While some individual TED talks are interesting and even useful in the classroom (I especially love that many are subtitled in numerous languages), there I totally understand what Nathan Jurgenson is talking about when he says that “TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity” in a way which “necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas.” But where Jurgenson merely points out the problem, I thought Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker piece on the TED conference did a great job of getting at the nub of the problem in a way which highlights some of the underlying issues involved in popularizing academic ideas. Unfortunately the piece is currently hidden behind a paywall, so I’ve taken the liberty of quoting the relevant passages at length:
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Tag Archives: dissemination
Open access introductory anthro courses?
One of my colleagues from the U of Kentucky just posted a request on our grad student listserv asking for advice about which texts people are using for intro courses. I replied with the book that I used during the two intro to anthropology classes I taught while at UK, but then added that the book was lamentably expensive at around 100 bucks. And that got me thinking.
I wonder if at some point there will be such a thing as an open access intro to anthropology course, where all of the texts and articles are not only current, but readily available. Just an idea. The cost of textbooks was one of the big frustrations for me when I was teaching–but I went along with things anyway because there were few alternatives. And then there was the issue with articles: some are a lot easier to find and access than others. Some articles are just plain not available. Not to mention the fact that there are all sorts of restrictions about how articles can and cannot be shared with students.
I know that textbook publishers aren’t exactly going to be thrilled with this conversation, but what would an open access course look like? I know that these kinds of things don’t happen for free, of course, so I am wondering how such a thing could be created, funded, and implemented. Has anyone else out there been looking something along these lines? I’d love to hear about it. Or, if you think this is an insane idea that would never work in the real world, I’d like to hear what you think just as much. Right now I am imagining a larger project along the lines of Wikipedia where different scholars write and publish open access articles specifically for introductory courses. That of course could be combined with material that’s already open (like articles from AA that are more than 35 years old). Hmmm. Thoughts?
PS: Ya, when I start thinking about OA I get on a roll. What can I say? I have my streaks.
Les Maîtres du Désordre vs. Les Maîtres Fous
Ever since it opened in 2006, I’ve wanted to visit the Musée du quai Branly (MQB) in Paris, which “contains the collections of the now-closed Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l’Homme.” With a permanent collection of over 267,000 objects and nearly 3,500 of those on display at any given time, it is one of the most important anthropology museums in the world. The building itself is also an impressive piece of architecture by Jean Nouvel—nicely setting off the collection. So I was happy to be able to finally visit the MQB this past Thursday. It was an awe-inspiring experience and I’m just sorry I didn’t have a week to spend at the museum, since it is truly too much to absorb in a single day. The permanent collection is divided up in to Asia, Oceania, Africa and The Americas. My recommendation would be to only try to visit one section per visit (and Oceania is so huge that it could easily accommodate two visits if you listen to the excellent audio tour).
I want to focus on one of their current special exhibitions: Les Maîtres du Désordre which was the highlight of our visit. Les Maîtres du Désordre reminds me of an MOMA exhibit I visited as a teenager: Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. That exhibit looked at the impact of the very African and Pacific works now housed in the MQB upon the development of modern art. Both are large, ambitious exhibits which seek to draw comparisons across numerous cultures. Both also seek to find affinities between modern art and “primitive” art. So it is worth looking at what James Clifford wrote about the MOMA exhibit before looking at the one at the MQB.
In his essay “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern” Clifford criticized the MOMA show on several grounds: the comparative method used is flawed (they could just as easily have found “primitive” art works which did not resemble Picasso paintings as ones which did), the works they chose are decontextualized and removed from their cultural and historical context, they chose works which are unproblematically “pure” in that they are free of European or other obviously modern influences, and the African and Pacific works are seen primarily in terms of their importance for “our” cultural development from which “they” are excluded. (On the problematic aesthetization of traditional “art” also see Wyatt MacGaffey’s essay “‘Magic, or as we usually say ‘Art’.”)
To what extent is Les Maîtres du Désordre guilty of the same sins as the Primitivism exhibit at MOMA?
How much does publishing really cost? The Long Answer.
There is an article in a recent issue of the Guardian reporting on statements by the editor-in-chief of Nature, Phil Campbell. It says two amazing things. The less amazing thing is that he says open access is inevitable. The more amazing thing is that he says that the cost of to publish in Nature or Science is “in excess of $10,000” per article.
Let me just write that one more time for people who don’t speak arabic numerals: in excess of Ten Thousand Dollars for a Single Article in Nature.
Now Nature is a pretty phenomenal publication, and I don’t doubt that it is expensive to produce, but I think most of us cannot fathom what it is that these publishers are doing that might result in such costs. $10,000 is, from the perspective of most anthropologists, is what it costs to do the research not what it costs to type it up. How can this be?
I can answer this. At least, I can tell you what the Good and the Bad reasons are for these costs, and why we should consider paying for the good reasons and stop paying for the bad ones.
The reason I can answer this is because I now publish an magazine– on the web and in print, called Limn. It’s free (as in speech) but it is also for sale (it’s beautiful, btw, and you should buy one, since I’m here explaining to you why you should). The three issues (comprising two print issues and about 30 articles) and website combined have cost about–wait for it–$10,000 to produce. Most of that has gone to the labor of a developer and designer (and anthropologist) who has done an absolutely amazing job. 30 short articles (about 2000 words on average), works out to less than $250 per article; probably less, since that price includes the start-up costs of creating and designing a going concern from scratch. The money came from a combination of research accounts, in-kind support from departments, and my pocket.
There is a huge difference between $250 and $10,000. And really the comparison between our little experiment and Nature is not fair to either side. However, I do think it’s fair to make a comparison with the AAA because the AAA is insisting that publishing is so expensive that switching from subscription to open access will ruin them. But from what I can tell, publishing in a AAA journal is significantly cheaper than $10,000, so it should be within reach of an alternative model. In January of this year, Oona Schmid, director the AAA publications program at the AAA gave a talk at Columbia (which also included our own Alex Golub as commentator; Oona starts at 13.10; Alex at 58.50). Based on her presentation and the AAA annual report from 2010, I have the following facts:
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There will come soft rains
A few thoughts about Ray Bradbury, writing, communication, and anthropology.
If there is one author that first sparked my interest in what we broadly call “the human condition,” it would definitely have to be the late Mr Ray Bradbury (William Golding gets a close second with The Lord of the Flies). I first read some of Bradbury’s short stories way back in seventh grade, and his words have stayed with me ever since (I only wish I could find my seventh grade English teacher to let him know his efforts were not wasted).
Bradbury’s science fiction was always deeply human, and often full of poignant warnings about the potential future of the human race. He was especially preoccupied with the machines we create, and how they can assert a certain amount of control over our lives. Near the end of his life he was quoted saying this: “We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.” Continue reading
A Khan Academy for Anthropology?
So I was down South where I met up with DJ Hatfield over breakfast and we got to talking… I’ve long been thinking about how the plethora of open academic courses and lectures online is making it so that teachers can act more like coaches—assisting students in self-paced exploration rather than acting as a funnel for all the information consumed in the classroom. DJ, in turn, has been thinking about how to break up his own lectures into smaller pre-recorded chunks so that he can act more like a discussion leader—interrogating his own lectures alongside students rather than simply regurgitating content down their beaks. Together we combined these ideas into a proposal for an online database of byte-sized anthropology lectures on various topics in anthropology—a Khan Academy for anthropology if you will.
Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.
But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.
So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.
Putting the nix on open access? (more about why HR 3699 sucks)
Apologies for two posts in one night, but there’s a lot of news on the open access front. First, the Quantum Pontiff asks whether Elsevier Could shut down arixiv.org:
They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)
I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.
That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB). Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well. Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access: Continue reading
Publishing in important places, and so on
A while back Rex wrote a comment on one of his posts that got me thinking. About academia. About publishing. And about the current system that many of us are a part of. Speaking about what he called the “awareness habitus of the general professorate,” he wrote:
…a lot of time when tenure committees speak half-heartedly of ‘publishing in major journals’ or citation statistics what they really mean is that they want junior faculty’s names to appear on the things that they read — to see them (although probably not read them!) ‘around’ in ‘important places’.
John Hawks followed with a great one liner posted just below, indicating that Rex had indeed hit the mark. He’s onto something. It’s the part about appearing in “important places” that really got my attention. If getting tenure is all about being in these important places, here’s my question: Who defines what is and what is not an important place? And, if this is one of the primary functions of our current publishing (and tenure) model, what does this say about the current state of affairs?
Just a few questions for today. What I appreciate about Rex is that his posts and comments always keep me thinking–and asking questions. Maybe too many questions sometimes. As a graduate student who is still somewhat on the outside of things looking in, however, these kinds of questions matter.
The Vonnegut factor
I just spent the last few days driving across the massive territory that is the United States via the hot, humid route known as the I-40. (The heat index in Oklahoma City was 118, by the way.) I-40 happens to be strewn with that ever interesting media known as the billboard, which got me thinking about how and why we (anthropologists) use our particular forms of media to communicate information, ideas, and concepts to diverse audiences. Yes, this post has something to do with anthropology AND Kurt Vonnegut. Just wait.
So all of those billboards kept blazing past me. They had all sorts of messages on them, from the blandly utilitarian and boring (THIS SPACE AVAILABLE) to the humorous/weird (JEAN SHORTS ARE NEVER OK*) all the way to the erotic (XXX MEGA ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT LEFT). There’s certainly no shortage of themes and styles. The billboard medium has certain constraints, of course (size, font, images, and the fact that drivers are gunning their engines anywhere between 60 and 100 miles per hour and only view those masterpieces of highway art for a few wondrous seconds). So billboard artists and advertisers have to make important decisions in order to broadcast their messages effectively and efficiently. They can go with humor, or shock, or offer alluring information that weary road warriors just can’t resist (HUGE, SPARKLING CLEAN RESTROOMS 25 MILES). Similar messages or information can be transmitted to viewers in radically different ways–there are numerous methods for telling drivers to pull over and buy some crap at the next exit. Continue reading
Regarding Japan Part 2: Affective Loops and Toxic Tastings
Eleven weeks have passed since the earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan. Although bodies are still being found amidst the wreckage, the rest of the world has long since moved on. The media waves of shock, horror, heroism, heartbreak, and heart-warm continue to push and pull us through a relentless series of events: from Libya to Tuscaloosa, Kate and William to Bin Laden, Donald Trump to Strauss-Kahn.
The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it. Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?
In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet. Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”. In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks. Continue reading
MIT Profs Explain What They Do
Thoughts on Fieldwork From Three Research Sites
Cultural Anthropology is a social science that explores how people understand – and act in – the world. But what, exactly, is it that Cultural Anthropologists do? How do they approach their research? In this short film, three members of MIT’s Anthropology Department, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork.
Anthropological Kerfuffles
OK. This is about as lazy as blogging gets. Below the fold is a four way Twitter conversation I had with Thomas Strong, Ken Wissoker and Carole McGranahan. What started as a funny quote about Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado turned into a discussion about which “big debates” in Anthropology get picked up by the mainstream press. But then, when we started trying to think of anthropological debates we would rather see in the press, we all fell short. Take a look at the conversation below and let us know in the comments what big anthropological kerfuffles you think are worthy of more media attention?
Share Anthropology
I’d like to briefly mention three initiatives aimed at making anthropology more accessible:
The first is a wonderful new—what to call it? blog? journal? blogurnal?—anthropology blog/journal “anthropologies” aimed at exploring “contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.” Their first issue explores the question “What is Anthropology?”
The second is the “Working Papers” series being published by the Open Anthropology Cooperative. These remind me a little of Prickly Paradigm Press, but focused more on anthropology, and free. (Prickly Paradigm should really consider publishing on Kindle’s new “Kindle Singles” program.)
Finally, something I put together myself after some discussion with Jason Baird Jackson, who told me about Open Access Tracking Project. I had been looking for a way to make Open Access anthropology publications more visible, but I realized that I didn’t want a large, uncurated, list of articles. So I came up with “Share Anthropology.” The idea is that anyone can submit a link to a blog post, discussion, or review of an Open Access anthropology publication. The emphasis being on discussion. If, for instance, someone were to blog about Chris Kelty’s book, which is available via Open Access, then that we’d link to that blog post on the Share Anthropology. This is an ongoing experiment – if you’d like to help out please let me know, or just submit some links!
ckelty’s $10 thoughts on blogging in anthropology
I got roped into a panel on “Writing for a general audience,” which is, strangely, one that you need to sign up and pay $10 for, I think because it is designated as a “workshop” — i’m thinking that this might be a rip off, given what we already pay… and it’s not like I’m seeing that money. But I digress. In any case, here’s what I produced for the workshop, which I guess I should charge you $10 for just so that the people in the workshop don’t feel cheated and all. Maybe you could buy a shirt instead
ckelty’s unimportant, quickly written, barely proofread, profound thoughts on blogging (in particular with respect to anthropology), including some clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ moments.
Why blog?
- Blogging is so not for everyone. The first reason to blog is to figure out whether it is for you. And this is part of the point: there is no cost or barrier to blogging. Anyone can do it, and anyone who says that there is a digital divide is selling you snake oil of one kind or another. What they usually mean is: not everyone is equal. This is true, and sadly, blogging won’t change that.
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Blog because you want to, and if you are lucky because people want to read what you write. Getting people to read what you write is not hard. Getting the right people to read what you write is very hard. On the other hand, it’s easier to get the anthropologist in the office next to yours to read a blog post about your last article than your last article—and might force you to elegantly and concisely communicate what it’s about and why it is important. And if you don’t have an office, all the more reason to blog about your articles! If you don’t have any articles, definitely stop blogging now.
Why blog in anthropology?
How Long Is An Anthropological Thought?
I have noticed two trends in anthropological publishing: First, several of our major journals have shortened the maximum length of submissions to below the 10,000 word mark. Second, new ethnographies seem to be getting shorter and short, and several I’ve read are less than 200 words of body text. I’m sure anthropology is just going along with larger trends in making these changes, but I think it also reflects changing answers to the question: how long is an anthropological thought?
I think I’d like to write separate entries on changes in book and journal length but before I do so I wonder what people’s general responses to these issues are? I know that the twittersphere was all a-tweet about shortened journal article lengths when the changes were made. Has anyone else noticed this but me? Or does anyone else have an opinion on either trend?