Tag Archives: Websites

Linguistic Anthropology

It is already 2007 here in Taiwan, and what better way to start off the new year than with the announcement of a new anthropology blog!

Welcome to Linguistic Anthropology, a group blog from the members of the Linguistic Anthropology e-mail list (of which I myself am a member – although it is Leila Monaghan who deserves credit for getting this thing off the ground – I had nothing to do with it).

So far the blog sports two excellent posts: one by Chad Nilep on “technology isolation syndrome” (i.e. the medicalization of youth by the BBC), and the other one by Leila about how to teach an introductory course in “sign languages and Deaf culture.”

PLoS One, Stanley Milgram and the CAVE

This is rich. The online open access jounal Public Library of Science (PLoS) has just launched PLoS One–an experiment in post-publication peer review. Rather than extensive peer review prior to publishing research, articles submitted to PLoS One will be reviewed by one editorial board member for primarily “technical rather than subjective” concerns (I think they mean technical rather than substantive… or maybe they don’t). Then the published articles are opened up for peer review by readers–through annotations, discussion and ratings systems. I think this is the future for scholarly peer review, especially in fields where competition is stiff and time to publication is important (i.e. less so for anthropology than for computer science, but still)–and so long as these articles are primarily annotated, discussed, and rated by people who actually have some knowledge of the given field or topic, it could become a system that moves people towards a kind of research publication spectrum (multiple, frequent reports on a research project) and away from the kind of secretive, report-it-all-in-one (or get rejected) Important Journal. The idea of “open access” is here not just about making research available, but also about staking out research territory in a public way, testing research questions in a public forum, and hopefully, raising the bar on the kind of research that is reviewed by the Important Journals.

What I love even more about this is that the first article I looked at is a fascinating replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous Obedience experiments from the 1960s, in which research subjects thought they were participating in an experiment about learning, but actually it was about obedience to authority. The replication takes place not with real people, but with virtual humans generated in an immersive environment and seeks to study emotional and physiological response to the administration of painful shocks to a character that the subjects know to be “virtual”–though they interact with it through vision and speach (and through text in the control). Apparently, people get a bit shaken up by torturing virtual humans. Not a surprise really, but a very clever experiment.

WritingBloggingWritingReading

I’ve been following the projects at the Institute for the future of the book, including MacKenzie Wark’s new Gamer Theory project, and a project by journalism professor Micthell Stephens about ancient Rome. Both projects are great from the perspective of experimental interfaces– very clever about the problems of careful call and response on scholarly texts (as opposed to the post + comments model of the blog). I’m not sure either are as interesting content-wise as they are interface-wise, but that’s frequently the difficulty with new media experiments… worth checking out in any case.

Material World

Another great addition to the anthropology blogsphere:

Material World is an interactive, online hub for contemporary debates, discussion, thinking and research centred on material and visual culture. It is the brainchild of scholars working in the anthropology departments of University College London and New York University, but aims to create a new international community of academics, students, curators, artists and anyone else with particular interests in material and visual culture.

Images of Empire

When I came back from my research trip to England this summer I wrote a post complaining about how few of these archives were online. At the time I knew one of the collections was working hard to put things up on the web, but I was waiting for the official announcement – which I finally got today.

Images of Empire today launches its new website at www.imagesofempire.com, providing online access for the first time to the unique archive of historical images held at the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, UK.

Visitors to the website can now explore over 6,000 still images and film clips from the collection, which is currently the UK’s largest dedicated resource of photography and film on the British colonial period. Images from the archive can be navigated and viewed using an advanced search facility and photographs from the collection are available to order online. Registration is free, enabling users to build lightboxes, order high-resolution files and access supplementary information. Further images from the Museum’s collection will be made available online at regular intervals as more of the archive is digitised.

By presenting this collection online, Images of Empire creates a valuable commercial resource for both professional picture buyers and academic researchers, and supports the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in its mission to provide a national forum for preserving, exploring and studying Britain’s cultural heritage associated with the former Empire and today’s Commonwealth.

From my experience there, I’d say the collection is somewhat idiosyncratic. A lot of film footage of colonial officers and their pets, but lots of wonderful treasures as well. The point being that it is one of those collections that will probably work best for you if you are just curious and browsing around rather than if you are trying to find something specific.

Indiana Jones denied tenure

Read the “departmental memo”:http://mcsweeneys.net/2006/10/10bryan.html over at McSweeny’s. This comes via 3 Quarks Daily, which has their own “excellent analysis”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/11/indiana_jones_a.html of Indy’s depressingly imperialist epistemological practice — something I’ve “blogged about before”:/2005/06/21/the-indiana-jones-thing/.

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).

Google Anthropology Blog Search

Via Lifehacker I discovered that Google has a new “roll your own search engine” service. I played with Rollyo before, but that was Yahoo, not Google. Also, Google’s search has a the wiki-like ability to allow other people to edit the search engine. (I hope this doesn’t mean that spammers will be adding their own sites to the list.)

Anyway, I’ve created a search engine for all the anthropology blogs listed in the Authoritarian Academic Blog Wiki (AABW – see here for some background). If you want to add your own blog to the mix feel free to do so (as long as its anthropology related).

I’ve also created a search engine for the “Anthropology web” which is for non-blog sites (or should it include all the blogs as well?). Right now it only includes the AAA web site and AnthroSource, but feel free to add other sites here as well.

Anthropology Blog Search

Anthropology Web Search

What is Christian Anthropology?

In an effort to offer balance to this site’s old-testament leanings, I offer you the following:

Question: “What is Christian Anthropology?”

Answer: Anthropology is the study of humanity. Christian Anthropology is the study of humanity from a Christian / Biblical perspective. It is primarily focused on the nature of humanity – how the immaterial and material aspects of man relate to each other. Some common questions in Christian Anthropology are:

Christian Anthropology deals with who we are and how we relate to God. Whether a people are inherently good or inherently sinful is crucial in determining how our relationship with God can be restored. Whether the souls of human beings carry on after death determines in large part our view of our purpose in this world. Christian Anthropology helps us to understand ourselves, from God’s perspective.

A key verse on Christian Anthropology is Psalms 139:14, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Academic Blog Wiki

I sympathize with Henry Farrell. We here at Savage Minds haven’t been doing a particularly good job updating our blogroll of the very small number of anthropology blogs out there, and Crooked Timber wants to be up to-date on the entire academic blogsphere. Help them out (and us too) but heading over to the Anthropology page of their new academic blog wiki, academicblogs.org, and add in your favorite anthropology blogs.

(Note: The site seems overwhelmed right now, so give it some time …) UPDATE: It is working now…

E-learning and Collaboration with Free Web Tools

Here’s a quick and dirty way to get your course online using free web tools:

  • Upload your syllabus to writely.com and make it public.
  • Upload your course documents to a folder on box.net and share the folder.
  • Create a discussion group for your class on Google Groups.
  • Post your class list to Google Spreadsheets (although you might want to keep that private).
  • Create a unique del.icio.us tag for URLs you want to share with your class.

I’ve noticed that most people do just about everything in either Word or Excel. These tools let you move that data online without having to change a thing. Once online you can continue to edit it online, share it publicly, or privately share it with a group of collaborators. I find myself using Writely and Google Spreadsheets more and more for any kind of task that would have previously required mailing the same document back and forth several times. Having tried about a dozen different services for running online discussions (such as forums, Yahoo Groups, etc.) I finally settled on Google Groups as the one that is easiest to use for both teachers and students. And Box.net seems like the easiest way to share documents for download. I just wish there was something to make it just as easy for students to submit their homework online.

Del.icio.us is the odd one out. Although I find it very easy to use and now can’t live without it, I’ve not been very successful at getting other people to understand how to use it, or why they might wish to do so. Not sure why that is…

UPDATE: One of my biggest problems doing a course syllabus is moving things around and then remembering which week is which date. I just figured out that Google Spreadsheets lets you do formulas in the date field! That means you can take the starting week and then just add 7 for each week. This way, even if you move things around the dates will still be correct! From now on I’m doing my course outline in a spreadsheet!

UPDATE: The new beta version of Google Groups adds a bunch of great new features.

UPDATE: Google has now merged Writely and Spreadsheets into “Google Docs” and has created a special web page for educators explaining the educational uses of a wide variety of Google products.

Notes Towards An Anthropology of Burning Man

In the course of advising a student the topic of Burning Man came up. The folk-notion guiding burning man, of course, is that it is a total revolt against our empty modern age and that it provides an opportunity for people to experience ‘their real selves’ and otherwise recover the authentic core of human experience — found, for instance, in primordial ‘tribal’ activities like fire eating and dancing without your shoes on — which has been denied to them by the commodity-padded iron cage of modernity that they live in.

As the following paragraph might suggest, I think of Burning Man as the ultimate in bourgeois extravagance — building a space complete with cars and water and music in the desert like that requires a mastery of technology which is nothing if not modern. Enthusiasm for all things “tribal” seems to me to invoke the most exoticizing of ‘noble savage’ tropes. And of course these days Burning Man requires a ticket, has a department of -motor- mutant vehicles, and even has Burning Man Cops. Worst of all it sinks people’s energy into endeavors which are often politically quietistic. Painting yourself blue and taking a lot of acid and then going back to your day job does not count as smashing capitalism, at least not to me.

That said, I think doing an ethnography OF ‘the Burning Man theory of subjecitvity’ — the culturally specific notions of authenticity and revolt that it embodies — would be fascinating. The entire thing is extremely Durkheimian both in its ‘annual collective effervesence in the outback’ sense but also in the sense that the US alterno scene has a genealogies connection to Durkheim (via notions of potlatch, the college de sociologie, etc. etc.).

But whatever. Perhaps its unfair of me to have this opinion of Burning Man. To each his own. But in my support I offer a random smattering of links to help deflate the tendency to write Burning Man as the Ultimate Postmodern Revolt:

*Here’s a “Bad Subjects”:http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/21/wray.html article on Burning Man from 1995 — very early.

*”Achtung Hippie!: Reflections On The Burning Man Scam”:http://blog.hisnameistimmy.com/?p=12 and a “follow up article”:http://blog.hisnameistimmy.com/?p=14 from the same blog.

*”Confessions of a Burning Man”:http://www.burningmanconfessions.com/ is a new documentary I’d be interested in seeing — has anyone else seen this?

More links or ideas would be great — feel free to let me (or Burning Man) have it!

UPDATE: Here are some links from readers —

  • “Burning Man: A Working-Class, Do-It-Yourself Affair”:http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue2005/burningman.html by Chris Carlsson, Processed Worlds 2.005 04/05
    *”Many More Films About Burning Man”:http://euroburners.org/filmfestival/films.html our commenter rachel reccomends ‘Dust Devils’

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard and other fulltext goodies

Unlike Kerim, I am just begining the study of Chinese. This is my first semester of Mandarin and let me tell you something, if you think publishing, teaching, and doing committee work is hard, you should try publishing, teaching, doing committee work, and learning a language that involves memorizing tens of thousands of distinct characters. Actually I don’t think the language itself is that difficulty (yet) — it’s really the writing system that is kicking my ass. But then again we’ve mostly been doing the sounds of the language and noun phrases and have yet to hit such sophisticated linguistic concept as, you know, transitive verbs.

Anyhoo, like many neophyte Chinese speakers I recently came across David Moser’s essay “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”:http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html. No surprises if you’ve learned a lot of other languages. But what was a surprise — and delight — was that Moser’s essay and the “entire festschrift that it’s from”:http://www.pinyin.info/readings/Schriftfestschrift.html are available online. It just so happens that a good number of the other monographs in the series are also available. They are all part of Victor Mair’s “Sinoplatonic Papers”:http://www.sino-platonic.org/index.html series which is making the transition to open access online publication. They all look wonderful and are a perfect example of the sort of playful occasional papers that perfect for open access: a labor of love that bursts with scholarly energy. Or so I imagine — I haven’t had a chance to read all 172!

The new new video

I don’t know how many anthropologists actually take seriously the idea of making video into a real tool of the trade–but I was amazed to find and play with eyespot, an online video-mixing site replete with Creative Commons tracks, Prelinger archive footage and an increadibly cool little interface. I can imagine this being an amazing tool for the creation of an ethnographic video as a collaborative effort, especially if your people produce and want to share their own video… bandwidth and memory notwithstanding (it was too much for me to upload a 12MB file).