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Jul 14

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Congratulations to Dr. Kate Hennessy

News arrived today of Kate Hennessy‘s successful dissertation defense. Kate is an awesome scholar that everyone should know about. She has just finished her doctorate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation, which I can recommend on the basis of firsthand experience, is titled: Repatriation, Digital Technology, and Culture in a Northern Athapaskan Community. It is excellent. It is an an important contribution at the intersections of visual anthropology, museum anthropology, digital culture studies, media studies, indigenous studies, and applied anthropology. It is a companion to the award winning media project Dene Wajich–Dane-zaa Stories and Songs, which Kate produced with a impressive group of Dane-zaa and non-native collaborators. (Including our mutual friends Pat Moore and Amber Ridington.) More could be said, but for now three cheers for Kate!

Jul 11

Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office Seeks Archaeologist

The Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office is seeking to hire an archaeologist. The AAA job page has the ad, which can be found here.

My friend and former doctoral advisee, Dr. Brice Obermeter coordinates the tribe’s historical preservation work from Emporia State University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Jul 11

Brian Gilley Named Director of IU’s First Nations Educational and Cultural Center

Congratulations to Dr. Gilley, IUB and the FNECC.

Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology and director of the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies program at the University of Vermont, has been selected as the first director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.

Read the full IUB Press Release here.

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.

Jun 30

AcademiX Presentations on Open Access Now Online

I am happy to report that the videos from the AcademiX 2010 conference on “Learning in an Open-Access World” are now online.  One can get to them via this page on the MacLearning.org site or one can just go into iTunes University in iTunes and search on AcademiX or a particular presenter’s name. While they are embedded in iTunes, they are free to all those who wish to consult them.  As discussed here earlier, my presentation is titled: “Innovation and Open Access in Scholarly Journal Publishing.” The other presenters and their titles are:

  • John Wilbanks (Creative Commons) Commons-Based Licensing and Scholarship – The Next Layer of the Network
  • Ben Hawkridge (Open University) New Channels for Learning – Podcasting Opportunities for a Distance University
  • Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Education for a Mobile Generation
  • Nick Shockey (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) The Digital Natives are Getting Restless – The Student Voice of the Open Access Movement
  • Richard E. Miller (Rutgers University) and Paul Hammond (Rutgers University) This is How We Think – Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift

I hope that our presentations are useful to the community in their this new form. Thank you to Apple for hosting the gathering and making these materials freely available online.

Jun 21

Deaccession and Accreditation in University Museums

As reported in Inside Higher Education, the AAM is moving to strengthen university and college accreditation standards to stress the importance of host institutions not treating museum collections as disposable assets. While this will be discussed mainly in connection with university and college art museums and galleries, it is equally important for museums of ethnography and other collections of cultural heritage.

Jun 15

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University of Prince Edward Island Unplugs Web of Science

Official news here that the University of Prince Edward Island is giving up on licensing Web of Science in the face of a 120% subscription increase. Better yet, they are taking the forward-looking step of building a consortium to develop a free and open alternative to it. Congratulations and thank you UPEI.

Web of Science is a product sold by Thompson Reuters. Part of its bundle of services is the proprietary system of citation indexes and impact factor rankings that has gummed up much of the legacy journal system.

Jun 11

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Dorothea Salo on NPG versus the University of California (or Make Tomorrow “Thank a Librarian Day”)

Compelling commentary on Nature Publishing Group versus the University of California by Dorothea Salo can be found here. The recent counter-reply by the UC leadership is awesome–careful and compelling.

While there are prominent pro-OA voices that are critical of boycotts and various other “wake-up people” approaches to changing scholarly communications, particularly as these efforts are deemed as ineffective and distracting relative to the full-steam-ahead implementation of green OA, I am personally gratified by the level of attention that faculty and researchers are paying to the NPG-UC dust-up. I think that this can only help on numerous fronts–serials crisis, budget crisis, enclosure, open access, IP, tax-payer awareness, administrator awareness, politician awareness, etc. If nothing else, it is revealing to new audiences how unbelievably hard and well academic librarians work on behalf of faculty, researchers, students, and staff. They deserve free, delicious, homemade cookies everyday simply for going regularly– on our behalf–into negotiation meetings with the representatives of NPG and the other mega-publishers. I know that that work is about as dispiriting as it gets.

Jun 9

Congratulations Smithsonian Anthropology

Today I received the email newsletter of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Their lead story is a big deal. Congratulations to the department on the successful conclusion of a curatorial hiring effort that has brought four new colleagues to the department. Department Chair Dan Rogers writes:

With the arrival of Gwyneira Isaac (curator, North American indigenous cultures) in early June and the arrival of Gabriela Perez Baez (curator, linguistics) in December 2009, the department has successfully concluded its search for four new curators over the past three years. (Curators Joshua Bell (globalization) and Torben Rick (human-environmental interaction) were hired in 2008.) This represents the largest influx of curatorial staff in several decades and we are delighted to bring in another generation of scholars. These hires bring the number of anthropology curators to 23.

This is great news for Smithsonian anthropology specifically and for museum anthropology generally. Congratulations and good luck to the new members of the curatorial staff.

Jun 9

OA Tracking Project, Connotea, Nature Publishing Group, Threatened UC Boycott

I wish that the otherwise awesome Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) was not reliant upon Connotea, a product of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Peter Suber describes the project and why it uses Connotea here. The problems with NPG are discussed in the recent letter threatening a UC-system boycott of NPG. (See previous post.) Discussion in Insider Higher Education is here.

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