Just a random couple of notes on two tools that I’ve looked at recently.

1) Mary Murrell points out that the Institute for the Future of the Book has released Sophie 1.0 and has announced a competition for a workshop at the institute for multimedia literacy at USC. Sophie is a multi-media authoring tool—a bit like Macromedia Director, for those who can remember that far back into the last millenium, but much much better. It’s open source, it has a very nice interface that allows for rapid construction of multi-page documents which can incorporate sound, video and images. It has a timeline for creating time-based presentations and it handles most of the main formats without trouble. It does take a bit of energy to learn, but it could be used to create really rich presentations or documents. It’s kind of the perfect in-between-film-and-text tool. The only shortcoming is that it produces its own file format which requires the sophie reader (also free, and available on mac-windows-linux) to read a book produced in sophie. This means that docs can’t be easily displayed on the web, but requires the viewer to download and install a piece of software. Better for presentations than stand-alone docs, I guess. However, it looks like one could export the time -based stuff to a movie format, and the text-based stuff to a pdf, so it’s not that bad.

2) On the extremely cool, but maddening side is Apture. Apture is an amazingly clever add-on to a web-site that allows beautifully clever links that pop-up and move the window around and allow you to quickly add photos and video to any site. It’s hard to explain (go play with the the demo). The down side is that this is 1) so NOT free and open source software, and as far as I can tell a direct route into allowing apture to basically display whatever it wants on your site, in order to get this functionality (it uses a remote application server that essentially serves content on top of your site, so it’s a bit like an annotation service); and 2) it ruins the “view source” aspect of the web by overlaying content that cannot be easily investigated, as one can with normal content displayed in a browser. Apture is hardly the main culprit here, but they are part of a trend towards the obfuscation of web technologies, towards a re-closing of the source so that it becomes harder and harder for individuals to teach themselves such new tools. Indeed, Apture is not intended to be learned and re-used by anyone except at the interface level, unlike the wealth of tools (HTML, PHP, perl, python, ruby) that we have come to expect as part of our information environment. This makes me sad and mad. I wish they could see the light

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For those of you looking for an intellectual antidote to the very serious conference oneman will be attending this weekend, I recommend that you join me at ROFLCon. ROFLCon is like the apocalypse, the last episode of M*A*S*H and the stupidest thing you can think of all rolled into one amazing package of Internet Memes. It is win. It can has cheezburger. Stuff White People Like Likes it. Since the Internet is Serious Business, this conference is likely to cause major waves in the morpho-memetic cultural field. I intend to make my forthcoming book into the next meme. I must be stopped. If I survive, and I intend to, I promise a report full of lies and distortions, dressed up as objective anthropological research. Leeeeeeeeeeerooooooooooy Jeeeeeeenkins!

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Certainly more promising in its tone and affect than Strong’s recent case of anthropology villification is Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure case at Barnard (it’s not up on line yet, but I’ll post the link when it is). I think the article is well done, given the near impossible noise to signal ratio that develops around such issues, and especially in Morningside Heights. It gave me a sharper sense of just how powerful Edward Said’s legacy has become in the years since his death. It is, however, a bit light on explaining why her book, Facts on the Ground is innovative, or why it might be interesting to those who want to understand the situation in Israel and Palestine from a new perspective. Although it mentions the basic outlines (the something-more-than-ironic intertwining of Israeli archeology and Zionism), it doesn’t go very far towards contextualizing why anthropologists are doing this kind of work now, and why the reaction represents not only the ideological extremism of the people who deliberately misinterpret it, but also the failure of anthropology and anthropologists to get their messages out.

I think this is a shame, because the book really could be an authoritative one, and I don’t really understand why everyone (including Abu El Haj herself) just sort of wilts and defends, not the book, but the right for academics to decide tenure amongst themselves (which I completely agree with, of course, I have to). But this instead of coming out with a forceful statement of the content and substance of the book? I think there must be something interesting to say about the inability anthropology has of defending itself against the contemporary blog-mediated, 72-hour news cycle, personal-attack media ecology we live in. Note the total absence of the AAA in this article, save a mention of our president-elect, Virginia Dominguez, who was Abu El-Haj’s advisor. Why shouldn’t the AAA step in and fight this fight on behalf of Abu El-Haj? Is there as choice other than responding to idiotic, personlized, ideological attacks and sticking one’s head in the sand? Clearly institutions like Columbia are too economically and politically captured to do it for their faculty, should our professional society be helping?

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I’ll be damned if we aren’t going to take our reader’s complaints seriously and start thinking criticially about things like the dominance of north american anthropology and our tendency to post inane shit. Like this blog. Which is the funniest and most incisive thing about Race I’ve read since Gloria Anzaldua.

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By way of kicking off our “occasional contributors” project, Carole McGranahan has agreed to write something about Tibet for us, which she will shortly post. Carole McGranahan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2001. Currently, she is revising her book manuscript Once and Future Truths: Tibet, the CIA, and Histories of a Forgotten War for Duke University Press.

I found a number of great articles she’s written about Tibet, which I’m sure she’d be willing to share with anyone who cannot access them.

On behalf of the elite Euro-American gatekeepers of Anthropology here at Savage Minds, I would like to thank Carole for agreeing to mix it up here on this subject.

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The Guardian has two comments, one by Vaclav Havel and one by Timothy Garton Ash on the situation in Tibet. Havel’s, signed with others, is a strong indictment of inaction, and both essentially call for the same thing: allowing the media in, opening dialogue with the Dalai Lama, and otherwise moving towards a path of dialogue. Ash in particular points out (as commentors here did as well) that the issue is not “independence” but autonomy. Whether or not to boycott the Olympics also seems a bit undecided here, especially if things escalate further. The Olympic torch leaves Athens on Monday. It’s still scheduled to stop in Lhasa.

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The recent violence in Tibet has been poorly covered by American media, and even more poorly analyzed, if at all. In fact, the only analysis I’ve seen so far is at Boing Boing, where they pay attention to things like this if it involves China blocking traffic to Boing Boing (which is actually probably a pretty good proxy measure of serious human rights abuses). I’ve been looking for anthropologists who have something to say on this, and with any luck, Vincanne Adams of UCSF, who is currently in China, will send us a short analysis on the subject. I and others (including Paul Rabinow, who suggested that we start a discussion here) would like to see this get more sustained, intelligent attention, given how completely dull the US media has been on the subject. I suppose it’s no surprise that the current administration has been silent. However, it’s also demoralizing that the current presidential candidates are, if not silent, weak and ill-informed on the subject (Obama seems to think the Tibetans are angry with the way Beijing is ruling Tibet, not that they are). Clinton, meanwhile, has said next to nothing on the subject.

This is another one of those instances where anthropologists should have something informed to say on this. If anyone has pointers to intelligent analysis, meaningful ways to show solidarity or other ideas, please share.

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Speaking of the NYRB, there is a totally “charming” article about Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker this month. Baker is exactly the kind of person I want to have speaking for Wikipedia, and his focus is not on reliability or legitimacy or the moral panics that so many seem to grasp at, but on the dangers of the “deletionists” and his one-man crusade to stop them from ruining what is in his estimation (and I agree) the true charm of Wikipedia, it’s ability to take the ephemeral, the obscure, the barely noticed and the everyday as seriously as the most revered data points of our collective experience. He asks for our help in preventing the deletionists from winning…

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Originally posted at Open Access Anthropology

I recently wrote a piece for Anthropology News which mentioned among other things that regardless of the AAA’s position, official or unofficial, about Open Access, it’s nonetheless happening in all kinds of ways. Now it’s happening in one more way that the AAA will have to deal with. Viz. Harvard’s recent announcement that it is mandating that faculty give Harvard permission to archive all of their publications, regardless of the AAA’s or Wiley Blackwell’s internal policies on Open Access.

What this means initially for the AAA and WB is that if any AAA journal want to publish an article by Harvard faculty, they need to do one of three things: 1) allow it to be open access 2) refuse to publish it or 3) convince the faculty member to request a waiver from Harvard. Now in some ways this is nothing new: author agreements for AAA publications already allow self-archiving, so there will no need to choose 2 or 3, unless WB decides to change that policy down the line (so this kind of policy is actually good insurance). In other ways, this is a significant step forward for OA because it reverses the role of inertia: instead of faculty defaulting to closed access, they now default to open access, which is in their interests, instead of contrary to them.

Now this policy can be mis-interpreted in a number of different ways (all of which Peter Suber has collected and responded to), but the basic fact is that this is almost the best possible policy for everyone. It functions by mandating permission—Harvard retains a non-exclusive right to everything its faculty publish, and therefore can choose to (and will) make it available in an Open Access repository open to anyone. (more…)

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This is a great little video about current research by three anthropologists in MIT’s anthropology department. It’s a great answer to “so what the hell is anthropology?” because it shows anthropologists Actually Doing Fieldwork. Shocking that… Every department should make one I think…

Click To Play

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On the subject of the diverse forms of Marriage and Reproduction, consider mathematicians. About 8 or 9 years ago the Mathematics Department of North Dakota State University started the “Mathematics Genealogy Project”—a database of every mathematician, living and dead and a list of their advisors and advisees. Mathematicians, and many other scientists, are famously obsessed with this kind of accounting of filiation. There’s even a mathematical concept, coined by the Kevin Bacon of Mathematics, Paul Erdös. The Erdös Number measures the co-authorship relation of two authors.

The Mathematics genealogy project has gotten a fair amount of attention, and it got me thinking that, Anthropology being the discipline most obsessed with genealogy as such, shouldn’t we have something similar, an Anthropology Genealogy project? Except better, and wackier with all those fantastic forms of kinship we know to exist? Not just students and advisors, but co-authors, membership in groups, crazy collaborations, informants who become anthropologists and anthropologists who become informants, concepts and diagrams and long-standing arguments about specific locales and research programs. Indeed, if we could figure out how to tie it in to major research traditions, conflicts and disagreements etc.—-even if schematic and simplistic—-then it might be a really good way to present the diversity of the discipline. Perhaps a Google Maps mashup of fieldsites, a la Susanne Calpestri’s for Berkeley? Or a recommendation engine…”People who studied this people, might also enjoy studying this people…” etc.

What does your genealogy of anthropology look like? Mine starts with Gary Gygax at the top

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I want to point people to a couple of things related to the intersection of peer review and open access. The first is a recent round-table discussion held at the Center for Studies of Higher Education at UC Berkeley, which brought together a great group of people including Don Kennedy, the editor of Science and Mark Rose (author of Authors and Owners) among others. The minutes are available (link) and they include a number of interesting proposals and diagnoses of the main problems facing scholarly publishing today, including some sharp observations about the financial realities of publishing peer-reviewed work and creative ideas for publishing monographs.

The other, a bit late, but still ongoing is that Noah Wardrip-Fruin over at Grant Text Auto, is experimenting with blog-based, serialized, community peer review. Noah’s book, Expressive Processing (one of a increasingly large number of texts laying claim to the field of “software studies”), is serialized for commentary using comment press (hip hip hooray!) and is being conducted along side “standard” peer review with MIT Press. I think this is a great idea whose time has definitely come, for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m more and more fond of the idea that peer review is best done by communities of people who are not anonymous. Pseudonymy might be a good idea (i.e., I don’t care who “IreadBooks69” is at Amazon but I know that s/he writes great reviews). The other is that community is a just generally a good idea. If the people commenting on Noah’s book feel as though they are contributing, are part of something, and that they get credit for it, or perhaps even get an immediate response, then that beats the heck out of the anonymous, forgotten black hole I routinely send my reviews into. I only hope Noah writes some kind of white paper-ish thing highlighting what works and what doesn’t so that people can repeat the experience.

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You don’t need to be a fan of the series 24 to get the joke here.

I watched it and it immediately made me think that there is a kind of ethnographic method here, perhaps a class assignment: take a familiar case from the contemporary setting and explore it by setting it back 15 years. Change everything you can think of, what stays the same and what makes a difference? Could be a useful way to pick apart the difference technology makes. Or perhaps not, since as EB White says: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”

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Dear Savage Minds,

Rex’s recent post about the recent set of articles in Anthropology News raises a question I’ve started to take more seriously: switch or fight? By which I mean: the more I deal with the AAA, especially the component dealing with publications, promotion and public policy, the more I am disheartened by the state of affairs. I agreed to write a piece for this month’s Anthropology News because Stacy Lathrop, who has done yeoman’s (yeowoman’s?) work trying to change things at AN, and Jason Cross urged me to express in AN some of the things that have been a constant topic here on Savage Minds. I think this is a worthy goal, because AN serves a different audience than the blogosphere, and despite the remarkable reach this blog has managed to attain, there are still lots and lots of working anthropologists who have no effing clue about these issues, and the only way it might penetrate is to go through the official organ (sorry, valentines day brings out the worst in me).

The relationship started really well. The idea was to release the pieces under a Creative Commons license, along with the launch of the new AAA site. Jason and I urged the AAA publications staff to release the articles with fanfare and openly so as to instigate a discussion. We thought it would be great to use something like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Comment Press software to allow people to do what Rex did… respond in detail to the arguments of the authors. I offered to set it up, I offered to host it, I offered to maintain it, I offered to eat any costs. In the end, we got neither the license nor the discussion. To be fair, the “negotiations” did result in a promise to keep the articles openly available after March 1, and there is a link at the bottom that says: “What are your thoughts? Share your comments here.” February 14th, and there are three comments, one of them from Jason Cross and one a trackback, two if you count this one.

So this is not only a failure of Open Access, its a profound failure of leadership and a failure to create dialogue. I still believe that publishing in AN reached a larger audience. And I still believe that we need to rescue the AAA from itself, and I’ve agreed to try to do that by serving on committees and even running for a position in the Spring (w00t. vote for me.). But more and more I’m hearing people say something like: do we really need the AAA? Can’t we start something ourselves? Can’t we secede from the AAA? Granted, no one is saying this in public, but I’m hearing it. A lot. So if this special focus on OA was a safety valve, someone turned it the wrong direction in my case.

So I’m not sure where to go in this relationship. The AAA does a lot for me. It puts a roof over my head once a year, and it gives me a line on my cv. Sometimes I even think it loves me… but I really can’t be sure anymore… what should I do?

Signed,
Confused in Cambridge…

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http://aaanet.org/

discuss.

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