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Jan 12

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From So-called #aaafail Back to Publishing

In the Chronicle of Higher Education Hugh Gusterson has published what I think is a clear and useful account of the recent “science” in anthropology dust-up from his perspective as a member of the American Anthropological Association Executive Board.  Many excellent scholars have devoted themselves to trying to make sense of this recent event (generally known by the rather harsh twitter hashtag #aaafail). I appreciated those (especially anthropologists writing online) who addressed the issue thoughtfully.

In addition to being another contribution to the AAA science discussion, Gusterson’s piece is useful as a brief (ethnographic) description of the work of the board in a practical sense. Discussing a range of issues that were on the board’s plate at the time that the revised plan document was approved (issues that seemed more pressing and important that the fateful language changes), Gusterson says the following:

…most of our time in the executive-board meeting, was given over to issues that many of us saw as more urgent than the long-range-planning statement: a detailed review of the association’s budget in a time of national recession; a discussion of our publishing model in a context in which most of the association’s journals operate at a loss and their content is increasingly available free via the Web; an analysis of our publishing partnership with Wiley-Blackwell; a briefing on the introduction of a multimillion-dollar computer program to facilitate the association’s business; a conversation about recurrent issues in organizing the annual meeting and issues that had already arisen with regard to next year’s meeting, in Montreal; a discussion of the search for a new editor of our flagship journal, American Anthropologist; a performance evaluation of the association’s executive director and the staff he oversees; and a tricky discussion about whether, or how, to make available as an archival document a 10-year-old official report of the association’s that had since been repudiated by the membership through a ballot.

This is a complex statement in a complex narrative and I urge readers to consult the original for context. I am interested here only in the passage given in bold (emphasis added). It is unique as a rare glimpse into Executive Board discussions of the AAA publishing program.

It would be possible to discuss the “journals operate at a loss” part. Much discussion among concerned observers of the AAA publishing program has gone into the financial side of this statement and pondering what it would mean to say that the journals operate at a loss.  It is a complex matter and I am not going engage with it here. (Put simply, there are ways of talking about the program that frame it as profitable and there are ways of talking about the program that frame it as loosing money.)

The much less discussed matter is the “their content is increasingly available free via the Web” part. This issue is hardly the focus of Gusterson’s essay and thus I do not want to go overboard, but his account does suggest that this too was a focus of extensive board discussion. If so, that is interesting.  What might it mean to say that much AAA journal content is available free on the web?

The AAA and its publishing partner Wiley charge for access to AAA journal content. The AAA itself is not making it freely available on the web. Officially, the AAA has (as a result of the work of member-advocates during the AnthroSource planning period) a “green” author agreement that does allow authors to post manuscript pre-prints and post-prints online (in institutional repositories, most importantly). It does not (unless something has changed) allow the posting of final publisher’s versions (ex: the final typeset PDF). (See SHERPA/RoMEO for details on the status of the agreement and the meaning of “green,” “pre-print,” and “post-print.”)

More and more AAA journal content probably can be found on the web, but almost none of it has been placed there in accord with the terms of the (rather generous) AAA author agreement. A growing number of AAA authors (some knowingly, some unknowingly) have chosen to make available publishers versions of their articles (etc.) via personal websites or, in some cases, to slip such materials into formal repositories (contrary to repository policies on respecting copyright, in most cases). I have no way of knowing, but my perception is that only a tiny proportion of AAA authors are using tools such as the Science Commons Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine to produce and utilize addendum to the AAA author agreement to allow the kinds of uses of the publisher version that are easily found on the open web.

Possibility one is that the AAA Executive Board, as reflected in Gusterson’s comments, recognizes and is discussing the matter that I have just evoked. That would be interesting. If so, the matter is probably still under consideration (given that there have been no visible actions on this front). From a process point of view, the Executive Board could: (1) change the author agreement to bring it into line with the (not actually legal) practices of more and more AAA authors, (2) begin a process of (a) educating the membership about what they are allowed to circulate on the open web (pre- and post-prints) and not allowed to circulate (published versions) and (b) going after those who are in violation of their signed author agreements (cease and desist letters, take down notices, prosecution, etc.), or (3) recognize the growing gap between law and practice but stay silent about the matter and accept the costs (lawlessness, confusion, erosion of the adopted business model) in exchange for avoiding a new domain of conflict within the association.

A different thing might be happening too. The discussion that I am imagining might be underway might not actually be under way yet.  It might be that the board–like most of the membership–does not yet understand such distinctions as those between pre-prints, post-prints, and publishers versions and their association with terms of art such as green or yellow OA. In this scenario, the board may not realize the massive levels of non-compliance with the author agreement that are becoming characteristic. That there are AAA insiders who themselves appear to be out of compliance with their own author agreements suggests that this may be the case. If this is so, it is unfortunate (but fixable) because knowing the actual terms of art and the actual frameworks in which our publishing work happens is a prelude to effective discussion and policy making.

If Gusterson is right and AAA-owned articles are freely available on the web, then it has to do with the implementation or non-implementation of Executive Board policy. The conversation would be different if 100% of AAA authors were carefully and lawfully exercising their rights to post pre- or post-prints and the field was discovering that it could get along without the value added work associated with final journal production. This might lead to a situation like that found in parts of physics, where a real open access culture built around the circulation of pre-prints had arisen (see Arxiv). What we have now is a situation in which Gusterson is kind of right, but that this situation is a consequence of a mix of misunderstanding or disobedience in an environment in which too few rank and file anthropologists understand the framework in which they are operating.

Elsewhere in the scholarly communications system, copyright holders are increasingly using strong digital rights management technologies to stop the proliferation of in-copyright journal articles on the open web. As an advocate for open access scholarly communication, that is the last thing that I would wish to advocate for the AAA, but I also am a believer in having, knowing, and following sensible rules that we can all live with. If AAA authors are going continue doing what they are now doing (and it has numerous upsides and numerous downsides), I would like them to know that they are breaking their author agreements or, if the AAA Executive Board does not see what they are doing as breaking their author agreements, then the Board should clarify (in SHERPA/RoMEO and in public declarations) that the AAA policy explicitly allows the free circulation by authors of their publisher versions in not-for-profit ways on the open web.

If the Executive Board wishes to slow or even stop the circulation of AAA owned intellectual property outside the subscription and pay-per-view frameworks that it has put into place, it has the power to do so. If it instead wishes to foster such free circulation, there are strategies that can be adopted towards such ends as well, but they are out of alignment with our business model. Now we have, in some ways, the worst of all possible worlds with some people reading and (over) complying with their author agreements (and thus, in practice, not sharing online at all [even though they could via pre- and post-prints]), some people misunderstanding their author agreements and doing things that they shouldn’t, and others adopting an “I’ll do what I want until someone tells me to stop.” approach. Legal anthropologists have plenty of experience with such gray zone situations, but they also are aware of the costs and harm that they can produce.

If AAA copyrighted material are going to purposefully circulate on the open web outside the subscription and pay-per-view framework, the best way for this to happen is in an environment in which rights are clear and in a framework in which authors are encouraged to place their materials (pre-prints, post-prints, or published versions as allowed for) in robust, durable, and interoperable repositories (whether subject or institutional ones) rather than posting them to transitory departmental and personal websites. I understand the case against (and for) the proliferation of such green OA circulation. The state of actual practices, association business choices, and the (often misunderstood) existing author agreement point to an association-wide discussion that is still not happening in any widespread way. As Gusterson’s comment suggests, perhaps it has begun in the Executive Board.

Jan 9

Kellie Hogue on Lakota Kinship and Myth

Congratulations to IU Doctoral Student Kellie Hogue on the publication of her new article: “A Myth of Kinship? Reinterpreting Lakota Conceptualization of Kin Relationships vis-à-vis 19th and 20th Century Historical Narratives.” in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes find an abstract and citation information here: http://jsa.revues.org/index11529.html

Jan 9

Repudiating Violence and Violent Language

My thoughts are with those tragically killed or injured yesterday in Tuscon, Arizona and their families.

Keith Olbermann has the right idea and I share his sentiment when he said: “Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.”

I wish that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, many conservative commentators/agitators, and the leaders of the Republican Party could muster the reflexivity, grace and moral courage necessary to change the way that they speak and act.

Learn about 9 year old Christina Green, who was born on 9-11-2001 and died yesterday here.

Jan 9

3 Comments

Now Books: JSTOR vis-a-vis Project MUSE, Revisited

In October 2009, I wrote a brief post about JSTOR Current Scholarship and suggested that it had obvious implications for Project MUSE. Kevin M. Guthrie, President of ITHAKA, was kind enough to reply to that post and argue that my concerns were unfounded.  Readers can refer back to these discussions.

All I want to say now is that there was once a kind of division of labor between JSTOR and Project MUSE, both not-for-profit initiatives that largely benefitted university presses, scholarly societies, and those scholars who depended on them (and who were lucky enough to be attached to subscription-paying institutions). Both organizations have early Mellon funding in their histories. JSTOR focused initially on journal back files and Project MUSE focused on current journal content.

In 2009, JSTOR announced its plans to move into current journal content.  This move was realized for end users with the new year that has just arrived.  In 2010, Project MUSE announced plans to move with its university press partners into electronic book delivery.  In an announcement circulated in anticipation of a presentation that was to be made (and surely was made) today at the ALA meetings, JSTOR/ITHAKA announced that it was moving on a program to begin publishing books.

As I did in 2009, I have regrets about the way this is shaping up. Is there commentary from Project MUSE folks out there anywhere?

(My anxieties are my own and do not reflect the views of any of the organizations of which I am a member, several of which benefit in significant ways from the success of both JSTOR and Project MUSE.)

UPDATE 1/12/2011: Find Jennifer Howard’s Chronicle of Higher Education story on the launch of multiple e-book programs here: http://chronicle.com/article/University-Presses-Face/125919/ and Steve Kolowich’s Inside Higher Education story on this topic at:  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/academic_journal_archives_move_toward_integrating_digital_books

Jan 6

Lorenz Khazaleh on Public Anthropology

A valuable commentary on strategies for fostering a more public anthropology by Lorenz Khazaleh.

Jan 3

1 Comment

2010 in review

The new semester is upon us and I do not have time to author a year in review post.  Thankfully the robots at WordPress.com cooked one up for me (and everyone else) and made it easy to autopost.  It is silly but also a bit interesting.  The secret to my success in 2010 was, it seems, the word “pegboard.”  I am not sure what to make of that.  For what it is worth…

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

 

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2010. That’s about 26 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 101 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 235 posts. There were 16 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 3mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 1st with 213 views. The most popular post that day was About Me.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, indiana.edu, savageminds.org, and insidehighered.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for jason baird jackson, pegboard, jason baird, dell hymes, and jethro gaede.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

About Me October 2007

2

Graduate Students August 2007

3

Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps (With Updates) October 2009
27 comments

4

Publications September 2007

5

Our Circulatory System (or Folklore Studies Publishing in the Era of Open Access, Corporate Enclosure and the Transformation of Scholarly Societies) May 2010
5 comments

Dec 25

1 Comment

First Georgia Reports of Yuchis, 1733

Introduction

In the summer of 2004 I was beginning to coordinate a project focused on Yuchi (Euchee) history during the period before removal to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). This effort centered on a conference panel and a planned edited book. To facilitate this effort I experimented for the first time with a blogging platform–a very unfamiliar technology to me at the time.  The blog was called Yuchi History Notes and, as the title suggests, the aim was to collect short items of relevance to the development of work on Yuchi history.  For purely practical reasons at the time (including changing jobs and moving to a new position at Indiana University) I had to set the blog part of the project aside and I took it offline, first making a PDF copy of the content for posterity and future reconstitution.

Happily, work on the edited book is nearing completion at long last.  Among the most useful and generous contributions to the Yuchi History Notes came from Professor John T. Juricek, an eminent student of Southern Indian history and a professor at Emory University.  Because his contribution will be cited in the forthcoming book, I need to get it back into the accessible record.  Towards that end, it is offered here as the first reconstituted item in the Yuchi History Notes series.  My thanks go to Professor Juricek for his steadfast commitment to the task of making sense of Yuchi history in its wider contexts.

[Originally published on Monday, June 21, 2004 as Yuchi History Notes #7]

First Georgia Reports of Yuchis, 1733

John T. Juricek
Emory University

During the years I spent editing two volumes of documents focusing on 18th-century Creek Indians (Georgia Treaties, 1733-1763— hereafter GT, and Georgia and Florida Treaties, 1763-1776) I ran across numerous references to Yuchis among the Creeks. These references were mostly fragmentary so one at a time they did not tell much of a story. As they accumulated, however, it gradually became clear to me that the incorporation of Yuchis among the Creeks was not only never complete, whatever assimilation did occur was not quick or trouble free. At times Creeks and Yuchis killed each other and seemed on the verge of war.

Below I outline the first case of Creek-Yuchi friction that I noticed. One reason I point to this incident is that I’m afraid that I misinterpreted it. It’s less embarrassing to expose your own error than to have someone do
it for you.

Six weeks after his arrival at the site of Savannah, on March 12, 1733 James Oglethorpe wrote as follows to other Georgia Trustees back in London:

“There are in Georgia on this Side [of] the Mountains three considerable Nations of Indians, one called the Lower Creeks… making about 1000 Men able to bear arms… The other two Nations are the Uchees and the Upper Creeks the first consisting of 200, the latter of 1100 men. We agree so well with the Indians that the Creeks and Uchees have referred a Difference to me to determine which otherwise would occasion a War;…” (GT, pp. 11-12).

When the final sentence is compared with the preceding one, “the Creeks” in the last sentence appears to be a shortened form for “the Upper Creeks” in the previous sentence. The impression that the Yuchis were at odds with Upper Creeks was strengthened for me by a late June 1733 entry in Peter Gordon’s journal. Gordon reports that “the Chiefs of the Upper Creeks and Uchi nations” arrived together at Savannah “to enter in to a Treaty of Friendshipp with Mr. Oglethorp.” (GT, p. 18) Ahah! I knew it! The two groups of chiefs came to Oglethorpe for his help in making peace between them, and he did it. Accordingly, in the introduction to the chapter that included these documents, I wrote that on March 12 Oglethorpe reported “that the Upper Creeks and the Yuchis had asked him to mediate a quarrel between them.” (GT, p. 5)

I now believe that there is a much more likely interpretation. First, it is suspicious that the Upper Creek and Yuchi chiefs arrived together, not what one should expect of two nations on the brink of war, and the remainder of Gordon’s account seems to describe a genial meeting with no mention of previous trouble. Second, I had forgotten about an earlier entry in Gordon’s journal. On March 7 he wrote that Tomochichi, the local Lower Creek (Yamacraw) leader, had just said:

“… that with regard to one of his people, that hade been killed by the Uchis (another neighbouring nation of Indians) he would not take revenge without Mr. Oglethorps consent and approbation, (taking revenge is a terme they use, when they intend to declare warr).” (GT, p. 9)

Given this clear evidence of trouble between Lower Creeks and Yuchis, and lack of it between Upper Creeks and Yuchis (on this occasion), on March 12 Oglethorpe was almost certainly referring to the Lower Creek-Yuchi conflict that Gordon mentioned on March 7.

[Contributed via an email to Jason Jackson, dated 6/19/2004]

Among numerous other works, John T. Juricek is the author of  Colonial Georgia and the Creeks : Anglo-Indian Diplomacy on the Southern Frontier, 1733-1763 (Gainesville: University Press of Florica, 2010).

Dec 20

Mukurtu: An Indigenous Archive and Content Management Tool | New Website Announcement

From a December 20, 2010 Mukurtu Project Press Release:

Mukurtu: An Indigenous Archive and Content Management Tool
New Website Announcement
http://www.mukurtuarchive.org

Project Director: Dr. Kimberly Christen; Director of Development: Dr. Michael Ashley; Lead Drupal Developer: Nicholas Tripcevich

In March 2010 the Mukurtu project was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start‐Up grant to produce a beta‐version of an open‐source, standards‐based community digital archive and content management platform. As the third phase of an ongoing software production project, the Mukurtu team is aware that indigenous and tribal libraries, archives and museums are underserved by both off‐the‐shelf content management systems (CMS) and open source CMS and digital archive/web production tools. Over the last decade as web technologies have diversified to include user‐generated content and more sophisticated digital archive and content management tools the specific needs of indigenous collecting institutions have been left out of mainstream productions.  Based on long‐term research and collaboration with indigenous communities and collecting institutions, Mukurtu’s development and production has focused on producing a digital archive and content management tool suite that meets the expressed needs of indigenous communities globally. Specifically, Mukurtu:

  1. Allows for granular access levels based on indigenous cultural protocols for the access and distribution of multiple types of content;
  2. Provides for diverse and multiple intellectual property systems through flexible and adaptable licensing templates;
  3. Accounts for histories of exclusion from content preservation and metadata generation sources and strategies by incorporating dynamic and user‐friendly administration tools;
  4. Provides flexible and adaptable metadata fields for traditional knowledge relating to collections and item level descriptions; and
  5. Facilitates the exchange and enhancement of metadata between national collecting institutions and related indigenous communities through robust import/export capabilities.

The Mukurtu software tool suite is under development now with a system demonstration site planned for Spring 2011. Our informational website, development blog, and wiki are now live. These sites allow us to chronicle our development progress, provide updates and engage with users as we move forward to a full launch in August 2011.

Please visit the new site at: www.mukurtuarchive.org and follow the links to learn more about the Mukurtu project goals, development, and collaborations.

Dec 16

Books Ngram Viewer + Folkloristics

This is a big deal.  Google has released Books Ngram Viewer.  Massive digital humanities text mining for everyone.  Information on it is here. Try it out here.

Below is the graph for the word “folkloristics” in English. Folklorists will understand the interest in this way of labeling their field.

I ran a few classic tale type names through it and the lessons of that possibility were clear.  Who can use this productively in time for next year’s American Folklore Society meetings in Bloomington?

 

Update: I was not expecting this. “folklore studies” (red) versus “folkloristics” (blue):

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.

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