Tag Archives: Websites

Adventures in Content Alerting: Sage Online

Sage is one of the larger publishers in social sciences around, known (at least to me) for producing copious amounts of sociology with an indescribable but instantly recognizable vaguely modernist “academic-press” visual aesthetic. In this post I’ll focus just on Sage’s journals and the content alerting that they offer at their website, “sagepub.com”:sagepub.com.

In terms of anthropology, Sage publishes just a few titles that are relevant to the discipline as a whole, but I have to admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for them — “Anthropological Theory”:http://ant.sagepub.com/ and “Critique of Anthropology”:http://coa.sagepub.com/. However, Sage is also are particularly strong in cultural studies type of journals, including a lot of new media stuff, so if you are interested in Theory, Culture, and Society or Media, Culture, and Society, you have to go to Sage. If, like me, you are an amateur intellectual historian, you can also check out their old-school sociological theory titles like the “Journal of Classical Sociology” and “History of the Human Sciences.”

Sage makes it relatively easy to sign up for an account on their website. Indeed, it is impossible to miss — they’ve currently got a drawing for an iPod going and everyone who signs up is elligible! Moreover, it is very easy to change your account preferences because the ‘manage my accounts’ page hovers in the upper-left hand corner of your window when you visit the site. This page is also where you go to sign up for snailmail alerts and manage your physical address as well. This is very handy and well implemented. The problem is that the ‘manage my accounts’ page has very little to do with the majority of the services that Sage’s site provides.
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The Food Timeline

Since we aren’t watching our weight anymore …

The Food Timeline is a unique archive of links to web sites and information on food history and research, arranged in chronological order.

Ever wonder what foods the Vikings ate when they set off to explore the new world? How Thomas Jefferson made his ice cream? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why? Welcome to the Food Timeline.

The Food Timeline is maintained by Lynne Olver, who is at pains to point out that she is not a chef!

(I think it is very appropriate that I found this page via my del.icio.us inbox!)

Questia: Suck or Not Suck?

My mother, of all people, is raving about Questia. Questia is not free, and my university library does not subscribe to it, but for about $99 a year you can get access to:

the world’s largest online library of books, with over 65,000 full-text books, 1 million articles, and an entire reference set complete with a dictionary, encyclopedia, and thesaurus. Your subscription to the entire Questia academic library also includes digital productivity tools for highlighting text, taking notes, and generating footnotes and bibliographies in seven different styles.

Now Questia looks like the kind of thing I hate – a service that attempts to lock you into using all of its information within its own paradigm, I don’t think any of their content can be downloaded; however, it is hard to argue with full text search of thousands of volumes of books and journals from some major publishers including Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis. And if it passes the mother test it must be pretty user-friendly.

Here is a direct link to their truly impressive collection of anthropology texts.

So, anyone here have any experience using Questia? Does it suck or not suck?

UPDATE: As per Rex’s suggestion I signed up for a trial account. You can’t see the trial account option if you go to the subscriptions page, you have to start using Questia and then you will see it appear as an option when looking at a book or article. If you don’t cancel after 7 days you get billed about $20 a month – far more than if you sign up for the yearly plan. And this experience is pretty typical of how crappy Questia is design-wise. For instance, you can create “projects” but then there is no way to move items from one project to another. You have to delete them, open up a pop-up window listing the projects, change the “current” project, then add the items again to that project. Other design elements are equally sucky – such as the fact that you have to go to a different view to delete highlights, it can be done from the same interface you use to highlight text.

Having said all that, Questia might be useful to people who live in remote places (like rural Taiwan!) where they don’t have access to a large library. There are a surprising number of books which you can read on their site. Even with the lousy interface, $99 a year might save yout the cost of buying a book you don’t need, or only need for a reference or two, which could well be worth it. Their crappy interface does not allow you to do anything truly useful, such as do a full text search only within a project or bookshelf you’ve created … but still, it just might be worth signing up despite all that (although I don’t think I will).

Finally, while their book selection is surprisingly large, their journal selection is quite limited. The main highlights for me were access to back issues of the Australian Journal of Anthropology and the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, I didn’t see anything else of much interest anthropology-wise.

Adventures in anthropological content alerting: University of Chicago Press

In my last entry about my continuing quest to survey the state of anthropology’s publishing noosphere I took a look at Taylor and Francis. Now I turn my attention to the University of Chicago Press. The UofC has a relatively small journal division with only one real standout for anthropologists: Current Anthropology. There produce other great journals (Critical Inquiry and Signs come to mind, but you take a look at “their website”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ for a complete list of what might interest you). Of course UofC is also one of the top publishers of monographs in anthropology as well, and I’ll take a brief look at that as well. What I find interesting about UofC Press is not just the fact that it is one of the best known academic publishers in the United States, but the way it succeeds (and fails) in embracing the latest trends in digital content for scholars.

First, the website: it is very well designed and has a nice clean look. Things are easy to find. You never have to look around the page trying to figure out where you want to click. Furthermore, the page for “Current Anthropology”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/home.html is very well done and includes (for those with the magic cookie) the latest edition of the journal — thus the UofC website is a place to access fresh text that is inside the ‘moving wall’ that blocks recent content.

The UofC is really outstanding for the way it has embraced the latest trends in technology. They have RSS feeds for all their journals in addition to the usual e-toc alerting service, so you can choose just how you’d like to receive information from them. Even more interesting, the press has it’s own “University of Chicago Press Blog”:http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/ so you can see what the latest news from the press is — a great way to see not just what UofC is publishing, but what they consider to be the biggest and bestest of stuff that they’ve published.

Taylor and Francis opted for an ‘identity heavy’ interface for their website — in order to receive content alerts from them you have to create an account on their site and log on to it (the problem with them was that they had lousy account management options). The UofC has a very ‘identity light’ site — you do not create a centralized account. Instead they are running a “mailman”:http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/ install and have a seperate email list set up for each journal you want an alert for.

Sign up for emailed content alerting is thus quick and painless, and you can use mailman’s well-designed interfact for it. But it is also completely decentralized — You need to create three different passwords for three different journals, and there is no central way to manage subcribing and unsubscribing (at least not that I could tell in the brief time I used the system). This is a major pain, and it suggests that they either haven’t thought about the usability of their site, or else that they are assuming that most people will use RSS. Finally, it’s worth noting that you have to click through two or three pages to actually get to the signup page for any particular journal.

Signing up for content alerts for books is even more of a fiasco — the UofC’s “current page for book alerts”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/mailnotifier/subscribe.cgi has some sort of semi-working python script that currently looks really broken. Thumbs down on this — it’s embarassing to see a major publisher have a website that looks like this.

There are other quibbles I could make about the UofC’s website — there isn’t a consistent look and feel across all pages, for instance — but these would only interest the truly picky. For anthropologists who just want to use the Internet to facilitate their research, the bottom line on the UofC site is very straightforward: good ideas, poor implementation. They have a thoughtful and forward-thinking approach to letting their readers know about their books and journals. Unfortunately, the implementation of their technology is spotty. Sometimes it just doesn’t look pretty, sometimes it’s a pain to use, and occasionally it’s just plain broken. A little bit of follow-through would help the UofC Press realize the great promise of its approach to managing its web presence.

Taylor and Francis: SARA TOC alerting

In the past year or so Kerim and I have published articles in Anthropology News about ‘next generation’ research online — using RSS feeds and so forth. In the next week or so I thought it might be interesting to try to undertake a broad review of what sort of tools are out there for anthropologists who do research. I actually am not qualified for this since I am not a librarian, and so this won’t be an enormous list of 500 URLs. Instead I just want to share some of the things that I think are useful as a researcher — the sorts of tricks and tips and locations that I find useful to know about.

For instance: how can you keep on top of what’s being published? Most journals have some sort of alerting service although it is typically in the form of ‘TOC (table of contents) alerting’ rather than an RSS feed — you give the journal your email, and when a new issue comes out you get a list of all the articles in your inbox. You don’t have to have a subscription to the journal or right to read it online in order to get alerted — it’s basically a fancy form of advertising.

Now there are various middleware services and sites that attempt to aggregate these sorts of services for you but on the whole I’ve found them to be spotty in coverage and they never provide the one-stop shopping oslution I want (if someone has other experiences let me know) so I’ve decided to just go direct to the source. Since each company has a different method of providing you TOC alerting, it makes sense to compare OTC alerting services by publisher rather than by journal.
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PhDWeblogs.net

PhDWeblogs.net is a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students’ weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register it here. We also accept other research-related weblogs, even if they are not directly connected to a PhD.

(via Scott Sommers)

AnthroSource and CiteULike: back together again

Thanks to the work of Brave Leader Richard Cameron and Uberprogrammer Peter Graif, AnthroSource now plays well with CiteULike after a period of recrimination and tears. Thanks so much to Richard and Peter for taking care of this and making this great tool work once more with AnthroSource!

AchiveGrid

Via ResearchBuzz I learned today of ArchiveGrid. Currently free, it may become a pay site if they don’t get additional funding by the end of the month. It allows you to search descriptions of the contents of hundreds of thousands of archives. If you are doing historical research of any kind it is definitely worth checking out!

Anthropology 2.0: the Death of Hypermedia?

The latest buzz word on the internet is “Web 2.0,” referring to a whole host of technologies which both make it possible to replace your desktop applications with web-based services (e.g. <a href=http://www.gmail.com/”>Gmail), and those which enable new social services capable of tapping into the collective wisdom of the web (e.g. Newsvine).

But where to look for anthropology articles that discuss this phenomenon? I’m sure our readers might have a few interesting suggestions, but the simple truth is that anthropology publishing can’t keep pace with the changes in technology. Articles and books I’ve looked at which were published in the last few years are based on research from nearly five years ago, and still talk about USENET, MUDs and how neat it is that you can design your own web page.

When I was in graduate school the hot word was “hypermedia.” Peter Biella’s classic piece from 1993, “Beyond Ethnographic Film: Hypermedia and Scholarship” is still making the rounds. Peter’s piece was ahead of its time. Just about every DVD we buy now is full of additional material, including alternative soundtracks, interviews, and even documents related to the film, but they still aren’t linked together as coherently as Peter imagined, or conceived of in projects like his Yanomamö Interactive: The Ax Fight On CD-ROM. And that’s my point: I think the immense amount of work it takes to create a truly complete hypermedia world for a single text is beyond the resources of any single anthropologist or academic publisher, not to mention even major film studios eager to add value to your Star Ward DVD box set.
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Emergent Anthropologies

The AAA website is announcing the birth of a brand new journal, “After Culture: Emergent Anthropologies”:http://www.aaanet.org/coop/search/details.cfm?coop_id=417&type=Publication%20Call%20for%20Papers. It sounds interesting and hip (why is it that any word that ends in y and is made plural sounds hip to the anthropological ear? “Other Modernities” “New Alterities”) and, best of all, it will be freely available on the web. While there are a few open access anthropology journals out there, there aren’t too many, and they are (to be frank) of varying quality. After Culture sounds like it might fix this, except for one thing — if you click on the URL of the journal as it’s listed in the call for papers (i.e. http://http//www.tc.umn.edu/~wolf0358/afterculture.htm ) you are redirected to the “Microsoft homepage”:http://www.microsoft.com/ (Firefox) or search results or search.msn.com (IE). Perhaps its the extra http:// in the URL? Regardless, it’s nice to see the AAA supporting this, even if they have some trouble figuring out how to direct people to the website in question. This project has been widely covered already, but here’s a little bit more google juice for them: if you are interested in learning more, “here’s a working link to the call for papers”:http://www.tc.umn.edu/~wolf0358/afterculture.htm.

Keith Hart’s Memory Bank

You know the phrase “informal economy?” That was Keith Hart’s idea. Hart exemplifies the Oxbridge lefty populist 60s development social anthropologist — you know the type. Throughout his career Hart has always had a personality and imagination that is a little too big for anthropology to hold. Luckily that is what the internet is for — his book “The Memory Bank”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog/simpleblog_view is now supplemented by a website which is literally “his memory bank”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/. I can’t think of another professor who received their Ph.D. four decades ago who have been so enthusiastic about embracing the Internet. Not only is his “book”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/book/ available online in more or less complete form, so are his papers, both “published”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/ and “unpublished”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/, his “stories and poems”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/stories/ and even links to “IMDB move reviews he’s writtten”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/journalism/.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the site is his “blog”:http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog/simpleblog_view. It isn’t actively maintained now, but even in its current form it’s sort of fascinating — some entries literally consist of “here’s what I wrote last night to replace the intro of chapter 2 of that new book I’m writing.” I started reading The Memory Bank when it first came out then managed to leave it on a plane. I remember it being intriguing and definitely a couple of standard deviations away from the run of the mill in a fascinating way. Although it was clear that Hart’s grasp of the Internet was different from that of someone who grew up with it, Hart’s take on it, like the rest of his career, cannot help but peak your interest.

Roxy Gagdekar, Bridge Blogging Chharanagar

While we are working on the film, we have been having our meals at Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, and we have had many long talks. He is a tremendous source of information about the Chhara community, denotified tribes, and the politics of Gujarat. A reporter at one of Gujarat’s leading newspapers, Roxy is also an excellent writer. So I am very happy that he has decided to start his own blog. He plans to use it to write about Chharangar, the activities of the Budhan Theatre, and even some short fiction he has written.

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds, I argued that there would be a resurgence of “armchair anthropology” as a result of the internet. Central to this argument are what Hossein Derakhshan calls “bridge bloggers.” Such bloggers are able to bridge the same linguistic and cultural barriers that anthropologists seek to overcome. In some cases they may even do it better. I believe that Roxy Gagdekar is one such person.

Googling Levi-Strauss on Freud

I’ve been playing around with Google Print, and it is amazing. I’ve already found several books I’m likely to buy as a result. I won’t go into how stupid the lawsuits are, as that’s been well covered elsewhere. But I think it is worth showing just a few examples of how useful this can be. For instance, suppose you wanted to find all instances of the word “Freud” in Levi-Strauss’ work. Unfortunately, not all his books have been scanned yet, but this search will get you results from seven of his books, and this one will search just within Totemism.

In addition to limiting searches to an author, you can also limit searches to a year. Like this search for both Freud and Levi-Strauss in books written during the 1960s. Not surprisingly, this turns up a quote on page three of Turner’s The Ritual Process.

Most books limit your ability to browse page-by-page, but older books which are in the public domain have no such limitation. I wasn’t able to figure out how to limit a search to only public domain books, except by looking for older books. For instance, Boas’ early Chinook Texts (which I found by looking for Boas books published before 1900) is in the public domain.

Forecast: Media Cloudy over Spanish Harlem

Although a tireless advocate of using new technologies in Anthropology, I’m careful to encourage those technologies which employ open standards and avoid requiring proprietary technologies. That way you can be reasonably sure that your information won’t be tied up in some technology that will eventually be defunct. This is why I am rather critical of a project I discovered browsing the schedule of the 2005 Margaret Mead Festival which starts today. (The festival site itself uses an annoying Flash interface. Ugh!)

The project is DIALelebarrrio, which describes itself as an effort to “create an ’embedded’ documentary in the streets of Spanish Harlem” by “creating a ‘media cloud’ over the neighborhood.” What is a “media cloud“?

[It] is a metatphor for a specific location-based source of digital information. DIALelbarrio wanted to create the image of a cloud full of stories, music, images and video, unique to the culture of Spanish Harlem, that hovers over the neighborhood and can only be accessed when physically in the area.

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