Tag Archives: dissemination

Video in the Villages

Wired has an article about indigenous media production, based on the 13th Native American Film + Video Festival, organized by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

The emphasis of the article is on how indigenous media is being used as an organizational tool. This is nothing new for anthropologists, Terence Turner having written about the same phenomenon as early as 1992. This being an article from Wired, I’m surprised that there wasn’t more of a focus on online media. Obviously in many communities it is difficult to access online media, however, activists do often have access to the web and being able to download material and redistribute it offline seems like a reasonable next step (if it isn’t already being done). This is one of the premises of the v2v network. CurrentTV is also interesting, working like Digg in allowing users to vote on which material will get broadcast. Taiwanese Aborigines are already using online media quite extensively, with blog.ohaiya.com and the more wide ranging Docupark wiki also hosting some Aboriginal content.

For anthropologists wishing to teach Turner’s article the Video in the Villages collection is available from DER, and I see that the film festival website links to various distributors for each of the works they presented. The advantage of material screened at festivals and distributed in the US is that it will have English subtitles. The need for subtitling is a big barrier for indigenous activism that seeks to reach a wider audience. One option is dotsub.com which “provides free browser based tools that allow anyone to translate films from one language into countless other languages.”

Scholarly Communications Interest Group

Of all the various sections and interest groups listed on the AAA website, I find it ironic, but unsurprising, that the “Scholarly Communications Interest Group” is one of the few without a link to a dedicated web page. Because I am now suddenly so involved in debates regarding scholarly communication in the AAA, I thought it might be worth while joining this interest group when I renew my AAA membership. Joining an interest group is free after all. But if they can’t even get it together to set up a web page, one has to wonder if it is even worth checking off that box…

PS: Wasn’t there supposed to be a major redesign of the AAA website in time for the annual meeting? What happened to that?

Who’s down with OAA?

It got buried in the comments section of the last post on this topic, so I thought I should give it more prominent display:

We’ve set up a wiki to promote Open Access Anthropology.

I’ve already copied and pasted some stuff from what Alex and I have written, but a lot more needs to be done. Please help make this page the bestest wiki page ever!

Then we need to find ways to promote the wiki URL (http://openaccessanthropology.org) at the AAA. I was thinking stickers or rubber stamps that we could hand out and stick on everyone’s programs. I’d be willing to chip in on the cost if someone would be willing to organize designing and printing the stickers in time for San Jose.

UPDATE: Thanks to Kambiz for hosting our new URL!

UPDATE: http://openaccessanthropology.org is now live!

Museum Anthropology Updates

Jason Baird Jackson writes in to share some news about developments with the journal Museum Anthropology:

I am the editor (as of late 2005) of Museum Anthropology, the journal of the Council for Museum Anthropology (a AAA section). We have established a companion blog to go along with the journal (http://museumanthropology.blogspot.com/). While this is currently filling the function once served by the print journal’s “Exhibitions Listings” section, we intend to experiment with such things as structured discussions of papers appearing in the journal, the sharing of color (and additional) images associated with articles, and other features that the weblog format enables. …

As of the fall 2005 issue [28(2)] , the journal is again publishing on schedule. My first two issues (volume 29) have seen the addition of a section dedicated to the review of online exhibitions and related forms of new media of interest to museum anthropologists. In general, a larger number of books and exhibitions are being reviewed and the diversity and quantity of contributors is expanding. A significant number of exciting articles on a range of subjects are now in the pipeline.

Because of publication delays, Museum Anthropology, like its peer Visual Anthropology Review, had been moved to the back of the line for full AnthroSource inclusion, but the two journals have gotten caught up and have been moved from the 2008 inclusion group to the 2007 one. Thus, with issue 30(1) in spring 2007, Museum Anthropology will be fully incorporated into AnthroSource. While it will thus not be an open access journal, AnthroSource will at least make Museum Anthropology accessible to a wider audience than its current print-only format. The gap separating the back issues of the journal incorporated into AnthroSource through the Mellon Funded start-up and the next issue (i.e. volumes 27-29) will also be added to AnthroSource soon, as will the missing volumes at the start of the journal’s run (volumes 1-9).

Verbal Privilege

Here is a different take on the legacy of what we write as scholars, and what kind of knowledge is produced as a result, a topic I’ve been exploring in some recent posts (here and here). This is from a poem by Adrienne Rich entitled “North American Time,” and posted (some time ago) to the blog Language Hat.

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

I can’t think of a much better way to explain why anthropologists should read Derrida, without making everyone feel all iterable.

Ask our readers: Is knowledge cumulative?

Here’s a question I think about a lot: Is knowledge cumulative?

It strikes me as an important question for how we think about the work that we do. Are we simply making utterances in an ongoing dialog, utterances whose echo will quickly fade, or are we adding to a general storehouse of knowledge which benefits from every additional sand of grain? I think how we answer this question underlies some of the differences between activist anthropology and what we might call “pure research” anthropology.

An activist thinks about her research as an intervention in an ongoing debate. While doing good research is important, even more important is the way that research might impact the contemporary political climate.

The “pure research” anthropologist is willing to spend their time on an obscure topic nobody is much concerned with at the moment because they are contributing to the expansion of human knowledge.

Of course, the reality is more complex than either of these caricatures. Work which is considered progressive at the time might be appropriated by conservative causes, while academic fashions may mean that the contributions of esoteric research lies in obscurity for decades or centuries before once again coming to light (i.e. when Rex blogs about it on Savage Minds).

While the promise of Google Scholar seems to speak to the fantasy of cumulative knowledge, there are some mitigating factors that must be taken into account:
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Should we outsource anthropology?

I just got back from the latest Allen Chun production at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica: “Culture in Context: Pragmatics, Industries, Technologies, Geopolitics.” Allen regularly hosts thought provoking interdisciplinary conferences. One cool Savage Minds connection was made this year, as frequent SM commentator John McCreery was the chair on one panel and I was the discussant on another.

My panel was entitled, “Flows and Boundaries, Real or Imagined,” and I had the honor of discussing papers by George Ritzer and George Marcus. Allen instructed us to discuss all the panel papers together, rather than taking them each separately. With one paper a survey on outsourcing, and the other a meditation on anthropological methodology, it at first seemed like an impossible task; however, I decided to have some fun with it and people seemed to enjoy the result. Since the papers are available online, and all my references are online as well, I thought it would be appropriate to post the full text of my discussion here on Savage Minds.

I urge everyone to please take the time to read through Ritzer and Marcus’ original papers before reading my commentary since it was written with a certain contextual setting in mind.
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The Digital Himalaya project

I’ve been busy lately preparing for a two-week research trip to England. We hope to find some kind of archival footage we can use for our film. In the process I stumbled upon this excellent web site.

The Digital Himalaya project was conceived of by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based jointly at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department at Cornell University, the project began in December 2000.

Of particular interest to Savage Minders is the Fürer-Haimendorf Film Collection:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf lived and worked as an anthropologist throughout the Himalayas from the 1930s through the 1980s. Fürer-Haimendorf’s specific interests included the Naga ethnic groups of the North Eastern Frontier Area of India and the Sherpa ethnic group of north-eastern Nepal. However, he travelled far and wide throughout the entire region, taking over 100 hours of film throughout his career. Extraordinary in both its breadth and its depth, the Fürer-Haimendorf collection is one of the finest extant ethnographic film collections that document Himalayan cultures. The collection includes both archival footage from Fürer-Haimendorf’s lengthy research career in the Himalayas, as well as interviews with the Professor himself recorded on video. Samples of both appear below. The Fürer-Haimendorf film collection is currently located in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. DART (Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching) has compiled a selected set of Haimendorf’s fieldwork notes on the Sherpas of Nepal which will appeal to scholars interested in his ethnographic field techniques.

The DART web site has this short biography of Haimendorf:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was born on June 22, 1909, in Vienna, Austria. He studied anthropology in Vienna under the tutelage of scholars of the Kulturkreis school. He was a prolific fieldworker, amassing an impressive archive of material on South Asian groups, with a particular focus on Nepal and northeastern India.

While conducting postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics, Fürer-Haimendorf became well acquainted with many of the leading lights of British anthropology, including Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, and Audrey Richards. World War II broke out while he was on his second field trip in India, and like Malinowski before him, Fürer-Haimendorf was arrested as an enemy alien. Confined to Hyderabad State for the duration of the war, he undertook extensive fieldwork among the inhabitants of that region. Upon returning to Europe in 1949, he began his fruitful tenure at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he served as chair of a growing anthropology department between 1950 and 1975. After a long and influential career, Fürer-Haimendorf died on June 11, 1995.

New AnthroSource Titles

From OSU’s Anthropology Resources web site:

New AnthroSource content for 2006
The following four titles have now been added to AnthroSource.

Culture and Agriculture
City and Society
Journal of Latin American Anthropology
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe

Coverage runs from the inaugural to the current issue.

Now, why can’t AnthroSource have its own blog to tell us things like this?

How to make downloading a PDF as easy as ripping an iTunes Song

We live in a wondrous era for electronic information. If you have a few thousand songs sitting on your hard drive there are all kinds of programs which will help you organize and catalog your information automatically. Software can identify the song and automatically add information about the song title, the artist, album, etc. There is even software that can automatically download the cover art for each album. When I take pictures with my digital camera it automatically saves extra information about the date I took the picture, what camera I used, and even the aperture and other settings. But there is one kind of information that remains in the dark ages: academic texts.

While songs and photos are rich in computer-readable metadata, most PDF files contain very little. You are lucky if you can even click inside the PDF file to copy and paste the article title. So, while there are many programs that will let you keep track of your PDF files in the same way that iTunes or iPhoto keeps track music and photos (my favorite is Bookends), one still has to open up the PDF, read the information, and then manually type it in to the database.

That you can open a PDF and read the data is a big difference between PDF files and other kinds of media. Not all songs have their title as the chorus. But precisely because of this, much less effort has gone into making it easy to automate the entering of such data into databases. Some academic websites will let you download citation data – but if the file is already sitting on your hard drive you can’t always figure out what database it came from. And this is another part of the problem with PDF metadata: the fact that there are so many different academic search engines, none of which is exhaustive.

So what is the solution?
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AnthroSource RSS Feeds

I can’t tell if this is a new feature or something that has always been there under my (admittedly large) nose, but I just discovered that all the journals listed in AnthroSource have RSS feeds! Just browse to the journal you want and the link for RSS feeds is listed right at the top of the page.

Even Anthropology News has an RSS feed. Now that I’m an international AAA member, I don’t get the paper edition of Anthropology News anymore, but at least I can know via RSS when a new issue comes out. Unlike Rex, I hate paper, and so I’m much happier getting AN this way.

New York London Paris Munich

Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout pop music. We haven’t had any music blogging here of late, and this isn’t particularly culturalogical, but anyway: “Miranda!”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00079LWGU/sr=8-1/qid=1144429421/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-9389056-8219021?%5Fencoding=UTF8 is a great, great, great Argentine pop band if you have a yen for lovely, lovely, lovely pop music (and who does not?). Sin Restricciones is one of the only CDs I’ve bought in years that actually makes a case for the album format: I had two favorite songs that I listened to over and over again; but instead of then getting tired of those two songs and putting aside the rest of the CD, I moved on to two new favorite songs, and then to two others, and then to two others, so that to date I have ended up obsessively loving 8 out of the 12 songs on it, and I wouldn’t rule out the last 4 winning me over in their turn.

World System + connexions

Apropos of Mike’s post about his one-man 400-person world Introductory Extravaganza Simulation, I thought it necessary to alert Savage Minds readers, who may also be educators and hopefully fans of all things open access (and despite my recent post, ASCII, or better yet UTF-8). The Connexions Project, of which I am an occasional advisor, at Rice University, is an experiment in open access textbook publishing. More than publishing, however, the aim of Connexions (cnx for short) is modeled on open source collaboration–instead of creating a full textbook and simply publishing it online, cnx encourages people to write short chunkish textbook “modules” which are all added to a central repository. Instructors can than search the repository for relevant content, chunk them together (perhaps with some additions of their own) to form a textbook, and use it in a class.

There are a couple of reasons why this is cool, and why it is better (and worse) than Wikipedia. The system uses a simple XML language for markup, which gives the content a very wide flexibility. It can just as easily be styled, for instance, in the team colors of your university as it can in black and white; it can be converted to a LaTeX pdf document with the push of a button (including conversion of links to footnotes, and continuous pagination, and a couple of other tricks); it uses MathML, which is probably irrelevant for all but the most hardcore kinship geeks on SM, but it does allow something very cool, viz. cutting and pasting of equations into Mathematica/MatLab. It will eventually integrate with QOOP.com so that you can order up a stack of old-school textbooks for your students to have and to hold. Of course it suffers by comparison with Wikipedia, because there are not 8 billion people using it, so the whole effects-of-scale thing has yet to really have its effects (though a number of people have undertaken translations into french, chinese, thai) and it can be a bit tricky to edit the XML documents you create, but getting better all the time (there is also aside-project underway to create an open-source XML editor to ease the process. Believe it or not no such beast worth its salt actually exists). The project was recently freatured at the uber-digitastic love fest known as TED.

Right now, the high quality stuff in the repository is mostly digital signal processing stuff, k-12 Music education, and a couple of other areas. I won’t speak for Mike, but a kind of protocol for his World Simulation project, with instructions on how to do it, would find a welcome home in cnx. Of course, Mike would have to be comfortable with people all over the world simulating his simulation–but that would be pretty real world now wouldn’t it? In any case, please have a look… if anyone has ideas for the project, I, and cnx, would love to hear them…