Tag Archives: Websites

The LSA Ethics Blog

Sometimes I think we don’t give enough credit to AAA — after only a year or two of total inaction since we first suggested the idea, they have gone from no blogging to having four blogs: “In Focus”:http://anthropologynews.blogspot.com/, “Human Rights”:http://aaahumanrights.blogspot.com/, “Public Affairs”:http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/ (although the url is aaanewsinfo — so much for branding) and the “Race blog”:http://understandingrace.org/cs/blogs/race/default.aspx. I’m sure there are some who think this is three too many and that they are all too hard to find and navigate, but I’m glad to see that they have gotten these underway — especially the public affairs blog.

That said though, I’m sort of blown away by the fascinating use of blogging that is happening over at Linguistic Society of America. They are just now drafting an ethics statement and they are doing it “posting each section of the statement as a blog entry and letting people comment on them”:http://lsaethics.wordpress.com/2008/07/. Now that is innovation in blogging. Fascinating.

A new blog in the Somatosphere

Just a quick note to draw your attention to a new group blog on medical anthropology, STS, bioethics and related issues called “Somatosphere.” I’m always happy to see new academic group blogs starting up because I think some of them represent a chance to really constitute new communities around topics that don’t yet have much real presence beyond the standard departments and conferences. Medical anthropology of the sort represented by Somatosphere is a clear case… take a look and encourage them with your, as ever, thoughtful and even-handed commentary (grin.)

Around the Web

Montgomery McFate’s Nom de Plume: The secret is out. When she is not doing for embedded anthropology what Anita Bryant did for orange juice, Montgomery McFate is busy writing lusty blog entries of military men on her site I Luv a Man in Uniform. In a statement to Wired’s Blog, McFate wrote that she can not affirm nor deny that she is Pentagon Diva, the author of the blog who describes herself in the About Me section:

Hey girls, remember TeenBeat? Remember when you thought Andy Gibb and the Bay City Rollers were just the hottest boys in the world? Go on, don’t be ashamed – you can admit it! Now that we’re all grown up, our tastes have changed – no more foppish, self-indulgent rock stars for us! Since there are so many studly guys in uniform slinging rifles these days, what better way to show our appreciation than a little fan site dedicated to men in uniform? As the Gang of Four once sang, “The girls — they love to see you shoot!”

Eww. Although Marc Tyrrell at In Harmonium emphasizes that Pentagon Diva and I Luv a Man … is essentially a big joke, Maximillian Forte at Open Anthropology suggests that the joke isn’t all that funny.

And so it begins… Wired and Culture Matters reported that the Pentagon has officially released a call for proposal submissions for Project Minerva.

Culture on the Move: Sandra Rubia Silva, a Brazilian PhD student, posted this piece at Material World on her proposal to research cell phone usage in the South of Brazil.

Really, Really Cold War: So cold it happened in the Ice Age. (Ouch, bad joke.) ABC News reports on recent findings out of University of Missouri-Columbia that there was a prehistoric arms escalation of arrowhead technology. The projecting of current events into the archaeological record and then using them as an example to illuminate our world might best be illustrated by, well, ABC’s illustration of arrowhead evolution.

ABC arms race

New Journal: Kerim passed along a recent announcement for (con)textos, a new PhD student journal in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Enjoy!

New Tools: Sophie and Apture

Just a random couple of notes on two tools that I’ve looked at recently.

1) Mary Murrell points out that the Institute for the Future of the Book has released Sophie 1.0 and has announced a competition for a workshop at the institute for multimedia literacy at USC. Sophie is a multi-media authoring tool– a bit like Macromedia Director, for those who can remember that far back into the last millenium, but much much better. It’s open source, it has a very nice interface that allows for rapid construction of multi-page documents which can incorporate sound, video and images. It has a timeline for creating time-based presentations and it handles most of the main formats without trouble. It does take a bit of energy to learn, but it could be used to create really rich presentations or documents. It’s kind of the perfect in-between-film-and-text tool. The only shortcoming is that it produces its own file format which requires the sophie reader (also free, and available on mac-windows-linux) to read a book produced in sophie. This means that docs can’t be easily displayed on the web, but requires the viewer to download and install a piece of software. Better for presentations than stand-alone docs, I guess. However, it looks like one could export the time -based stuff to a movie format, and the text-based stuff to a pdf, so it’s not that bad.

2) On the extremely cool, but maddening side is Apture. Apture is an amazingly clever add-on to a web-site that allows beautifully clever links that pop-up and move the window around and allow you to quickly add photos and video to any site. It’s hard to explain (go play with the the demo). The down side is that this is 1) so NOT free and open source software, and as far as I can tell a direct route into allowing apture to basically display whatever it wants on your site, in order to get this functionality (it uses a remote application server that essentially serves content on top of your site, so it’s a bit like an annotation service); and 2) it ruins the “view source” aspect of the web by overlaying content that cannot be easily investigated, as one can with normal content displayed in a browser. Apture is hardly the main culprit here, but they are part of a trend towards the obfuscation of web technologies, towards a re-closing of the source so that it becomes harder and harder for individuals to teach themselves such new tools. Indeed, Apture is not intended to be learned and re-used by anyone except at the interface level, unlike the wealth of tools (HTML, PHP, perl, python, ruby) that we have come to expect as part of our information environment. This makes me sad and mad. I wish they could see the light 🙂

American Ethnography, the AAA, and the Public Domain

Recently “Anthropologi.info”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?blog=8&title=new_e_zine_american_ethnography&page=1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&disp=single#c2258 blogged a new anthropology site, “American Ethnography”:http://www.americanethnography.com. American Ethnography is a very pretty site with monthly thematic collections of articles from AAA journals. My initial response was: “wow, how happy will the AAA be to see entire articles they are selling for money on AnthroSource being reproduced on the web for free?” So I was surprised — astonished would be a better word — when Martin, the proprietor of AE, pointed out a paragraph on the AAA website’s “permissions page”:http://www.aaanet.org/publications/permissions.cfm which states that:

AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission. The AAA asks only that you include a complete reference to the original publication and a link to AnthroSource.

I would actually prefer a little more specification of what “public domain” means exactly here, but its still an extremely positive step forward — well done AAA! And as for the rest of us, I we should take this opportunity to start making some of the foundational works in our discipline available as soon as possible. Not only will this enable everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline, but it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected. And if they are not, then perhaps we could convince AAA to make the moving wall on their content shorter than its current forty-four years…

Three New Tools

It seems that new productivity tools come out faster than we can keep up with them, but I’ve recently started using three new ones which I think are worth taking a moment of your time to investigate. All three have changed how I work:

  • Jott is a service which works over the phone (sorry, US phone numbers only right now). You call the Jott phone number, record a short message, and then it is transcribed by both computers and humans before being emailed to you, one of your contacts, or various web services which interact with Jott. A recording of your original message is included, so you can figure out what went wrong when there’s a mistake. (It’s pretty accurate, but not pefect. “Ad hoc became “add a hawk” in my last Jott. They encourage you to spell out unusual names.) Even though I’m in Taiwan, my internet phone is registered in the US, so I use this all the time. Its great when I’m lying down reading a book and want to transcribe a short passage or make a note to myself.
  • Evernote is a way to make sure your notes are with you wherever you are. It syncs your notes between your desktop computer (they have clients for Mac and Windows), the website, and even your mobile phone (via a Windows Mobile client, or an experimental IMAP interface for the iPhone). It also clips web pages and even recognizes handwriting, but I’m just happy to have my notes with me wherever I go. Oh, and you can send your Jotts to Evernote for note-taking bliss. (Evernote is currently in closed beta, but I have three invites left, and hopefully those three can share their invites once mine are gone.)
  • Sente is a Mac OS X only application for keeping track of your references and PDF files. Nothing new there, EndNote and Bookends do the same thing just as well. In fact, Bookends was my favorite until recently, but Sente’s new “links” feature is amazingly useful so I’m giving it a try for the paper I’m writing. Download a citation from AnthroSource to Sente and it will see the link to the AnthroSource website, which it shows in the main panel. Click on the link to download the PDF file and its automatically downloaded, renamed, and attached to your reference! If there’s an ISBN number for a book you can see the Amazon and Google Books web pages for that book. And so on. Watch a short video showing this in action. (I should also mention Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox which can pull bibliographic metadata from numerous websites, organize PDFs and make bibliographies. Zotero can’t quite compete with stand-alone apps just yet, but its free and catching up quick.)

Peer Review Round-up, yee haw.

I want to point people to a couple of things related to the intersection of peer review and open access. The first is a recent round-table discussion held at the Center for Studies of Higher Education at UC Berkeley, which brought together a great group of people including Don Kennedy, the editor of Science and Mark Rose (author of Authors and Owners) among others. The minutes are available (link) and they include a number of interesting proposals and diagnoses of the main problems facing scholarly publishing today, including some sharp observations about the financial realities of publishing peer-reviewed work and creative ideas for publishing monographs.

The other, a bit late, but still ongoing is that Noah Wardrip-Fruin over at Grant Text Auto, is experimenting with blog-based, serialized, community peer review. Noah’s book, Expressive Processing (one of a increasingly large number of texts laying claim to the field of “software studies”), is serialized for commentary using comment press (hip hip hooray!) and is being conducted along side “standard” peer review with MIT Press. I think this is a great idea whose time has definitely come, for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m more and more fond of the idea that peer review is best done by communities of people who are not anonymous. Pseudonymy might be a good idea (i.e., I don’t care who “IreadBooks69” is at Amazon but I know that s/he writes great reviews). The other is that community is a just generally a good idea. If the people commenting on Noah’s book feel as though they are contributing, are part of something, and that they get credit for it, or perhaps even get an immediate response, then that beats the heck out of the anonymous, forgotten black hole I routinely send my reviews into. I only hope Noah writes some kind of white paper-ish thing highlighting what works and what doesn’t so that people can repeat the experience.

Friday in 1994

You don’t need to be a fan of the series 24 to get the joke here.

I watched it and it immediately made me think that there is a kind of ethnographic method here, perhaps a class assignment: take a familiar case from the contemporary setting and explore it by setting it back 15 years. Change everything you can think of, what stays the same and what makes a difference? Could be a useful way to pick apart the difference technology makes. Or perhaps not, since as EB White says: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”

Announcing the redesigned SLA website

When the Society for Linguistic Anthropology was discussing a site redesign, I volunteered to be an advisor. When they started talking about paying thousands of dollars to a web designer who designed static sites which failed to conform to web standards, lacked an easy to use administrative backend and contained no integrated blog or rss feeds, I offered to do the site for free.

Well, you get what you pay for. The new SLA website may not be pretty, but it does have an RSS feed!

Society for Linguistic Anthropology
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Mmm… brains (and culture!)

Our friends at Culture Matters have spawned. Leave them alone and you never know what they’ll get up to. In this case, a new blog on “neuroanthropology.” This is the kind of think I really like to see, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is precisely the kind of place where there is room to move anthropology and biology forward together. As Greg puts it, it allows us to “think much more seriously about how culture might shape development, allowing us to think seriously about a kind of deep enculturation of the brain, senses, endocrine system, and the like. Researchers in fields that specialize in these topics are increasingly aware of the degree to which developmental variables affect developmental outcomes, creating opportunities for anthropological research to influence a host of other fields.” There is room for a new kind of medical and bio-cultural anthropology for people willing to connect— though it does depend on finding the brain scientists willing to meet the cultural scientists halfway, which is no mean feat.

The other thing i like about it is that it is a specialized scholarly blog; that’s something i’d really like to see more of because it gives me hope for the future of the field to see people openly and enthusiastically sharing ideas, research, new finds and new theories, rather than squirreling them away in the hopes of being first, and honor that seems increasingly less important.

Joy.
http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/

Anthropologists on Pakistan

Cultural Anthropology is currently hosting a forum and a collection of articles on Pakistan, offered by Veena Das and Naveeda Khan. It contains a number of short pieces, an article from CA by Khan and a forum and blog on the CA website (registration required). It looks like they’ve had no discussion so far, so for those of you with Pakistanimania, head on over…

link…

The new ASA blog

This has been noted at “other places”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=2943&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 but it bears mentioning here as well — the ASA “has a very promising new blog”:http://blog.theasa.org/. The Brits have always been great at producing interesting, readable, and timely work — Anthropology Today is lively and interesting whereas — I kid you not — the only thing I find worth reading in Anthropology News is the obituaries. Why is it that the commonwealth is so out-pacing the American anthropological noosphere?

AAA 2008 Meeting news roundup

While we were wallowing under Php exploits, Culture Matters has been working on a lovely “round up of AAA meeting news”:http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/a-round-up-of-news-coverage-of-the-aaa-meetings/#more-267. Go over and read it now — very thorough.

The AAA, HTS, and the anthropological noosphere

I am very gratified to see “the AAA has taken a stance on HTS”:http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/2007/11/aaa-board-statement-on-hts.html, and that it has taken the stance that it has. Even more to the point, I am glad to see that it has taken this stance in the way it has, which includes a blog on which people can discuss this issue. I think both the stance and the blog signal a couple of things about the AAA that deserve mention:

  1. The AAA statement is extremely ‘narrowly written’ — it takes a position only on a) this conflict and b) the ‘thin’ consensus on ethics that exists within the AAA, which is focused particularly on human subjects. This begs many bigger questions about participation in the war, which I think is a good idea on their part since they are not germane to the AAA’s decision at the moment.

  2. The way to go forward is probably to start ‘thickening’ this initial statement and build off of it.

  3. The statement clearly (in my humble opinion) shows the influence of SM and the anthropological noosphere more generally on the AAA exec board and every reader, commenter and Mind should be proud to see that this is really a case of our community forming a ‘civil sphere’ that can inform AAA decision making.
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