Teh Savage Minds Awards Ceremony

With less than a week to go until the start of the AAA, and no time to properly pull this off, I hereby announce that we will be annoucing the winners of the 1st annual Savage Minds Awarding of teh Excellents Contest on Saturday evening at 6pm in the lobby of the Hilton. ( We’ll also make sure to announce where the party is at that point). Which means it’s time to VOTE!!!

I will be there with a bell and a whistle, or some other noise maker like a cute little girl, to draw attention to my stupid antics, at which point I will announcingly annouce the nominees and winners in three categories:

1) Most Excellent Anthropology Blog (Vote Here)
2) Most Excellent Open Access Journal in Anthropology(Vote Here)
3) Most Excellent Uncategorizable Digital Thing-a-ma-job for Anthropology (Vote Here)

As you will have noticed, the category I wanted to award something to–that of best OA article is gone. I will instead recite an impromtu Eulogy for the absense of Open Access research in our discipline. Or maybe not.

Prizes will range from signed and numbered copies of print-outs of Savage Minds posts (suitable for Framing!) to cases of Artic Man Deoderant to valuable caches of cowrie shells and dried beans.

A NOTE on the voting: I decided to use Mako Hill’s awesome Selectricity Tool. It allows you to calculate the vote in all kinds of ways so we can conceivably have many winners depending on how we count ! What better way to encourage cultural relativism! Go and Vote! Tell your friends.

The Nominees are:

Most Excellent Blog

  1. Owen Wiltshire’s “Another Anthro Blog
  2. Lorenz Khazaleh’s “Antropologi.info
  3. Material World” (Haidy Geismar, Daniel Miller, Graeme Were, Patrick Laviolette)
  4. Erkan Saka, “Erkan’s Field Diary
  5. Alexandere Enkerli’s Linguistic Anthropology
  6. Maximilian Forte’sOpen Anthropology
  7. Culture Matters
  8. (Greg Downey, Joana Breidenbach, Nursel Guzeldeniz, Jovan Maud, Pal Nyiri, Stephen Cox, Lisa Wynn)

Most Excellent Uncategorizable Digital Thing-a-ma-job for Anthropology

  1. The Center for History and New Media’s Syllabus Finder (Dan Cohen, Producer)
  2. Digital Ethnography, (Mike Wesch, Producer)
  3. Open Context, Eric Kansa, Producer
  4. Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive :: An Indigenous Archive Tool (Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich, Producers)
  5. Neuroanthropology (Which was also nominated for Best Blog, but I’m spreading the love unilaterally)
  6. Alan MacFarlane’s gloriously heterogenous collection of Anthro Stuff

Most Excellent Gold OA Journal (Which is also the de facto best Category Not Listed in the original post)

  1. Ethnobotany Research and Applications
  2. Ecological and Environmental Anthropology
  3. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
  4. Anthropology Matters
  5. Oral Tradition
  6. Cultural Analysis
  7. Asian Ethnology
ckelty

Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author most recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of peer review and research process in the sciences and in the humanities.

5 thoughts on “Teh Savage Minds Awards Ceremony

  1. There ought to be an option to send only the items wou actually want to vote for into the voting process. If I only really have an opinion on 3 items out of a list of 7 and only bother to rank a top 3, items 4-7 will still get points for being 4th, 5th, 6th or 7th. Do the items appear in random order every time the page loads? If not, items nearer the top of the list would end up getting a lot more ‘apathetic’ votes than items near the bottom.

  2. ah but you have just discovered the mystery of voting systems. I don’t know if the items appear in random order… that’s a good question, but the results depend on the system you choose. If I choose majority or plurality, then it doesn’t matter how the other 6 entries are ordered, only the entry at the top. if I choose condorcet or borda, it does matter. Since I didn’t specify which voting system we would use, you have no idea what to do… cultural relativism reigns supreme!!!!!

    If I had specified the voting system, then you would have to give it more thought. The full version of Selectricity is a bit more sophisticated than the “QuickVote” version…

  3. Apart from anything else, the issue for me is that I haven’t actually looked at many of the nominees. Thus, only the first one or two nominations I choose are meaningful. The order of the others is arbitrary. It would be good of the system had a zero option, I choice that simply said, “I don’t know.”

  4. Apart from anything else, the issue for me is that I haven’t actually looked at many of the nominees. Thus, only the first one or two nominations I choose are meaningful. The order of the others is arbitrary. It would be good of the system had a zero option, I choice that simply said, “I don’t know.”

  5. Why won’t this site allow me to post comments? And why didn’t anyone nominate Keith Hart’s The Memory Bank? No other anthro blog even comes close to this one…

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