Anyway: yes, we would like to make Cultural Anthropology all hip, with your collective help. We’ve taken a lot of inspration from Savage Minds, but have a different project: we want the site to be focused on the last twenty years of CA, and the next twenty — or at least the next four, when Kim Fortun and I stop being editors. We can’t post CA articles directly, because of that little Anthrosource thing, but we can embellish, supplement, mutate, and extend them. Where the site goes really is experimental and, as ckelty sez, depends on what people can come up with.

We couldn’t run anything like this on the RPI servers, so renting our own little portion of the noosphere was an obvious choice. Casey’s Da Man as far as we’re concerned, since we know jack about platforms — but are learning…

Oops — looks like I’ve crossed the line from skulking to blogging. Come visit (it’s culanth.org, not cultanth) and play…

It is just now getting underway. It’s “live” in that we wanted to get the Lipsitz Op-Ed piece out where it was visible and lay the framework for future efforts. It’s “official” I suppose in that it’s being run by the current journal staff (editors, managing editor and editorial assistant) of the journal. Does that count?

We’re working on adding users (we’re at about 20 registered users, and I’m trying to encourage people to use their names, for pedegogical reasons). SCA members can blog on the site, and all registered users can use the forums and post comments on articles. We’re hoping to post more supplemental material for articles and educational material for those interested in teaching through CA.

True there isn’t much up in the way of supplemental material and forum conversation, but hey, the first issue under the new editorship is only just now getting off to UC Press. We certainly have high hopes for the site, but until we get our fist issue off the ground, I suspect we wont have as much on the site as even we would like. Right now we’re working to create lists of articles for educators to use from previous issues of CA. We’re always looking for new feeds which we ought to aggregate, or other bright ideas on how to do this. I’m personally juggling this with doing fieldwork, so my eye isn’t always 100% on the ball.

Drupal was my pick because I know about |–| that much PHP, and Drupal was a known entity to me.

Oh, and culturalanthropology.org and .net was taken:

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY.ORG
ROGGEKAMP 87
THE HAGUE, ZH 2592 VM
NL

Administrative Contact :
DANIELS, ALFRED
NLD

Technical Contact :
Hostmaster, TABNet **
CA, USA

I’m not sure what SCA wants so I don’t know what cms it should use. Joomla has always seemed to me to be overkill, Drupal works in a certain out of the box but is difficult to modify (unless you know a lot of -perl- php, in which case you didn’t need it in the first place), etc. WordPress is quite flexible, etc. etc. My tendency these days is to install different packages depending on the functionality you wanted. We’ll see — I’m in the midst of doing this for a different section of the AAA so we’ll see what happens.

Oh, and Drupal… (which is php btw, not perl, but < ?php $snarky_comment=1 ?> nonetheless… it is an opaque project)… be aware that the site is entirely created and run (so far) by one underpaid grad student assistant… and an extremely valuable and clever underpaid gs assistant at that… you would prefer what? Shall we build the SCA Linux distribution now? A Plone site? Drupal is as easy as they get (although Joomla is starting to look pretty good…)