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Sep 27

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@Mukurtu Project Wins Major IMLS Grant

Congratulations to Kim Christen and everyone working on the Mukurtu project on news that the effort has received a major grant from the (U.S.) Institute for Museum and Library Services (announced here). This is a major development for a major project.

As noted on the Mukurtu project site, Mukurtu is “A free and open source community content management system that provides international standards-based tools adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property systems of Indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums.” It is “a flexible archival tool that allows users to protect, preserve and share digital cultural heritage through Mukurtu Core steps and unique Traditional Knowledge licenses.”

Sep 27

“Ritual and Oratory Revisited” in Annual Review of Anthropology

The final, stable 2011 edition of the Annual Review of Anthropology (a vital, not-for-profit undertaking co-edited by Don Brenneis and Peter T. Ellison) is now available (toll access). Because the topic is of great interest to me, I was pleased to see Rupert Stasch‘s review essay on “Ritual and Oratory Revisited: The Semiotics of Effective Action.” Looking more closely, it was a welcome and nice surprise to see that he knew about my work in this realm and found a generous way to weave it into his general narrative. My writings are sometimes high in area studies interest and, conversely, less immediately engaging for scholars working elsewhere in the world, thus it is always nice when it is clear that they have been discovered by, and made sense to, a colleague working in a different context. This essay will be an invaluable resources as I take up new work on the topic. Thanks!

Sep 26

“Your royalty share will be 0%”

Thanks to the amazing Laura Gibbs for pointing me to this new video.

Sep 25

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Information R/evolution

While the fall semester is just beginning, this season’s call to submit book orders is a haunting reminder that the spring semester will be here very shortly. As I have noted previously, I will be teaching a new and experimental course on Folklore and the New Social Problems. Alongside ethical and topical matters, a meta-concern of this course is information literacy and the cultivation of durable research skills for a changing world. The call to submit textbook orders is especially ironic in these contexts in ways that I do not have time to explore in this post. Thinking about them today though, I wanted to catchup with an inspirational colleague (and an inspiration for my upcoming course) so I checked in online with Michael Wesch. I was happy to see that he has been named “Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars” at Kansas State University (well deserved!). I also watched, for the first time, his video Information R/evolution. It is a great companion to The Machine is Us/ing Us and it focuses on the changed information ecology in which those of us with access to digital resources work. Like many of Wesch’s other projects, it speaks well to the concerns so many of us are trying to negotiate. It is a valuable resource for my course. Check it out.

To be clear, I love books and nobody is working harder than my library colleagues to address the changes Wesch introduces. A key value of Wesch’s video work is his ability to explain these changes to general audiences (including those undergraduates with whom he has had such success).

Sep 23

Book News: Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era

I just discovered a nice sign of progress on a long simmering book project for which I am the editor. (Its long simmering status was my fault, not that of the authors or publisher.) Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era is presently being copy-edited by The University of Nebraska Press. I am looking forward to reviewing the edited manuscript next month. Looking for something else, I was pleased, just now, to discover that the book now has a page on the UNP website. I had not know the format that the press was going to choose, so I am very pleased to see that it is slated to appear in paper. Thanks to everyone who has worked on this project. More news here as it develops.

Sep 23

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Modelling Gold Open Access as a Disruptive Technology

David W. Lewis, the Dean of the IUPUI University Library and IU Assistant Vice President for Digital Scholarly Communication has just authored a paper on “The Inevitability of Open Access” in which he models the future of gold open access as a disruptive technology. The paper, forthcoming in College and Research Libraries, is available now as a pre-print from C&RL’s own pre-print/post-print server. (A direct link to the PDF is here.) Anyone invested in the future of scholarship should find Lewis’ predictions useful. After developing a set of predictions for the future of scholarly journal publishing, Lewis offers specific assessments of relevance to a number of actors, including scholarly societies with publishing programs.

BTW: Congratulations to C&RL for moving to gold OA. Librarians leading by example!

Sep 20

Check Out Roy Boney’s Awesome Graphic Feature on Cherokee Language and Literacy

Indian Country Today has just published an awesome graphic feature by Roy Boney on the history of Cherokee literacy from the time of Sequoyah to the time of unicode. I do not need to go on and on and on about it. Its really great and you need to check it out.

Sep 20

Recovering Voices Program Manager

Recovering Voices Program Manager (IS-301-12, $74,872)
Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

We are seeking a program manager for Recovering Voices, an interdisciplinary Smithsonian program that is working with communities to document and sustain endangered languages and knowledge. Read more

Sep 20

5th IU-OSU Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Conference: (Re)Framing & (Un)Mapping

(Re)Framing & (Un)Mapping
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

February 17-18, 2012

Keynote address by
Dr. Michael Ann Williams
(Western Kentucky University)

We are happy to announce the 5th annual collaborative conference between The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association and the Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Associations at Indiana University. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines connected to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation(s) of everyday life.

In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955), Gregory Bateson makes reference to an Andaman Island peace-making ceremony in which participants strike one another to enact, then dispel their anger. Investigating the fine line between play and aggression, Bateson writes, “(t)he discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down, and the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the ‘real’ blows of combat.” Bateson’s example leads us to think about the “maps” that organize our interpretations of cultural “territories”: systems of meaning, practices of communication, and theoretical and ideological frames. Inspired by Bateson’s seminal text, this year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions and themes:

  • What devices do folklorists and ethnomusicologists use to (re)frame and (un)map? How are these concepts used to decontextualize, entextualize, and recontextualize?
  • How do ideological frames and maps translate to concrete realities, and vice versa?
  • What effect do frames and maps have on folk groups, music and culture?
  • What are the politics of mapping? How do previously unmappable things become mappable? How do things fall off the map? How do frames and maps work as boundaries that define what lies within and without, sameness and difference?
  • How have concepts of performance, play, ritual and literal frames affected theory and practice in folklore and ethnomusicology?
  • How have frames and maps guided thinking about space, place, land(scape), region and nation-state, and how have the latter complicated our understanding of the former?
  • In what other ways does current research engage with (re)framing and (un)mapping?

*We also welcome submissions on other topics.

The conference will have four opportunities for participation: 20-minute paper presentations, a poster session, 10-minute experimental panels for works-in-progress, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for all presentation formats, apart from the forum.

Abstracts must be submitted by November 18, 2011. Please email submissions to osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com.

Register for this event for free at
http://osuiu2012conference.eventbrite.com/. For more information on the details of the conference visit http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference in the coming months.

Center for Folklore Studies
Ohio State University
308 Dulles Hall
230 W. 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1340
Phone: 614-688-3639
Fax: 614-292-1599
Email: osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference

Sep 20

Historian Tiya Miles Honored with a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

Congratulations to Tiya Miles on being honored with a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. It is always fun to see who has been awarded one of these amazing Fellowships and it is great when someone working in the same corners of the world that I do is a recipient. Learn more about the awards and Professor Miles’ work on African and Cherokee history in the American South here.

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