicked off and there are a lot of activities planned for the IUB campus. To get things started my friend and collaborator Jennifer Laherty did an interview with WFHB. It is about 8 minutes long and it can be found on the station’s website: http://wfhb.org/news/open-access-week/

The very talented Bethany Nolan was kind enough to talk to me about Yuchi Folklore and to write about our discussion for her Art at IU blog.

The Euchee (Yuchi) Tribe of Indians just held its 17th (!!!!) annual Heritage Days festival. A few years ago a Miss Yuchi/Euchee was added to the festivities and the young women chosen have been great representatives of their nation. This year another awesome young woman was selected. Congratulations to A.S. on being selected for this big honor and big responsibility.

Sep 11

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Exhibition Opening: Operation AB – Katyn–The Destruction of the Polish Elite at the Beginning of WWII

Thank you to all everyone who traveled, from near and far, to attend last night’s exhibition opening of “Operation AB – Katyn: The Destruction of the Polish Elite at the Beginning of WWII,” at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. The exhibition, organized by, and circulated to the MMWC by, the Institute of National Remembrance, Poland is an important effort to report on a tragic, important, and poorly understood phase in WWII-era European history, particularly the terrible Katyn massacre. It is an honor to host this important historical exhibition and it was an honor to welcome so many guests to the museum for the opening.

Among the special visitors attending the exhibition opening was Dr. Łukasz Andrzej Kamiński, the President of the Institute of National Remembrance. It was a great experience to welcome Dr. Kaminski and his colleagues to the museum and to Indiana University.

The IU Polish Studies Center, led by Padraic Kenney, was the leader of this local effort and the MMWC is thankful for the opportunity to pursue this partnership.

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