Tag Archives: dissemination

How to read the web like a blogger.

Most people who read Savage Minds do so through our RSS feed, so it seems silly to have a tutorial about how to read RSS feeds. (Currently over 200 people are subscribed to our feed.) However, I figure that some people still haven’t figured it all out, so I thought I’d make it easier.

This will be short:

That’s it.

In time you may wish to set up your own Bloglines account. Then you can read this tutorial, which will guide you through the process.

Over time we will add more feeds to the Bloglines aggregator. And when it goes public I might even switch us over to Feedlounge which looks like it will be very cool!

Personally, I don’t use Bloglines, preferring NetNewsWire on my Mac. (Which can actually sync with Bloglines, although I haven’t tried that.)

For more information on RSS feeds, see all the posts in the “feeds” category on my blog.

Interviews

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds I discussed the convention of using a “man in the street” interview in journalism. Two recent Mark Liberman posts on Language Log raise more general questions about the use of interviews as data. In “Ritual questions, ritual answers,” he argues that

The journalists already know what the stories are. Their questions are not designed to discover any new facts or ideas, but rather to get quotes that will fit in to designated places in the frameworks of logic and rhetoric that they have already erected.

And in “Down with journalists!” he reinforces this argument with a funny example in which a French journalist finds himself the victim of this very practice.

We all know that this happens, just as we know that these quotes often server little more than a ritual function, but what can we do about it?

One option is to make the source data – the interviews themselves – available to download. In fact, such “grey literature” may eventually become available as part of AnthroSource, but it will not be easy. For one thing, there are confidentiality concerns. How do we make our data publicly available while still protecting our sources? It is possible to do – but it would create a huge burden on researchers. In essence, one might be punished for being a good researcher and collecting large amounts of data, because then you would have to carefully censure much more data to make sure it is safe for public consumption.

Making such data available online is not something that is without precedent in the field. Johannes Fabian’s book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire is very much a collaboration with his informant, the artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. The full interviews are available online, as part of the Archives of Popular Swahili website (which, in turn, is part of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa website). Now, this is somewhat different in that Tshibumba Kanda Matulu is an internationally famous artist, who is anything but an anonymous informant, and the book is constructed in such a way that his discourse is allowed to challenge Fabian’s authorial authority.

Such a model may not work for all ethnographies and all situations, but it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more primary anthropological data becomes available online. Will anthropologists creatively re-mix each other’s data? Will informants salvage their message from the grand narratives of the anthropologists? Will computational methodologies and google allow for the work to be analyzed in new ways? Or will anthropologists resist to the bitter end in the name of protecting their informants … even when they might just be protecting their own reputations? Which isn’t to say that confidentiality isn’t a real concern – just that we should think twice before ducking for cover.

NOTE: My thinking on this topic dates back to an e-mail exchange I had with Mark Liberman last year about the topic of posting primary data online.

Tutorial: How to use CiteULike with AnthroSource

There has been a lot of discussion on the blog about CiteULike and getting it to work with AnthroSource. But what does it all mean? And how does one use it? This post is intended to help get you started.

First, some background. (Skip ahead if you want to get your feet wet actually using these technologies right away.)

In my forthcoming Anthropology News article (accidentally posted to the web early because they told me it would be in the May issue, but then it got bumped till September), I describe the concept of folksonomy:

As opposed to previous systems, which required each piece of information to be classified by a professional archivist, as in the Dewey decimal system used by libraries, a folksonomy asks each user to classify information as they see fit, sharing the resulting classifications between users. This works with electronic documents because, unlike a book on a library shelf, each item can be filed in more than one place. Imagine a virtual library where everyone shelved books as they do in their own home. While some people’s shelving skills may be sorely lacking, the chances are that at least one other person would have filed Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in exactly the same place you would expect to find it—under “ethnography.” If there are an infinite number of virtual copies it doesn’t matter that someone else mistakenly filed it under “astronaut.”

CiteULike is one of many new systems which use such “social tagging” to classify information online, but unlike del.icio.us which specializes in storing URLs, and Flickr which specializes in photographs, CiteULike specializes in academic literature. Specifically, CiteULike allows scholars with access to full-text databases not readily available to the public to bookmark and tag those references. That means you can use CiteULike with commonly used databases like JSTOR (and now AnthroSource), as well as public sites like Amazon.

Now, how to use it? There are actually two ways to answer that question. Rex has already described how he fits CiteULike into his academic research. So I will answer the more basic question, of how one actually gets started using the service.

It is actually quite simple.
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CiteULike and Anthrosource are Friends

I don’t exactly know where I found the time to do this, and something else, like my child or my career, will no doubt suffer, but here it is: you can now Cite What U Like at CiteULike from Anthrosource. Thanks to Alex, Kerim and Bob Offer-Westort for help in putting it together. ( Oh, and Richard Cameron, of CiteULike, of course, who helped clarify obscurities involving whitespace. Which in some departments might get him a PhD .)

So, try it out, my folksonomic researching fiends.

Recursive public irony

Chalk one up for Irony biting you in the ass. My article “Geeks, Social Imarginaries and Recursive Publics” is in the Summer issue of Cultural Anthropology (after about 4 years of re-writing, but that’s OK, it’s a better article now). The ostensible topic of the paper is how geeks make a “recursive public” by addressing each other in public at the same time that they address the means of making that public public– such as the ability to create networks, license software openly, anonymously contribute and read, etc. A chunk of the paper is about my good friends over at Silk List, who are inverterately recursive publicans. The Irony comes in that one of them noted the appearance of the article in AnthroSource, our discipline’s new stab at digitizing the last 100 years of anthropological scholarship–but could not actually access a copy of it. Unfortunately, without a membership in the American Anthropological Association, the article costs $12. Not a bad price really, except that the research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and any self-respecting American Taxpayer should balk at paying a second time for research they have already funded.

But the Irony does not end there. This semester I have affiliations at three separate universities– Rice University, MIT, and Harvard. It turns out all of these institutions have subscriptions to JSTOR–which contains copies of the journal up to 1997–but none of them have subscriptions to AnthroSource, which contains the last six years of the journal–so even having standing at three very rich institutions does not guarantee access. Fine–I’m a member of the AAA in good standing, I think, I’ll just access AnthroSource and download a copy of my own article. No go. The system doesn’t recognize any permutation of any of my email addresses from any of the 8 years of meetings I have been to. When I “register” at AnthroSource, there is no option for looking up my member standing. No doubt I will have to do some sort of telephone tag or email trail in order to find the person who can help fix the problem, and probably that only temporarily.

Rub 1: I can’t even get a copy of my own article.

I knew this would happen. When I was revising the article, I returned the author agreement with an amendment that would give me the right to distribute electronic copies under a Creative Commons license. I’ve done this with four other articles I have written, but the AAA (via the University of California) said, and I quote:

The AAA does not allow authors either to amend the standard agreement or to retain their copyrights…AAA is a non-profit, educational and scholarly publisher. It exists for anthropologists as their collective publishing arm–unlike the many commercial, for-profit publishers against which Creative Commons pits itself.

The asinine suggestion that somehow Creative Commons is pitted against commercial for-profit publishers notwithstanding, they seemed to misunderstand the fact that what I wanted to encourage was for people to read my article, not the destruction of the AAA. What I want them to see, in the midst of much gnashing of teeth in the discipline about so-called “public anthropology”, is that the goal of the society should be to promote and distribute our research, not restrict it, charge people twice for it or make our lives exceedingly difficult by burying the research inside passwords and accounts and cross-linked memberships that don’t work.

The cry always comes up: “but the AAA depends on subscription revenue, without it we will go bankrupt!” To this there are two answers: 1) if the only solution to this problem of revenue means sacrificing the goal of distributing our research or making it publicly available, then fine, adieu! But, more charitably 2) there should in fact be much more discussion about how to increase the revenue for the AAA– through means other than the restriction of research–especially publicly funded research. There are ways to do this and a very lively ongoing discussion in “Open Access” such as the work Peter Suber and Public Knowledge have done– why not engage it more?

Rub 2: So much for recursive publics in Anthropology… I hope at least that a few people at the AAA, who do have working accounts at Anthrosource will read my article…

Update: I forgot to mention that the AAA is having an essay contest to best describe “How Anthrosource will Transform Anthropological Scholarship.” I’m not sure I have 1500 words in me, but it kind of cries out for a submission…

Update Two: Check out what google Thinks You Mean when you search for anthrosource. Not good.