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Long Road
privacy, libraries and others…
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about privacy, the public domain, and Indigenous knowledge and cultural materials as I was writing an article about the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal project. Privacy, as it gets used in arguments for and against digital technologies that can easily reproduce images and or...
More on Indigenous languages and technology
See this article in the Native American Times about the use of a new software application to aid in learning the Ojibwe language. Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia announces the launch of their new Ojibwe language learning software, Ojibwemodaa. The software application uses video conversations and engaging games to immerse the...
Check out this article from the Indigenous Language Institute: Who are you if your identity is based on your language, and your language is dying? It’s a question posed by teen participants in a digital-media workshop titled “Ancient Voices, Modern Tools,” at Santa Fe’s Indigenous Language Institute. The 13 students involved learned...
Anthropology News: Repatriation
The latest AN is out and free until the end of the month. The focus is repatriation (in a US context). Check out the articles: Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh Remains Unknown: Repatriating Culturally Unaffiliated Human Remains Margaret M Bruchac Constructing Indigenous Associations: Protocols of Recognition and NAGPRA Compliance Peter N Jones Using Genetic Material in Cultural Affiliation Studies:...
It’s that time of year again! Time to put your thinking cap on and come up with a project for the Vectors summer institute. I can’t say enough good things about Vectors and the folks who run it, if you even think you might have an idea, I suggest you...
“Twilght” mania & Quileute Cultural Property
Check out Angela Riley’s insightful piece in the NYT today on the Twilight industry and Quileute interests: At the same time, like indigenous peoples around the globe, the Quileute want to be meaningful participants in the treatment of their own cultural property. This means, first and foremost, having their sovereignty and...
media/anthropology
Notes on Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (Inglehart and Welzel 2005)
Source: Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Conclusion to A Revised Theory of Modernization chapter, pp. 46-47 1. Socioeconomic development, in probabilistic terms, ‘tends to make people more secular, tolerant, and trusting and to place more emphasis on self-expression,...
Migrant workers’ use of ICTs for interpersonal communication
** via medianthro list ** The next EASA Media Anthropology Network e-seminar will run from 20 April to 4 May 2010 on the Network’s mailing list. Sun Sun Lim and Minu Thomas (National University of Singapore, NUS) will be presenting a working paper entitled “Migrant workers’ use of ICTs for interpersonal communication...
Mobile rewards: a critical review of the Mobiles for Development (M4D) literature
EASA2010: Crisis and imagination (24/08/2010 – 27/08/2010) Media Anthropology Network workshop: The Rewards of Media Paper Title: Mobile rewards: a critical review of the Mobiles for Development (M4D) literature Francisco Osorio and John Postill Sheffield Hallam University Abstract: The extraordinary rate of diffusion and adoption of mobile phones across the global South over the past decade...
Conference on China’s soft power
** via MECCSA mailing list ** A Conference organised by the China Media Centre at the University of Westminster with the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of China Renmin University 309 Regent Street, London W1 UK April 8th and 9th 2010 The dramatic economic growth in China has meant a renewed international influence. ...
Alasdair MacIntyre (1985) on what counts as a practice – and what doesn’t
Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human...
Notes on Krotz (2009) Mediatization
Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been searching for a while for ways of grasping media and societal/cultural change. Well, the following notes may be of use in this regard. They are taken from: Krotz, F. (2009) Mediatization: a concept with which to grasp media and societal...
Material World
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Call for Papers: The Circulation of Museum Objects
American Anthropological Association Meeting, New Orleans, November 17th- 21st, 2010 Panel organizer: Chris Wingfield, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford / University of Birmingham - chris.wingfield@prm.ox.ac.uk Deadline for title and abstract: Friday 19th March. When things become museum objects, they......
Max Liboiron, PhD Candidate Department of Media, Culture and Communication New York University max.liboiron@nyu.edu www.maxliboiron.com We are facing a garbage crisis. From nuclear waste with a ten-thousand year half-life, to the persistent organic pollutants found in the breast milk of......
for Papers for the upcoming American Anthropological Association's meetings (New Orleans, LA; November 17-21, 2010) We are looking for individuals who have empirical or theoretical work relating to brand counterfeiting. The panel has six papers confirmed (and one discussant) and......
Do Museums Still Need Objects?
Conn, Steven. 2010. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press reviewed by Haidy Geismar, NYU Conn is a historian of museums, whose other books include the influential Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (2000, U Chicago Press).......
THE RESTORATION OF ARTWORKS IN EUROPE FROM 1789 TO 1815: PRACTICES, TRANSFERS, STAKES International study day October 2nd 2010 Calendar: Proposal submission deadline: May 1st 2010 Reply to authors: June 1st 2010 Workshop: October 2nd 2010 Place: University of Geneva......
Teaching Anthropology
Need your help. Resignation advice: Got it?
So, gentle readers....I need your advice. What do you do in lower higher education to resign from an extra-contractual position when you have come to the conclusion that you are getting hosed?I mean none of the promises that were made to you by your President have come true even...
Its always nice to be reading along and find a reference to anthropology which not only seems to understand us but to promote the best of us.So, here I was sipping the morning coffee with my laptop open to the Sunday papers (look Ma, no ink-stained fingers) and I ran...
Things White People Love: Avatar
No, I haven't seen it. I probably won't. I always hate it when Hollywood drives the bus--especially for two hours and forty minutes. Besides being an Avatar virgin means I don't become overly invested in my own opinions of it and I am interested in the opinions of my students...
Tomorrow is my baby girl's twentieth birthday. In the artificial construct of American age, it is the last year I can refer to her as a baby girl. Next year, she will be an adult.There has been a lively discussion on the SACC listserv about measuring educational success. ...
So, I saw this on the Huffington Post and it was just so way cool that I had to share.Seems that empires are like zits. First they grow, then they explode, then, eventually, they just disappear.My favorite part is in 1960 when African independence kicks in. I so...
Happy Thanksgiving: "We got hosed"
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Open Access Anthropology
Social Sciences Open Access Repository
Via John Postill’s Media/Anthropology blog, a post about a new Open Access Repository for all the social sciences. “SSOAR [Social Science Open Access Repository] is geared towards a scholarly audience in the social sciences wishing to search quality-controlled content across disciplinary boundaries and to access documents directly and free of...
Editorial on Commerical and Not-for-Profit Scholarly Publishing
Readers of the Open Access Anthropology blog might have an interest in an opinion essay that I (Jason Baird Jackson) wrote recently. In it, I lay out some modest steps that scholars interested in changing the direction of scholarly communications might take. The focus is a plea to withdraw from...
Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity
Readers of Open Access Anthropology will want to check out the announcements for (and press coverage of) the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity that was just announced by Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley. I just finished speaking to Inside Higher Education about it for a story that they will run...
The Impact of the Web 2.0 World on Scholarly Societies
A friend who is very involved in the leadership of the American Folklore Society just shared with me a link to James Lappin’s very effective blog post “The Impact of the Web 2.0 World on the Records Management Society.” While presented as a case study of information science/archives organizations in...
I think that this is the week’s big news in scholarly communications issues. Its not open access, but it is not-for-profit. There is much that could be said. Hopefully there will be some discussion among anthropologists, especially in light of the AAA’s experiences working with the University of California Press...
Scholarly Society-Library Partnerships Webcast Now Online
The video archive version of the recent Association for Research Libraries (ARL) webcast on “Reaching Out to Leaders of Scholarly Societies at Research Institutions” to which I contributed is now available online. It can be gotten to for free, all that is required is signing in for ARL headcounting purposes. ...
Museum Anthropology
An important op-ed about the "Twilight" series and issues of intellectual property and Indigenous representation. Not directly related to museums, but the questions raised certainly relate to our work....
CFP: The Circulation of Museum Objects
Call for Papers: The Circulation of Museum ObjectsAmerican Anthropological Association Meeting, New Orleans, November 17th- 21st, 2010Panel organizer: Chris Wingfield, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford / University of Birmingham - chris.wingfield@prm.ox.ac.ukDeadline for title and abstract: Friday 19th March.When things become museum objects, they can appear to be removed from...
A short little blog entry asking a big question: Heather Pringle talks about the need to preserve rock art, but also how rock art is fundamentally about place. You cannot understand rock art without understanding its location in the specific geographic it originates. Do, then, Pringle asks, museums have an...
Assistant/Associate Curator Position
Assistant/Associate Curator - Native Arts DepartmentThe Denver Art Museum (DAM) is seeking qualified candidates for the position of Assistant or Associate Curator for its acclaimed collection of American Indian art. The DAM has a long history of honoring American Indian art and is committed to enhancing the understanding and appreciation...
Monticello College Foundation Internship
The Monticello College Foundation Internship in Museum Education provides an exciting and challenging opportunity to work closely with museum educators, exhibits staff, and curators at the Illinois State Museum.The Monticello Intern helps coordinate the volunteers and day-to-day operations of the Museum's hands-on children's gallery ("A Place for Discovery"). The intern...
CMA Proposals for AAA Sessions
Council for Museum Anthropology members are invited to submit session proposals for consideration for CMA sponsorship.Sessions sponsored by CMA are assured a place in the annual meeting program. Any topic relating to museum anthropology will be considered, but sessions that speak to broad issues in the field or engage the...
The Blog
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The November issue of Wired Magazine (UK) features "Unlocking the Digital City", a series of articles exploring how new technologies have transformed - and are continually reinventing - urban life and urban landscapes. The entire issue is worth reading. Below are excerpts from three perspectives on the promises and realities...
I came across this list of the top 25 anthropology blogs as compiled by Invesp Consulting (an e-commerce conversion optimization company, of course). Their Blog-Rank statistics are based solely on (automated) data extraction from various aspects of online content, such as RSS membership, Yahoo and Google indexed pages and pagerank,...
VoiceThread for collaborative learning and teaching
I read this review article today on Educ@conTIC (Spanish only) about a web-based service for creating collaborative, multimedia conversations. VoiceThread is "a powerful new way to talk about and share your images, documents, and videos".With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world....
Spain still below average, natives still digital
The latest from a European Commission report on Internet use throughout Europe has found that Spain should seek to improve and expand upon the use of new technologies in homes and businesses. Less than half of Spaniards make use of the Internet regularly, and those who use it daily represent...
ScienceDaily: Anthropology News
Prehistoric response to global warming informs human planning today
Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes....
Fossil bird eggshell provides source of ancient DNA
Scientists have successfully isolated ancient DNA from fossil eggshell remains of extinct birds for the first time....
Scientists discover 600 million-year-old origins of vision
By studying the hydra, a member of an ancient group of sea creatures that is still flourishing, scientists have made a discovery in understanding the origins of human vision....
Students' perceptions of Earth's age influence acceptance of human evolution
High school and college students who understand the geological age of the Earth (4.5 billion years) are much more likely to understand and accept human evolution, according to a new study. A 2009 Gallup poll reported that 16 percent of biology teachers believe God created humans in their present form...
Pottery leads to discovery of peace-seeking women in American Southwest
A researcher believes pottery found throughout the North American Southwest comes from a religion of peace-seeking women in the violent, 13th-century American Southwest. These women sought to find a way to integrate newly immigrating refugees and prevent the spread of warfare that decimated communities to the north....
Modern man found to be generally monogamous, moderately polygamous
New research has found that modern man, or Homo sapiens, would have been monogamous while exhibiting tendencies toward polygamy over the course of evolutionary history. These findings are consistent with studies in evolutionary psychology and anthropology that depict contemporary human populations....
Glossographia
Why paleography matters: solution
Well, we haven’t had an answer, so I’ll give it to you: All of the numeral-phrases except the bottom right read CXLVII (= 147). I’ve highlighted every other character in red to emphasize the distinct characters, making this solution comprehensible if not obvious. The fact that you,...
I don’t normally get too uptight about the names that archaeologists give to ancient humans: Lucy, Otzi, ‘hobbit’, whatever. However, I have a quibble about “Inuk”, the 4000-year old Paleo-Eskimo found in Greenland in the 1980s, and whose DNA was recently sequenced (see the article here from today’s...
Why paleography matters: clue 2
Still no correct response to my puzzle, so here’s a second clue: The ‘words’ are Roman numerals, six characters in length. Filed under: Literacy and writing ...
From David Stuart’s Maya Decipherment blog, news that the Saxon State Library of Dresden has published hi-res colour images of the Dresden Codex online. It is, of course, the most detailed and complex surviving account of Maya mathematical astronomy and an extraordinarily important document for our knowledge of...
Why paleography matters: a clue
OK, we’ve only had one guess and no correct answers yet on my Doorworks puzzle/contest from yesterday, proving that a) paleography is technically challenging and important and b) I’m cruel and heartless. So, a clue (which regular readers might have guessed already): All four of the ‘words’ are...
Doorworks 4: Why paleography matters
In case any of you were wondering why the study of handwriting matters, and why the elimination of the chair in paleography at King’s College London is a grave loss: Below is an image containing four discrete pieces of late medieval English writing (compiled together as a comparative collection)....
Visual Anthropology of Japan
"'The Cove' puts Japanese fishermen everywhere on the defense"
More "Cove" stuff from Japan Today:As soon as the fishermen saw my TV camera, one ran at me, yelling “No!” and pushing me out of the building. Another smeared his rubber fish gutting glove across my lens, while a third threw snow at me with a shovel. Following the success...
"2-second video causes headache for ABC News"
From the Associated Press via Google (3/11/10):For the want of a better two-second picture of a tachometer, ABC News has called into question its reporting on acceleration problems with Toyota vehicles.The network's handling of a Feb. 22 "World News" story about potential problems with computer systems in Toyotas has created...
"The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man: The international war over exit signs"
vs.(Images borrowed from Slate Magazine.)Julia Turner at Slate Magazine writes about the international controversy regarding exit signs, namely the red worded exit sign from the U.S. versus the green running man exit sign from Japan. Which is better, words or pictograms? Which color is better, red or green? Which works...
VAOJ is once again included in the top 100 Anthropology blogs
Sento-kun celebrates the 1300th anniversary of Nara Heijo-kyo Capital.In 2008 VAOJ was included in the top 100 anthropology blogs in an impressive list compiled by On-Line Universities.com. This year VAOJ has been included in the list once again, moving from number 98 in the regional specific category to number 27...
Here are two interesting stories from The Daily Yomiuri dealing with filming in Japan."Speeding driver nabbed based on online video"A man has been arrested on suspicion of speeding after posting a video clip online that showed him riding his motorcycle at speeds of up to 188 kph in a 50...
"'The Cove' wins Oscar for Best Documentary"
The story continues...From today's Japan Today:"The Cove," a U.S. film about a controversial annual dolphin hunt at a Japanese town, won the best documentary feature at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards ceremony Sunday in Los Angeles. Directed by Louie Psihoyos, one of the world’s most prominent still photographers,...
Rachel's Field Notes
When I first boarded the Air France plane in 2006, I noticed that the seats were old-looking and filthy. There were stains and tears. This scene was a major contrast to what I’ve always seen on American planes. The seats on American planes were normally new-looking, clean, and tear-free. Then, when...
College Board is sitting on a bag of money
(Click on the bold text to see the sources) In the U.S., many young Americans have been stacking up their expenses to earn the best scores on SATs (and AP exams) and the expenses includes taking the exam more than once, purchasing books, and paying fees to take the preparation courses. ...
Paintings Portraying the Real Factory Life
A Brazilian artist, Luiz Coelho, created a marvelous painting series to create an awareness of what goes on behind the materials we own and voice the concerns of the factory life in China. The blood stain on items speaks for itself in the images of his paintings. Coelho’s work serves as...
Cultural Differences in Regulating the Corporations
Today, I came across an article on CNN.com speaking about how Europeans will have the right to choose which internet browser to use on their Windows computers rather than Microsoft’s very own Internet Explorer. This article reminds me of one of the major cultural differences in Europe and the US...
Change the world by using a camera
As I was reading through the archives of Material World, a blog create by the department of anthropology at UCL and NYU, I came across a blog entry posting a link to a site that speaks on the lines of my values for photography. Click! Photography Changes Everything is a...
Humans, especially females, really have intimate relationships with the malls. One Friday afternoon, I took a stroll at a mall to observe the cultural landscape of the mall – not just for the fun, but also for my anthropology course assignment. I didn’t just gaze at people strolling through the...