Some readers felt I’d been trying to make the argument that with the Internet anthropologists are finally able to leave their sheltered university homes, to finally write to the public. They felt that I was arguing on behalf of a more publicly engaged anthropology, and so in response to my thesis the point was made that anthropologists have always been engaging public issues. Public engagement in anthropology isn’t anything new.The Internet, one reader voiced, is not facilitating change in anthropology at all, rather it is about continuity.

This however was a misunderstanding. I tried to show that anthropologists have always been interested in public engagement. I used the example of Dr. James Hunt, who started the Anthropology Society of London. I used him as an example of public engagement gone bad. There is absolutely nothing inherently good about public engagement. Ie. A good example today is the Human Terrain Teams, aka Anthropology Soldiers, who are not good, and who are not good for anthropology. I balanced this out with arguments from Thomas Hylland Eriksen, as I was not trying to say public engagement was necessarily bad either! In fact, I tried to show that anthros have used the Internet in some amazing ways (I used Wesch’s work as a brief example, which I contrasted with Jay Ruby’s, in hopes of developing the idea of “anthropology in public” and “public anthropology”)

But in dealing out a negative example of public engagement, this reader argued that anthropologists have done a lot of good. Why only cite a few selective examples? I suppose the quote from Eriksen wasn’t enough to balance things out!

I didn’t want to write a complete history of the discipline. But in only presenting a few examples, I opened the door to “what about so and so”. Or as I was asked more exactly,

“why did you not just start the thesis with what blogging and open access have to offer – tell us what they do for the discipline, rather than review in an ad hoc way selected bad moments in the discipline? Why not lead from your strengths to the strengths of the discipline?? What is the negative and cynical portrait of the discipline intended to accomplish?”

I developed chapter 2 as a literature review that revealed “pressures for change” in the discipline. Ie. I wanted to introduce reasons anthropologists have for 1) collaborating with non-anthropologists, and non-academics (Vine Deloria Jr’s arguments), 2) engaging public debates (ala Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s arguments) and 3) opening the social sciences (ala Wallerstein et al’s book “Open the Social Sciences”).

And to answer as clearly as possible – I found these examples showed reasons why anthropologists would want to write outside traditional peer reviewed presses, and why the Internet has provided a number of tools to help anthropologists engage this change.

[optimism] To clear this issue up further, chapter 2 is not a complete history of anthropology. It’s highly selective, showing a few examples that have pressured anthropologists to change the way they do anthropology. In terms of public engagement, there have been successful anthropological engagements (I never argued otherwise). A reader suggested I include the following works to present “public anthropology” in its full glory, “in the few pages you do devote to public anthropology, you do not cite these anthropologists who very publicly identify themselves with public anthropology”, and they kindly included this excellent list,

“Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Hortense Powdermaker, “the anthropologists who wrote and protested about the Vietnam war”, “anthropologists who were foundational in the women’s movement”, Meg Luxton, Hugh Brody, Luke Lassiter, Laura Bohannan, Ruth Behar, Amitav Ghosh, Camilla Gibb, Phillipe Bourgois, Nancy Scheper Hughes, Paul Farmer, etc…”

Well this is a tough issue to respond to. For one, I don’t think that mentioning “public anthropology” demands that I cite every public anthropologist. Especially when my point was that there are reasons for anthropologists to engage the public, and that publishing in expensive to access journals isn’t the way to do it. And more importantly to my thesis, was the issue that writing on a blog isn’t “public anthropology” either, since the topics anthros blog about are rarely meant to be interesting to those outside the discipline.

Why I talked about public anthropology ->  1) reasons to make research accessible, 2) is “making research accessible online” “anthropology in public, or public anthropology”.   Would citing these other researchers have helped? I’m sure they could have, but I think that would take another few years and a Ph.D.

More issues to come don’t worry!

The biggest issue that came up: Chapter 2.

Why, I was asked, would I present anthropology in such a negative light? What does such a negative portrait hope to accomplish? Why would I want to participate in such a horrible world? [real question] Why not lead from the strengths the thesis can make to the discipline? Why did I reference Vine Deloria Jr and why did I reference James Hunt?

To paraphrase the question: Haven’t people pooped on anthropology enough? Is it really necessary to select particularly nasty examples of anthropology to describe what anthropology is and how it has changed? Have anthropologists not changed enough already that you could just cite what they do NOW?

My answer: it hasn’t helped to shove anthropology’s dirty laundry under the rug. The history of anthropology shocked me to the core, and I wasn’t about to ignore it. Vine Deloria’s arguments, that I cite in chapter 2, are the best definition and critique of anthropology I’ve ever read. I stand by that reference 100%.

James Hunt? Well sure he isn’t representative of all anthropologists.  And I’ve been told I cannot say that “his work is seen as biggoted and racist” in a thesis, even if his work IS..  But the reason I chose James Hunt was that he founded the Anthropology Society of London with the intention of mixing politics and science, and he promoted public engagement.  Anthropologists aren’t all saints, and when they engage the public, it isn’t necessarily virtuous. That was my point. My bigger point was  that anthropologists get things wrong, and that we need to give people a place to respond and interpret anthropologists interpretations.

Finally, while I probably didn’t express this well enough in the thesis, chapter 2 was NOT a “complete” representation of the discipline. I was looking at the history of the discipline to find breaking points, frictions, that pushed the direction in different directions. The point I wanted to make in chapter 2 was that there are arguments for 1) increased collaboration with non-anthros, 2) increased public engagement, and 3) to “open the social sciences”.

Now say what you want, but I think the examples I give do back that up. I’m not sure I did that well enough in chapter 2 though. The reactionary response I received from one reader has forced me to correct this, to somehow open up chapter 2 with recognition that the points discussed are very selective and not trying to represent the discipline as a whole.

Many more posts to come…

p.s.

I also learned the proper definition of “reactionary”. I used the word to represent a person “reacting”, which it is not. This has since been corrected, and I did my best to use it correctly in the paragraph above!!! Reactionary is restricted to a conservative backlash, someone defending the status quo, and not to someone getting pissed off by your actions.

p.p.s

When given the option to select your thesis committee, give it a lot of thought. Don’t allow faculty members to turn your thesis into a battleground, even if that’s what social science is all about.

Next post: Issue #2 – Why didn’t you include the following works? [list included]

Discussions related to Open Access often focus on journals, but as one thesis reader has asked me, what about books? Open Access is about removing the price barriers to peer reviewed academic research, whether it be book, journal article, or whatever else. The peer review system for book publishing is different than that of a journal, but anthro books are still considered “quality research” that should be disseminated. Charging $20-100 for a book is still a significant barrier for many libraries. As one teacher commented, a really good anthropology book will sell about 1000 copies.

So if the books were cheaper, would they be disseminated and read more? Would more copies end up being distributed? Maybe! Should academics be concerned about the dissemination of their work? Is it okay for people to try and make money off your research at the expense of researchers having easy access to it? So to be clear, the same OA arguments apply to books and journals.

But there are some interesting particularities to look at. For example Google Books makes it simple to read and scan through millions of expensive published academic books. It lets you read a portion of the text, which is plenty for scholars to decide if they would benefit from purchasing or borrowing the book. In this way Google Books improves the visibility of academic work published in book form, while still demanding that people and libraries pay to read it. To answer a readers question, since people still need to pay to get full access, Google Books is not a form of Open Access publishing.

And while e-books and e-book readers are taking off, many people still hate to read large documents on the computer. It’s just nicer and easier to read away from the computer. The confusion creeping in here is that Open Access is associated with online dissemination journals, rather than with removing price barriers to research where-ever they may be.

So yes, as Lorenz Khazaleh recently posts, OA is also about books! He writes,

“More and more journals have gone open access, now it’s time for open access books!

OAPEN – Open Access Publishing in European Networks is an initiative in Open Access publishing for humanities and social sciences monographs. Several European university presses have joined the initiative that aims to improve the accessibility and dissemination of academic books.”

Further, books can be Open Access, in that they are free to access online, and they cost money in print, at the very same time. A book can be published OA, and at the same time printed and sold. Take a look at what Max has done with his edited volume of student authored essays, titled “The New Imperialism”. He describes the process involved,

“Having seen, from early on, that I would be receiving a batch of excellent papers, I asked the seminar participants if they would not want to put their output on the record, to publish their work. One option was to have all the papers online, on the seminar website. The other was to publish it like my Department also publishes an annual volume of student research, Stories from Montreal. They opted for the latter and I got busy creating something I had never planned to establish: a publishing entity, Alert Press (amazingly, the name was not taken). That was just the start–then came getting an ISBN, arranging for the National Library of Canada to do Cataloguing-in-Publication, getting a copyright certificate, and formally registering the Press. The printing would be done on demand, which is where the services of Lulu come in. Then there was the index–no proper book can go without one. That is, as some know, a particularly large expense which had to be out of pocket. Each of the papers had to be revised, edited, proof read, and re-corrected, references checked, formatting done for the book, providing images that are free under a Creative Commons License (up to the front and back covers of the book), and then indexed. Only the very best papers were included, which in this case means that only 14 of the initial 25 papers made the final cut. One or two opted out of the publication idea from the start–it is entirely voluntary, and not a course requirement. But it will be an annual feature.”

Now published, the book is available in a number of forms. The paperback costs about $10. A hardcover sells for $19. And an e-book version can be downloaded anytime for free. This shows how Open Access can work alongside other publishing models.

Christopher Kelty, a blogger at Savage Minds, published his book “Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software” on the books website, and through Duke University Press. The entire book can be read and commented on online, exploring ways readers can help contribute content to the book after it has been published. Kelty also talks about “modulating” his work, as part of an experiment that looks at how Open Access to research, and new more flexible licensing models,  allow people to use the work in new ways.

The Prickly Paradigm Press, and the earlier Prickly Pear Press,  also provide a number of OA books licensed under the Creative Commons. An interview with Marshal Sahlins discusses the history of the publishing organization, and why free access to research, and the creative commons license is important. Sahlins writes,

“I just want to say that I truly support the idea of the free dissemination of intellectual information, and that I truly lament the various forms of copyrights and patents that are being put on so-called intellectual property. I also lament the collusion of universities in licensing the results of scientific research, and thus violating the project of the free dissemination of knowledge that is their reason for existence. So I consider it an important act to release these books under a Creative Commons type of license. I’m happy, and also a little proud, to do so.”

This is all to say that OA book publishing is working alongside other dissemination strategies, and that yes, you can provide both.

Update: check out 40,000 free e-books that have been made available through Project Gutenberg.

Related posts:

Kelty on the Culture of Publishing

Doing a little digging: Golub and Sahlins Interview.

The least I can do, having tried my hand at blogging research as it goes,  is to filter out what’s interesting:

Research into the history of the discipline revealed a number of reasons anthropologists would want to disseminate their work to non-anthropologists. Anthropologists pushing for a kind of public anthropology, want researchers to involve themselves in contemporary public debates – alongside journalists and anonymous internet trolls. Anthropologists pushing for a kind of collaborative anthropology, seek to recognize and incorporate the expertise of people outside the discipline. Finally, anthropology is often defined as being interdisciplinary to begin with.

Many OA advocates claim scholarship is meant to be shared as widely as possible. But the success of subscription based journals shows that scholarship doesn’t need to be shared widely to succeed/sustain itself.

Even when journal publishers allow researchers to archive their work, many researchers question reasons for doing so.  The Concordia Spectrum repository for example,  lists 146 articles under Sociology and Anthropology. 2 of those are from faculty members, and the rest are masters theses. Yet many of the faculty support OA to some degree, sharing their work online on personal websites. So somehow the institutional self archiving repository at Concordia is challenged by professional politics. Are researchers at universities paid to publish? Should they have to provide their research output to the universities library? What if the faculty is on shaky terms with a shaky administration? Researchers probably want to maintain autonomy over their work, to limit as much as possible the control of university administrators (objection! speculation!).

Other faculty have unanimously approved OA mandates however, and I am pretty sure OA resistance is no longer about ignorance. Researchers understand that they can make their research more accessible through OA, but they question its professional impact.

Another big issue that came up in my anthropology readings is that anthropologists have expressed the need to better incorporate feedback into the research process. So this thesis explored getting feedback “out in the open”. Open Access publishing isn’t (necessarily) about getting feedback from different audiences. Repositories remain for the most part rather static dumping grounds for quality peer reviewed content. Review and comments are controlled through editors and journal presses. Aside the fact that the discipline is interdisciplinary, and aside ethical and moral obligations to make research relevant to non-anthropologists, and aside the desire to engage in contemporary public debates alongside journalists, why, anthropologists ask, should they share their work online, and why would they have their work uglied with obnoxious anonymous online diatribe?

So even though blogging and other social media are great tools to incorporate collaborators as writers and content producers, sharing ideas, links, articles, comments, etc.,   the issue of collaborating with, and to incorporating feedback from, non-experts remains an issue within the discipline. Some of this relates to debates in anthropology between science and advocacy. Science and its system of expert peer review limit the participation of non-experts. Does this make sense for anthropological research?

Anthropologists are concerned then that increased dissemination online won’t necessarily help disseminate the work properly. Who else will benefit or make use of it? Who else will contribute to or comment on it? Academics are encouraged to focus on peer reviewed prestige publications, and not on public engagement and other work that raises too much publicity. Researchers in other institutions can surely make use of interlibrary loans, why should I have to post it online where it dominates my Google profile?

So I conclude the beast by discussing two kinds of anthropology that are openly accessible online. One is anthropology in public, the other public anthropology. Anthro in public is about reaching anthros with the Internet. Anthropology is done for academics, who then do great things with that knowledge (objection heresay!). Public anthropology is about changing the style of anthropology to appeal to different audiences outside academia.

Yes that is all.  Of course it’s filled with references, research, and a few random stray ideas that I couldn’t let go of. I already disagree with points I’ve made in it, but I’m going to hold off changing anything until I get feedback from the authorities.

Let’s begin with a pessimistic idea. People are stupid [insert ignorant, arrogant, whatever] and academics are people. And a hundred years of ethnographic evidence shows that researchers, anthropologist and otherwise, can get things wrong. Being stupid in this sense isn’t so bad. School is supposed to help with this problem. Dedication to a life of intellectual debate is supposed to make us better thinkers. It is supposed to instill critical thinking. It should make us less stupid. At least that’s what you’d hope.

The truth is, and I’ll speak for myself here to avoid stirring too much fire, that I am still stupid after writing a thesis.

So here is the question, what is an academic to do when he or she finds themselves wearing a stupid hat, after spending years in school? Say I became a teacher, how is a teacher, whose primary job it is to quantify their students stupidity, supposed to walk into a classroom while wearing the very same stupid hat? Surely the students would complain, and their parents would rage.

Teachers depend on maintaining intellectual authority superiority .

“Of course I get things wrong” they will think, but never will they let the layman make that assertion.  That is why academics have a sophisticated system of peer review. The work published get’s reviewed by other expert academics, who maintain the same necessary air of intellectual authority.

This is why the majority of anthropologists are not sharing their work outside of a peer reviewed journal, and why they don’t want to share their work openly online. You don’t want to engage with noobs. If a noob contributes to what you are doing, you might end up getting flagged as noob yourself. One anthropologist referred to the Youtube audience as a bunch of fifteen year old brats. If only that were the case. Youtube brats are far worse than a bunch of fifteen year olds. Or at least they can be. [mental note check up on Michael Wesch's youtube projects, which seem to get pretty supportive comments actually, which are then integrated into academic projects... ].

This is the challenge of learning in the “open”. By sharing work online as work progresses one is more likely to be attacked/shown to be stupid [arrogant, ignorant, prejudiced, etc]. This is a wonderful thing in terms of making progress in an academic discipline. Critique should be welcomed. As far as a discipline goes, finding out researchers are wrong, and learning from that, is a wonderful thing.

But most academics cut this discussion off. The style in which they write rarely invites genuine questioning. To ask a question would be to invite the participation of the students and people around them, and again, the academic doesn’t want anyone else to answer their questions! At best, they will read their paper at an expert conference and invite 10 minutes of discussion at the end. Wow talkabout opening up ones research!

Feedback from the “out in the open”

So why don’t most anthropologists blog and share their work outside peer reviewed presses? It doesn’t help them look smarter than everyone else! To look smarter then everyone else they restrict their work, make it difficult to find, they write in ways that invite no questions, they write in ways no one wants to bother to understand, they write about things not important to anyone else, etc…    [Ie, as happened to most ethnography in the past. Go in, write about stick to talking about century old social theory, as a way of avoiding any issues of war, imperialism, etc... certainly don’t involve others in creating the question in the first place.]

Go ahead, call me stupid. That’s what this blog is for.

[so is it fair to say publishing Open Access is an attempt by researchers to open their work to commentary? Probably not. After all, even if the article is OA, there might not be any attempt to disseminate it. Just having a page like this one on the internet, is not a very active way of obtaining feedback is it? Feedback is really ignored in the OA discussions… Most of the arguments for OA are based on other professional arguments, such as “OA get’s you cited more”. hmmm]

</rant>

I am easily distracted, and easily inspired. As a result I’ll be in the middle of a thesis paragraph when I’ll jump over to a web browser [note how its constantly running] where I’ll end up reading random news websites (well, not random at all… actually I read terrible annoying right wing news sites that get my blood boiling. Sites like canada.com and msnbc. I read other sites too, but these two I consider a waste of time when compared to a beautiful anthropology thesis.)

It turns out I’m not alone. Websites, social media, the internet, iphones, etc, have all been merging into annoyingly busy interfaces.  From this page where I write a blog post, I can twitter. I can see my inbox (all 3 of them). My battery has 39 minutes remaining. I should turn on some battery saving feature no? Oh wait I was writing. That’s right!

There are solutions. Improve your concentration with this Google Chrome App. “Writespace” turns your browser (online or off) into a beautiful black screen. Hit f11 to maximize it into full screen and there it is. A blank black screen. A clear white font. I love it. It reminds me of my days playing diku muds. Why a black screen? No distractions. Just a page to write on.

Another great one – “Stayfocusd”. This app let’s you create a list of websites you waste too much time on, and then it blocks the sites after you spend more than 10 minutes (or whatever you configure) on them. Perfect for stupid news sites, facebook, etc.  Try giving yourself more time and the program opens up a page on procrastination! Love it.

You may now return to work.

“More fundamentally, the dispute has brought to light how little common ground is shared by anthropologists who span a wide array of sub-specialties, said Elizabeth Cashdan, chair of anthropology at the University of Utah. For example, some anthropologists might mine the language and analytical tools favored by such humanities as literary criticism, while others may be more likely to deploy statistical methodology as befits social science. Still others might rely on the biological metrics, hard data and scientific method used by natural scientists. “This is reflective of tensions in the whole discipline,” said Cashdan, a bio-cultural anthropologist who described herself as “very dismayed” by recent developments.

Hugh Gusterson leaves a great rebuttal, pointing out that the new definition does not dismiss science and that the entire debate has been blown out of proportion,

“… The old wording said “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research; and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists; including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems.” The new wording says, “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research.” The document goes on to make numerous references to “anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.” Fair-minded people will recognize this as a modest change and will see that science is still there in the mission statement (after all, what are biology and archeology if not sciences?) even if the wording has been slightly changed. You would think from some of the hysterical statements here that the AAA had issued a statement condemning science. ”

The new emphasis on “public understanding” is interesting given the critiques I’ve read arguing that anthropology needs to engage itself in public debates, and that the “science” of anthropology has played a role in limiting its’ ability to engage itself beyond a select, expert, audience (who happen to depend on its’ success for their livelihood).

In other news, the thesis has moved to Google Docs, (wooops, apologies to readers, here I mean, MY thesis draft), and it is open to edits and comments from anyone online. Printed draft by Monday? It is going to end!! incredible really.

See also,
“The Joy of Pseudoscience”
http://nodivide.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/the-joy-of-pseudo-science/

Speaking of anthropology repositories, the Mana’o anthropology archive, which I will be discussing in this next chapter, has reopened its doors! Hopefully it’s website will soon rank higher than the “Shuttering Mana’o” post that currently ranks #1 on Google (if you search for Mana’o and anthropology).

Once the need for open access to research has been established, the thesis will turn against itself, looking at the ethics of conducting research and sharing the knowledge gained openly. Having argued for an “open” anthropology, and for “open” access to research, the thesis will explore how “openness” is a problem, and it will try to do justice to the thoughts and opinions of anthropologists who are not publishing Open Access, and/or who have no desire to maintain a presence online.

Chapter 3 wordle included to make the giant runonsentence a little more 2.0

A big thanks to Alexandre Enkerli, Max Forte, Jeremy, Lorenz Khazaleh, and Socect, who have helped dig chapter 2 out of its grave. It still has all sorts of issues and I still want/need to rewrite it, but I’ve come to the realization this thing isn’t going to be perfect, and rather than blame myself, I’m going to blame its nature. A thesis is meant to suck. That’s why people don’t read them, and that’s why people don’t usually share them. So I apologize for breaking with tradition, and thank you to those who have bothered to read it – even if it made no sense whatsoever, having far too many run on – and brutally hyphenated – sentences.  I’m pretty sure however, that I could shrink the chapter into 2 pages and do the world a favour.

Instead of spamming the blog with the drafts, I’ll just link to the permanent pages from now on when there is something new up there. This hopefully will make room to post some thoughts about how the project has gone, what sacrifices I made in terms of my own standards to get here, and if all goes well some discussions about everything else that has gone on in the past year. After traveling through Mexico and Sri Lanka I spent a fair bit of time hanging out in traditional anthropological settings. i talked politics, spoke with all sorts of people in marginalized war torn communities, and well, decided to write about the Internet and open access publishing! It’s been quite the journey – and along the way I met a lot of very helpful individuals. Hello Brent of Zipolite. No I haven’t read the 100 references you wrote down for me to include in this thesis. I have the list and I’m hoping to read one or two more of them before I hand this thing in.

I also ran into a few vegetarian and vegan activists active in academia. Hello Cornelius and Masala Meatballs! Food, farming, and animal cruelty are an easy research project for me to get behind. I can see joining the food and ethics academic debates if I ever successfully complete this thesis. Or I’ll get a job. Anyways, I’ll finish it first and figure out the big picture later.

The Introduction remains the same.

Chapter 2v3 has been updated.

Chapter 3 draft is now up. It’s missing a few sections, but its a start.

In other related news,

As I struggle to complete this thesis, a friend of mine very active in the undergrad program recently posted some thoughts about his future. He’s a passionate undergraduate anthropology student who wasn’t accepted into any graduate programs. He’s applying for *any* kind of work to pay off his student loan, and feeling exceptionally frustrated about the future. I can’t help but feel terrible feeling ambivalent about academia. Then again, I’ve quite enjoyed it so I won’t worry about troubling facts. Questions about my own future have probably played into my slow as !@#! writing style. I realize everyone who finished there degree already knew exactly what they wanted to do with it. I have never enjoyed that clarity!

Thankfully, his enthusiasm and frustration felt hitting a roadblock, have motivated my ass to get this thesis done. I’ve enjoyed my time and its time to move along so some of the more eager can join the fun. I just can’t believe they’d turn down someone who is actually that passionate about the subject. Finding someone who will talk anthropology 24/7 in the hallways of your school is not easy!!! don’t turn em away people!