The First Annual Savage Minds Awarding of teh Excellents almost has a full slate of candidates (only a couple of nominations came in by email). I’m shooting for 6 nominees in each category. We need a few more before we can move on to voting, if you aren’t already exhausted by certain other campaigns that seem to be going on, and on. Clearly we need good nominees for the Article category… get out there and read, people. And please feel free to distribute this call widely… awards will involve Pansies, and nobody wants to miss that.
And the nominees so far are:
Most Excellent Blog
- Owen Wiltshire’s “Another Anthro Blog”
- Lorenz Khazaleh’s “Antropologi.info“
- “Material World” (Haidy Geismar, Daniel Miller, Graeme Were, Patrick Laviolette)
- Erkan Saka, “Erkan’s Field Diary”
(Ful disclosure, I am on Erkan’s Dissertation committee… and I have no freaking idea what kind of conflict of interest this is). - Alexandere Enkerli’s “Disparate” has been nominated, but Enkerli has immediately questioned this nomination and suggested instead that Linguistic Anthropology would be more appropriate, thus splitting the vote… unless he’d like to choose just one to up his chances.
Most Excellent OA Article
- Emmanuel Désveaux, “Amerindian Roots of Bob Dylan’s Poetry” Oral Tradition 22(1)
- Dorothy Noyes, “The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership” Cultural Analysis 5, 2006
(I axed the Sahlins nomination because, well, because it’s Sahlins… and a lecture, and from 2005).
Most Excellent OA Teaching Materials (very broadly construed, apparently)
- The Center for History and New Media’s Syllabus Finder (Dan Cohen, Producer)
- Digital Ethnography, (Mike Wesch, Producer)
- Open Context, Eric Kansa, Producer
- Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive :: An Indigenous Archive Tool (Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich, Producers)
Most Excellent Gold OA Journal (Which is also the de facto best Category Not Listed in the original post)
I’d like to nominate Open Anthropology in the Most Excellent Blog category. Thanks!
Thanks for the nomination! May I nominate one of my favorite blogs Culture Matters?
If there are (too) many nominated blogs (there are so many great blogs!) one could split them into two categories: group blogs and individual blogs
Is there a deadline for the nominations?
We may yet have to have a group/individual blog split… we’ll see what the response is.
And as for deadlines… yes. I just don’t know what it is yet 🙂
Split the blogs if that is what it takes for Open Anthropology to be nominated. But it must.
To be clear: my main blog isn’t about anthropology, so I wouldn’t think it a good idea to have it nominated here. The Linguistic Anthropology blog is a collaborative blog about “teh most excellent field within anthropology.” The main contributor to that blog is Chad Nilep but I did post a couple of things (including a piece which should be in the next issue of AN). The LingAnth blog is a perfectly reasonable nomination, here. I didn’t want to nominate it myself because I’m involved in that blog and self-promotion always sounds fake.
LingAnth gets too little attention. My main blog gets enough.
I second the nomination for Open Anthropology and suggest adding Neuroanthropology both for blog and teaching resource. If you teach at the undergrad level its invaluable for making sense of the bio developments (particularly if you are a cultural type). BTW shouldn’t you all update your own blog roll? Us small, struggling, bloggers need a little love.
And another for Open Anthropology! Pamthropologist has a fantastic blog as well. Why not just nominate them all?
http://www.alanmacfarlane.com is an amazing resource put together by someone in the Cambridge anthropology department… interviews with many notable anthropologists, video lectures on many topics, electronic versions of his books. Whether it constitutes open access or not, and would therefore be eligible for “Most Excellent OA Teaching Materials”, is a point for the lawyers – but I felt that shouldn’t stop me from flagging it up as excellent, given I’ve whiled away many an hour looking around there.
For lots of reasons, I am eager to see the gold journal category succeed. I have already offered a nomination and three of my favorites already constitute the current list, but I can name a few other significant ones that might be considered in the work of filling out and broadening the pool. Rounding these three up suggests the way that OA in mainline science research has inflected certain sectors of anthropology more than others.
Ethnobotany Research and Applications
http://128.171.206.29/ojs/index.php/era
Ecological and Environmental Anthropology
http://eea.anthro.uga.edu/index.php/eea/index
Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
http://www.ethnobiomed.com/
The best OA Journal? I’d like to nominate Anthropology Matters http://www.anthropologymatters.com/
Thanks for the nomination Lorenz!
I’d like to nominate a recent article for the OA Article category: Paul Hendrich, “Charting a New Course for Deptford Town Hall,” Anthropology Matters 10(1), 2008 (http://www.anthropologymatters.com/journal/2008-1/hendrich_2008_charting.pdf)