ArXiv for social science research anyone? @savageminds @culanth @haujournal @jmtrombley @jasonjackson2 @daniel_lende @MattThompsonTMM

— ryan anderson (@anthropologia) May 19, 2016

This is a pretty interesting idea. What would it entail taking arXiv as a role model?

What is arXiv?

Like SSRN, arXiv is a digital repository. They are both examples of Green OA — a type of open access where authors deposit versions of their work so that they can be accessed by readers for free. What version of an article makes it into the repository depends on which publisher you’re working with, but almost all of them allow authors to deposit the original submission: no peer review, no mark-up, no type setting. Others are more generous, a few even allow the post-print to be deposited. It just depends, if you want to go Green do some research on your publisher’s homepage or ask a company rep.

Green OA is frequently contrasted with Gold OA, where the author submits to a journal that makes the final product available to readers for free, examples include HAU and Cultural Anthropology. Again, there is great diversity among Gold OA publishers just as there is among Green repositories but we’re not getting into that here.

arXiv is Green OA, it is a pre-print repository but of a particular kind. If you’re at an elite or second tier R1 you probably already have access to a repository through your institution. However many of these institutional repositories (IRs) share a common problem, faculty participation is low. Some universities have attempted to address this with OA mandates, but this is not always sufficient to change faculty behavior. People are really busy, or maybe they don’t see the value in access. Perhaps they think someone else will do it for them, or are mistaken about their author’s rights. For whatever reason many people who can go Green choose not to.

The generally poor showings for institutional repositories has lead some in the digital libraries field to argue that IRs are not the way forward for Green OA. Instead they anticipate that disciplinary repositories (DRs), sometimes called subject repositories, will be more successful. Perhaps in our neoliberal world faculty are less tied to their institution than their discipline? Both SSRN and arXiv are DRs.

nb. There are other ways you can get your pre-prints out there without a repository. Social networks like academia.edu and researchgate.net exist to facilitate self-promotion and the sharing of information. Similarly with personal webpages. However, a major advantage to IRs and DRs over social networks and personal webpages is that the former are run by information professionals. Digital librarians who will work to insure that your metadata meet international standards and that technical stuff, like bit stream preservation, are well maintained thus keeping your work discoverable and accessible. To get the best of both worlds deposit your work in a repository, this will result in a URL that you can embed on your webpage or network.

So both SSRN and arXiv are Green OA, disciplinary repositories run by full-time professionals. But there’s a difference!

What makes arXiv special?

Three things make arXiv magic. It carries prestige among the community it is intended to serve, it has a very successful business plan, and it has a very successful governance model. All of this was achieved with only twenty-five years of hard work and sacrifice.

On its front page arXiv boasts 1,148,725 e-prints available for download, better than double SSRN’s 563,300. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that arXiv was originally intended as a repository just for physicists (today it has slightly expanded that scope) whereas SSRN aims to serve all of the social sciences and the humanities.

For some reason physicists have really bought into what arXiv has to offer. Maybe it is a result of the collaborative atmosphere of physics research? In my imagination, cultural anthropology romanticizes the lone genius — we’re either collecting ethnographic data in some out of the way place isolated from the rest of the world or perhaps cloistered in an solitary office channeling that experience into text only to emerge with the finished product. Maybe we just don’t do enough stuff as part of a team?

Aside: I think an integral part of the professional life of someone in the social sciences or humanities is the experience of being in a constant state of precarity. Not only do our colleagues in the STEM fields have more resources at their disposal, they are not constantly called upon to defend their very existence to powerful outsiders. Shoestring budgets and the unending barrage of existential threats make a lot of social science and humanities faculty “small-c conservative,” risk averse and skeptical about diverging from the well-worn path of professional success offered by conventional publications.

All of this is to say, there seems to be something about the “culture” of physicists that contributes to their high participation rate. If I was a physicist and I deposited an e-print in arXiv I could tell my buddies and everyone would pat me on the back. Good job! Another publication! If as an anthropologist I make a deposit to SSRN and I tell my buddies about it, everyone would say, What’s SSRN? and, When are you going to publish that? Raising the prestige and visibility of Green OA is one of the best possible outcomes of the SSRN/Elsevier merger. But more on that later

One more detail: arXiv does not rely on peer review. Instead, there is a system of vetting author submissions. Like peer reviewers, experts volunteer to vet submissions but instead of writing comments they are primarily interested in making sure that papers are acceptable and properly sorted into their appropriate sub-field. Many arXiv papers go on to have other lives as traditional publications and thus go through a peer review process eventually. My point here is that physicists think sharing unreviewed work is a notable accomplishment in a way that anthropologists (currently) do not.

The business plan for arXiv is perhaps the most crucial ingredient to its success. Born in the Los Alamos Laboratories in 1991, arXiv has since migrated with its founder Paul Ginsparg to Cornell. Cornell University Libraries, known as a leader even among the most elite libraries, has since 2011 provided the repository with infrastructural support and staffing. Annual funding from CUL is supplemented with the deep pockets of the Simons Foundation, both in the form of annual funding and challenge grants. Further contributing to this are voluntary pledges from about 200 institutions that represent arXiv’s heaviest users, these pledges range $1500-3000 per institution per year. The above are 2012 numbers.

Oya Yildirim Rieger writes in “Sustainability: Scholarly Repository as Enterprise” (Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol.39, No.1) that there are five sustainability principles CUL adheres to in planning the future of arXiv: (1) deep integration into the scholarly community and scholarly process — scientists take a leadership role in guiding arXiv, it reflects their values and their community as a result; (2) a clearly defined mandate and governance structure — if you’re running a digital archive then you’re playing a long game. The long game is the whole point of archiving things!; (3) technology platform stability and innovation — the data architecture and user interface game has to be top notch and always responsive to the constantly changing expectations of the users; (4) systematic development of content policies — be crystal clear about collection policies, submission guidelines, copyright status, etc.; (5) reliance on business planning strategies — you want big money for your repository? Then you better be able to talk the business talk and show value to your investors.

The long term viability of arXiv is sustained by its thoughtful governance structure. CUL upholds its end of the bargain from a managerial and administrative standpoint, they house the archive. But they are in constant communication with two boards: a Member Advisory Board, consisting of elected representatives from stakeholder institutions, and a Scientific Advisory Board that consists of researchers in the fields arXiv serves. These two boards are responsible for providing input on different aspects of arXiv’s development. The MAB is more concerned with implementing information standards, working towards interoperability, and planning. The SAB is concerned with intellectual oversight and the vetting process.

What about the future of SSRN?

As you can see arXiv has a lot to recommend it and achieving these goals will be a tall order. In the meantime, we already have the SSRN plus all manner of other institutional repositories and digital libraries. So, do we really need something like arXiv instead?

To be sure Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN is disappointing to many open access activists because it represents another step towards the corporate enclosure of intellectual life. Elsevier is perceived by many as among the worst of the bunch because of its reputation for playing hardball, being litigious, gobbling up author’s rights, and even on a few occasions acquiring OA journals and then charging for access to them. What a bully!

Elsevier has also been the focus of past and ongoing boycotts with scholars refusing to cite their journals, submit work, or volunteer as reviewers or editors. No doubt some authors will feel that they should abstain from participating in SSRN as an extension of their OA activism. If this sounds like you, then you will no doubt be in good company. There are lots of other ways you can go Green OA. Vote with your feet and choose one of those instead.

I’m actually going to run the other way with this. I am not going to advocate for the boycotting of SSRN and this is why: open access is not free.

arXiv solved the problem of funding open access by aligning itself with an Ivy League school and the philanthropic arm of a crazy rich hedge fund manager. Plus it still manages to get hundreds of other libraries to send it checks on an annual basis, NPR-style. SSRN saw another way forward, selling out to corporate America. Did the professional staff at SSRN all get big bonuses and golden parachutes as a result? Probably not. They do, however, get to have salaries and benefits which is pretty cool considering they give their product away for free. They, SSRN, had reached the limit of their growth as an independent entity and needed more resources to advance their goal. Ckelty is probably right that Elsevier sees this as an opportunity to feast upon data, but if the service remains free to use while increasing in quality then that might be an acceptable trade off. As we have known since Darwin, trade offs are an integral part of distributing risk through populations living in complex ecosystems.

I suspect that some will not be persuaded. Contributing to an Elsevier property will be an ideological bridge too far and, to be honest, I am sympathetic with this position. An arXiv for the social sciences holds a lot of promise — but here’s the rub. Even if you had arXiv’s mad funding and governance skillz, you would still be missing a key ingredient: acceptance and prestige among the community the archive intends to serve. The physics community has embraced arXiv and Green OA in a way that anthropology and the social sciences has not. That’s on us.

So maybe we don’t need to replicate arXiv. Maybe we need to have a period of reflection, reflexivity in that classic ANTH 101 sense, about our “culture” as a discipline. Then conceptualize a repository that reflects that in a way that other anthropologists will think is valuable. That might result in something that is not identical to arXiv, but uniquely our own.

But the mad dough and Ivy library would probably be pretty helpful too.

Because we place a premium on organization and arrangement only authorized subject headings are permitted, something called a “controlled vocabulary.” In the work I’m doing now our controlled vocabulary comes from the Library of Congress. One of the defining characteristics of the LoC subject headings is that they are hierarchical, broad terms are subdivided into narrower terms, which are further divided and modified in rather rigid ways.

So those are the basic rules of the game. The objective is to describe the item so that others will find it, but within the constraints set out by the LoC (typically there are in-house rules you have to take in to consideration too, etc). Alright, given all that: What is this picture about?

We know that these men are in the Army by virtue of the collection I’m looking at and the guy with the cap bearing an insignia is a Lieutenant. We can express that like this:

United States. Army–Officers.

What this subject heading shows is that all the branches of the armed forces are corporate entities that are themselves subdivisions of the United States, I’ve further specified we are talking about Army officers which is a smaller subset of that broader term.

However, not everyone in this photo is an officer. Interestingly enough if I want to include the two black GI’s carrying the litter I cannot say United States. Army–African Americans, but instead must use African American soldiers. LoC explains the difference:

African American soldiers.

• Here are entered works on African American military personnel in the United States Army. Works on the organization, administration, and history of African American units within the United States Army are entered under United States. Army–African American troops.

This photograph is not about Army administration or history. Its about the personnel. Hence, African American soldiers and not United States. Army-African American troops.

A result of this is that the racial characteristics of some persons are labeled in the subject headings but not others. To remedy this I can utilize another field in my catalog record reserved for notes. My colleagues and I debated over the proper terminology to use, this is very important because all our word choices need to be justified (even our punctuation must be justified!) and consistently applied over the entire collection. Are we dealing with African Americans and Caucasians, or blacks and whites? Or what?

We decided to return to the LoC for guidance and here we found some interesting taxonomical definitions concerning race. Remember these are supposed to reflect the hierarchical arrangement of clear-cut definitions required by library catalogers.

African Americans

• Here are entered works on citizens of the United States of black African descent. Works on blacks who temporarily reside in the United States, such as aliens, students from abroad, etc., are entered under Blacks—United States. Works on blacks outside the United States are entered under Blacks—[place].

Blacks

• Here are entered works on blacks as an element in the population. Theoretical works discussing the black race from an anthropological point of view are entered under Black race. Works on black people in countries whose racial composition is predominantly black are assigned headings appropriate for the country as a whole without the use of the heading Blacks. The heading Blacks is assigned to works on such countries only if the work discusses blacks apart from other groups in the country.

Black race

• Here are entered theoretical works discussing the black race from an anthropological point of view. Works on blacks as an element in the population are entered under Blacks.

Whites

• Here are entered works of a sociological nature that discuss white people as an element in the population, especially in countries where they are a minority. Works of an anthropological nature focusing on the physical features that characterize Caucasians and distinguish them from other races of mankind are entered under Caucasian race.

Caucasian race

• Here are entered works of an anthropological nature focusing on the physical features that characterize Caucasians and distinguish them from other races of mankind. Works of a sociological nature that discuss white people as an element in the population, especially in countries where they are a minority, are entered under Whites.

Race as an abstract, theoretical construct is, for the Library of Congress, defined as the domain of anthropology because of the emphasis on physical features of the body. Anything not having to do with the body must therefore be sociological!

Returning to our photograph and its aboutness, it is clear that this item does not have anything to do with abstract, theoretical constructions such as the black race or the Caucasian race, but rather is about the specific people contained within the camera’s frame, they are blacks and whites. Therefore we can proceed with describing our photograph in the notes as about African Americans (who are citizens of the United States) and whites. So the subject headings are:

United States.–Army–Officers
African American soldiers
Allied health personnel and patient

And the note reads:

“Two African American soldiers carry a white patient in a litter while a white officer looks on.”

Not all the pictures are from Papua New Guinea, so I guess technically there aren’t 420 images that you can use when teaching Pigs. But in this case, it is important to emphasize not just quantity, but quality. The pictures are high-quality, and they are very well cataloged: each one has extensive metadata describing when it was taken, and what and who is in each picture. They are organized by topic so you can see, for example, just the pictures with pork in them if that’s what you’re into.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll state right away that the people who did this work are friends of mine, so I’m hardly an impartial observer. But it seems to me that collections like this are The Future. As the Internet gets more and more turgid, filled with ad-encrusted crud and unverifiable assertions, carefully curated open access collections like this are so, so welcome.

The Rappaport photos are hardly novel. Museums and libraries all over the world are making their collections available — just check out the institutions participating in the Flickr Commons project. But the key step between availability and use is discovery: making sure people know about all the great resources out there.

That’s hard to do for libraries, for whom just producing digital collections is work enough. We need to use these collections regularly, and credit them when we do use them. It’s only when word of mouth spreads that people will really develop a sense of the many hidden treasures out there available for research and use.

So this week, the next time you need a picture for a powerpoint, why not get this process rolling and use a picture from the Roy Rappaport collection?

These past months have seen carnage of unimaginable magnitude. But none has attracted the outpouring triggered by the Charlie Hebdo killings. What have cartoons got to do with this?

For many, but not most of the world, the experience of freedom is now salient in speech and expression. In this struggle for freedom and rights, and its maintenance, cartoons have become the severest testing ground. We reprimand cartoons. We summon cartoons. We make demands on cartoons.

This generative force of cartoons is at the heart of my book Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and the History in the Modern World.  It is a story of how cartoonists became central to newspapers and politics in India. It is also a history of why cartoons provide a new context for offence and the refusal to laugh.

Cartoons protests reveal a spectrum of politics. This jostle over cartoons is what I have called in my book, a “tactical modernity.”  It can also tell us a thing or two about other worlds of cartoons.

In the 1870s several “comic newspapers” with the famous moniker “Punch” appended to their title circulated in colonial India. This titular choice established kinship with the popular British humor magazine, Punch (1841). Published in the vernacular with circulation figures in a few hundreds, the colonial Indian Punch incarnations provide the first glimpse of “cartoon talk.” This talk surfaced during my archival research of the colonial British government’s weekly surveillance reports of newspapers and magazines.

In 1910 a prominent newspaper the Agra Akhbar wondered aloud at the displeasure of British officials when they saw vernacular cartoons mocking colonial rule. The newspaper editor illustrated his point with the official scorn received by a caricature in a Bengali Punch. From one perspective the caricature looked like a bulldog, but from another it resembled a British official.

What happened to British liberal humor that appreciated such visual tricks back home in its revered humor magazine Punch but not in the colonial vernacular Punchs? Colonial officials accused such vernacular punches of impertinence.

Such anxiety over the cartoons meanings did not end with colonial rule in 1947. As cartoonists got absorbed into independent India’s print journalism, newspapers began to boast of staff cartoonists. Cartoons were front-page news. This brought considerable attention to popular leaders, such as India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. “Don’t spare me Shankar”—Nehru’s jovial quip to his favorite cartoonist Shankar (1902-1989), is the lore of cartooning in India.

Soon after India’s independence, the new democratic government was busy crafting India’s constitution. Columbia Law School graduate, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar was the architect of this constitution. In 1949, reflecting on the slow pace of finalizing the constitution, Shankar published a cartoon depicting Nehru and Ambedkar. This was among several cartoons that tickled readers and lampooned politicians in the popular weekly, Shankar’s Weekly.

Few would have suspected that more than fifty years after its first publication in 1949, Shankar’s cartoon would bring the Indian Parliament to a standstill in 2012.

This happened because Shankar’s Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon was included in a new social science textbook issued as part of a series of curricular reforms in 2006. Dr. Ambedkar is a celebrated leader of India’s Dalits (contemporary term for historically oppressed communities marginalized in India’s caste system). Shankar’s depiction of Nehru whipping Ambedkar, who in turn nudged with a whip the snail¹ on which he was seated, raised an outcry for hurting Dalit sentiments.

The fracas over the publication of Shankar’s 1949 Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon in a social science textbook, and its subsequent excision from the textbook is a reminder of how cartoons do not just travel across space. Cartoons also travel across time. These shifting contexts of space and time make political cartoons provocative archives.

To the self-declared guardians of India’s young minds, the cartoon’s inclusion in the social science textbook, a sacred pedagogical space, smacked of conspiracy.

Undoubtedly other politics were at play too. If historical social prejudices and inequity so deeply concerned the elected members of the Indian Parliament, why do they not wage this battle in their policy and against the day-to-day violence experienced by Dalits?

This displacement of an ideological battle, from Dalit reality at the ground to the representation of an admired Dalit leader in a cartoon, is “the dance of democracy.”

However, charting a finer chronology of cartoon talk, protests and the refusal to laugh in India leads to the complex nature of such protests. Activists complement their tireless advocacy against social discrimination by also being vigilant about representations, and they don’t spare cartoons.

Their protests, by demanding a transformational role for cartoons, implicitly  acknowledge the power of cartoons.

These humor sensibilities emerge from particular ideological positions that bring to the surface the everyday manifestation of social inequities.

The Charlie Hebdo attack performed a logic of sacrifice, one that allowed cartoonists, police personnel and the terrorist to become martyrs. They all died on duty. All bound by violence and the ritual of sacrifice.

To assert that Charlie Hebdo “attacked religion [only] when it became political” is a clever display of ignorance. Ultra liberalism?

Cartoons have become the scapegoat. The violence Charlie Hebdo displaced on to the cartoons, the terrorists restored to the body.

So what can we do? Archiving a history of times we did not laugh can forge solidarity.

Drawing lines of empathy can provoke us to transcend obsession with the self and become the other. It might also compel us to acknowledge our vulnerability—our inability to transcend and to empathize. This failure can burden us with guilt. Even with guilt, one can protest violence, forging new forms of solidarity in the process.

My current project is the digitization of a collection of romantic correspondence between a young couple in a small Virginia town in the early 20th century. First they are friends, then they are dating and engaged, and once they are married the correspondence stops and the remainder of the collection is Christmas cards. It was here that I found a three page form letter from the Women’s Home Companion Better Babies Bureau dated September 1939.

Initially I interpreted the moniker “Better Babies Bureau” as a play on the WPA alphabet soup of agencies, but according to this encyclopedia entry this series from Women’s Home Companion dates back to 1913 and links the to eugenics movement.

After warning against the use of home remedies for whooping cough instead of seeking a doctor the “counselor” Sarah Francis Logan writes:

This brings me to another thing: the danger of kissing on the mouth, which many women regard lightly. Do not allow anyone to kiss your baby on the mouth or hands. Many people who seem perfectly well and healthy have an insidious disease that may be communicated to your baby by a kiss. It is the most direct way of transmitting infection.

Of course some people will laugh at you and say you are fussy, but then these same people are amused at “system” in the feeding of babies. They are like farmers who continue to raise poor cattle and poor crops because they scorn new methods. Do not let anyone’s ridicule of your ideas effect you, because you are doing the wisest and best thing for your baby.

In retrospect the eugenics connection comes across clear in the the farming metaphor.

As an American I think of kissing on the mouth and the kissing of hands as a greeting that is quintessentially European. I was never raised to kiss my parents or any relative on the mouth. Aunts and grandmothers got kisses on the cheek, uncles and grandfathers got hugs. Kissing on the lips is only ever a romantic gesture and I never did it until I was an older teenager. At any rate, it was far too intimate to share with a stranger and inappropriate to do with family. On the rare occasion when a misinterpreted turn of the face did result in accidentally kissing my mother or father on the lips it was always a mild shock. Whoops!

It’s interesting to reflect that gestures of intimacy and affection have a history. Maybe in the past Americas did greet each other with kisses like Europeans? What caused this practice to fall out of favor? Then in the early twentieth century there was a great influx of eastern and southern European immigration to the US. Did they bring their dangerous kisses with them? The science of eugenics stood ready to defend Americans against this unhygienic practice much as early nutrition science was marshaled to prove the unhealthy consequences of mixing A + 2B into goulash.

I should be done creating links from the finding aid to Dspace next week and will share the link to the document here. With a click you will be transported through the magic of the Internet to W&M and see what I’ve been up to.

It’s a real mark of accomplishment that someone has taken the time to preserve the blog in a format that ensures that future generations will be able to read our poorly-spelled, hastily written blog entries. In some small sense — and I mean ‘small’, I’m not getting a swelled head here — SM really has become the blog of record for the sociocultural anthropological internetosphere.

The archive itself is just one part of a process to get SM more fully archived both now and in the future… but I’ll leave out details of our future plans since, frankly, they may never materialize.

SM started with no long-range plan for archiving, or indeed for pretty much anything, and over the years we’ve suffered a variety of data loses, ranging from minor to catastrophic. The lesson for open access week is this: back up your data. But at the same time, if you feel the urge to write, write. Start new projects when you feel you have the energy and opportunity to start them, even if all the pieces aren’t in place yet. Archiving is important, but don’t let scholarly apparatus have a chilling effect on your innovation. If academic life is a trapeze, librarians are the safety net. Thanks to UT Austin, Pat, and the whole crew for doing their job so that we can do ours.

Lewelyn is I believe as much pleased with college and I am as yet very much pleased with it. The tutor of my division is rather unpopular yet I have always found him polite and obliging. He has excused me every time I have made an application to him. The other day I even … him and told him that some of the students would inhale the exhilarating gas and that I had a curiosity to see them. He said that he would not wish it as a general thing but as I had been punctual I might be excused. I then went and the first that took it had no effect upon. The next as soon as they took the bag from him began to look wet and dance and jump about and pull the fellows about. One began to fight and chase the fellows all about the room. One jumped up and cried out two or three times and danced about and sung and talked about Miss Johns a lady he was particularly fond of and then ran up to a medical student and seizing him tore his pantaloons off just about the knee and left his great long hairy leg stretching out naked and then running up to another snatched off his spectacles. But the two most ludicrous were Cait and Robbins of the Senior class one of them Cait placed his hat in the middle of the floor (it was an old rus… hat which the fellows were in the habit of laughing at him about) and made an … to it “O most magnanimous hat. Super-incumbent on the bare floor! Rex Brainorum” And he laughed all the while fit to kill himself and the other one went about bouncing and scraping to the fellows and ran to … a fat fellow in the room and had to kiss him but he was too strong for him so he left him and very unexpectedly ran up to me and seizing me hugged me and kissed me very affectionately before I could disengage myself.

Ah, college.

Read more about early experiments with laughing gas, and the vogue it enjoyed among the privileged class, in this great post from The Public Domain Review.

Founded in 2005, Savage Minds is now nine years old. Our current design is a default WordPress template I used when our original (more colorful) theme somehow got corrupted, preventing Google from indexing our site. Then our site went down again about a year ago when our hosting company decided it didn’t want to honor a promise made by a smaller company it had bought-out. This was a terrible crisis for us as we somehow hadn’t backed up the site in years, falsely believing that our host was keeping adequate backups on our behalf. Unsure of what to do next, we threw this temporary site up on WordPress.com, using the same generic template we’d been using before. Now all that is about to change, and a number of other things as well.

A New Look!

First of all, for the past two months I’ve been working away at a complete redesign of the site using a modern “responsive” theme that will dynamically adjust to different screen resolutions. That means it should look as good on your smartphone or iPad as it does on a giant 27″ monitor. I’ve also used some fancy fonts from Google which should make it a pleasure to read. (Of course, some of you will hate the font choices, and to you we offer our deepest apologies. These things are always very personal…) In one touch I’m particularly proud of, the sidebar will drop away displaying the text at full width when viewing individual articles, removing any distractions.

Here’s a picture of what the front page will look like (with sidebar). [Click to embiggen.]

Now mind you, I’m not a professional graphic designer so there may be some oddities. While I’m not inclined to make any major revisions to the design for some time to come, I will be more than happy to continue to work at any problems, bugs or annoyances you find in the new theme once it goes live.

Archives Restored!

The second big news is that it turns out our web host did keep a backup of the site and we finally got a hold of it. That means that when we launch the new site, all five years of our archives will go back online at the same time! I can’t even begin to say what a huge relief this has been for us.

We are also using the opportunity to clean up the site metadata a bit, moving our overly numerous “categories” over to “tags,” keeping categories for major types of posts and ongoing series rather than for organizing data topically. We’ve already start to do this on the current site, and the move will merge these categories with the original archive.

New Full Time Bloggers!

But wait! That’s not all! We are also announcing some internal changes in how we run things here at Savage Minds. Over the years the names on the Savage Minds masthead have constantly been changing, but one thing many people have commented upon is how few females are there. Now, that is a fair criticism, but it ignores the fact that we have always had a lot of women guest bloggers and two female “occasional Minds” — former guest bloggers who could blog whenever they liked but weren’t considered “full time” members of the site. The reason that they weren’t full time members is a little convoluted but I think you all deserve an explanation…

We used to have a rule that full time Minds had to blog at least once a month. At that time, neither Maia Green or Zoë Wool felt they could meet such a requirement and so even though we wanted them as full time members we created the new “occasional Mind” category just to accommodate them. However, over time many of the so-called “full time” members stopped blogging. This created a weird situation where the “occasional Minds” were blogging more than the “full time Minds” but not getting credit for it. So, this year we’ve changed our rules to reflect the reality. Full time members now only need to blog once a year to keep their status (once they’ve been invited onboard). That’s just as true for founding members like Dustin Wax and Christopher Kelty as it is of our formerly “occasional” bloggers.

As a result of these changes we are very sorry to loose Thomas Strong and Jay Sosa. They both kept meaning to blog, but somehow life got in the way. We wish them well and hope they will come back as guest bloggers some day. But we welcome Zoë Wool and Maia Green as the full time members we always hoped they would be. (And we hope they will be blogging more than just once a year.) As a result they will be joining back-stage discussions and, along with Carole McGranahan, working to help us achieve our goal of gender parity as well as greater diversity in the years to come. Full time bloggers are recruited from the ranks of guest bloggers, so if you know of anyone from underrepresented communities who would make good guest bloggers, encourage them to apply! (Please see our “contact” tab for details.)

Other News…

Other changes include the new community moderation intern that Rex hopes to announce soon. Ryan’s migration of his anthropologies project over to Savage Minds. Carole’s new writing group, and even more announcements planned for later in the year. Stay tuned!

When?

When will the new site go live? That’s hard to say. We hope to do it before the end of the month, but I am now in the process of moving web hosts for the third time this year and I want to make sure that the new server is stable before making the switch. Please be patient.

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over ninety archival interviews. Having started with leading anthropologists, my subjects have broadened to include other social scientists and, recently, biological and physical scientists.

The full list of interviews can be found here.

Moving on to something a little more exciting … Last year I wrote about the possibilities of crowdsourcing photo archives, so I was happy to learn that the Library of Congress is giving it a go.

(Hat tip to Why that’s delightful and BoingBoing.)

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive was developed collaboratively over the last two years by myself, Warumungu community members, Craig Dietrich, Tim Dietrich (software developers) and Chris Cooney (designer). Mukurtu means ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu. Dilly bags were used as safe keeping places for sacred materials. The archive is thus a “safe keeping place.”

The gist of the project is this: Warumungu community members wanted a way to manage the digital materials they received from a number of sources—mainly researchers, teachers and missionaries who had once worked in the community. How could they store, organize, distribute, and allow access to these images based on the Warumungu cultural protocols that surround viewing and distribution of images and the associated knowledge that goes with them?

Over two years of consultation, we developed a browser-based digital archive (using a MySQL database and PHP scripting language, the archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP web environment—Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP—for those techies out there) using the cultural protocols to drive the technology. That is, the information architecture of the system was driven by the specific Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing, distribution, and reproduction of images. There is a detailed summary concerning the functionality of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive on my blog.

Over the last few years of development I have met several people involved in similar projects—mainly in Australia (I’d love to know about others). Finally having Mukurtu installed in Tennant Creek though gave us the opportunity to 1) think of ways to develop it further in the context of Nyinkka Nyunyu as an art and culture centre and 2) reach out to others to find ways to improve and share what we have. We have begun to develop a framework for a flexible system that would allow other communities to customize the system to fit their own cultural protocols–what we need now are more developers! Although at present most of the content in Mukurtu is from personal collections, the goal is to now reach out to museums and begin a process of virtual repatriation of Warumungu cultural materials. The South Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria have already loaned physical objects to Nyinkka Nyunyu for their museum space. These objects are displayed at Nyinkka Nyunyu and are accompanied by Warumungu narration.

The local archive allows for thousands more objects to be virtually repatriated at a fraction of the cost. Mukurtu allows for the content to be curated by individuals in the community. People can tag the content with restrictions, add multiple stories and recollections, and sort it by culturally relevant categories. People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Digital archives—powered by Indigenous protocols and intellectual property systems—have the potential to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the institutions that hold Indigenous materials and the communities to whom they belong. Even if one thought that all objects should be repatriated, most Indigenous communities don’t have the money or facilities to store the objects properly. Many communities want museums to keep their objects safe—they want a voice in the way they are displayed and curated. Digital projects can provide one avenue for Indigenous curation. One great example of this is the Virtual Museum Canada project. The Canadian government has funded many First Nations web based museum projects (see the Dane Wajich project by the Doig River First Nations community).

There is potential, then, for digital archives and other web-based projects (that take seriously and integrate Indigenous protocols) to reanimate the terrain of museum display, curation, and information management and to establish collaborative development projects between technologists, anthropologists and communities. Local archives, “safe keeping places,” that use Indigenous cultural protocols to define access and distribution parameters should not be read as closing down the commons or sealing off information. Instead, these projects give us a way to interrogate the limits of commons-like narratives about information or information freedom. They give us a way to redefine access and control apart from big business models. They allow us to examine different modes of information distribution and reproduction and the ways in which these systems maintain and create knowledge through their specific protocols. These archives are as much about production as they are preservation—in these cases the two are intertwined. Can these systems also inform the larger debate about access to information in relation to digital technologies? They seem poised to do so.

Project Naming started in 2001 when Inuit youth took 500 digitized photos taken by Richard Harrington during the 1940s and 50s and asked their elders to help identify the people and places in the pictures. This program was slowly expanded to include more and more photos, but in 2005 they started a new phase of the project in which “more than 1,700 photographs” from Canadian archives “were digitized and sent to Nunavut Sivuniksavut for identification.”

Although much of the project has been about bringing Nunavut youth together with their elders in a very personal way, the project has a page entitled “The Naming Continues” where web visitors can help identify those photos which have not yet been cataloged.

I think it would be great if more archives had sites like this. One possibility I see is that anthropologists could help out by doing what these Nunavut youth are doing. Before going off to the field you could download relevant uncataloged photos and then ask your informants about them. Talking about photos is a great way to start an interview, and who knows, maybe someone will recognize some faces! And it needn’t just be uncataloged photos. That photo listed as “Indian boy in native dress,” surely someone can identify the specific type of clothing and the region of India where it is worn … even if we never find out his name.