Open Access and Anthropology – a free and easy interview

(via OA News)

I’ve been having trouble getting away from the blogsphere to do research. One of my goals is to develop a slew of great interviews, but I’m finding the blogsphere is providing that too!

Christopher Kelty and a bunch of co-authors have published a conversation that deals perfectly with my research topic, titled “Anthropology Of/In Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies”. They discuss issues relating to the circulation/distribution/sharing of anthropological productions. Particularly interesting is the discussion surrounding the role of Wiley-Blackwell publishing now that it manages the American Anthropology Associations publishing program.

They wrote the paper by circulating a draft written by two of the contributors, with each person adding bits and pieces to the conversation. The text was then edited and published.

It also points out how new generations of scholars are ignoring traditional scholarly societies, and so they ask, what is the purpose of them today? They state it cannot be simply about dissemination, as open access and online publishing make that unnecessary. They argue the AAA needs to adapt its methods to new publishing environments, and in order to that it needs to focus less on simply distributing work, but instead to put more emphasis on review, promotion, discussion, teaching, and reading.

In order for AAA publishing to survive, they argue anthropologists need to think beyond the budget of the AAA, to the budgets of libraries, schools, NGO’s, and other interested parties. Jason Baird Jackson writes,

“But if we want to think seriously about “sustainability” we
must realize that sustaining anthropology means more than sustaining the AAA budget—it means sustaining the viability of research libraries and of our not-forprofit university press partners as well. More and more research libraries today are responding by partnering directly with scholars to “publish” (in Chris’s sense) research, and thus they are expanding the library’s role in new ways. They are trying to make scholarship more open and more sustainable by cutting out the middleman, the publishing companies.”

They also discuss the possibilities for an improved Anthrosource which properly integrated new internet strategies. Jason Baird Jackson argues that outside Anthrosource and the AAA, a “shadow anthrosource” is emerging that in many ways threatens it. By not adopting new technologies, scholars are going elsewhere and sooner or later Anthrosource will be made irrelevant. He writes,

“AnthroSource was going to have a subject repository in which we
could have put our field notes, white papers, unpublished book manuscripts, etc. I saw this vision die during my first year as an editor. When the AAA couldn’t find a university to partner with, the repository was given up and AnthroSource became just a journal bundle.”

Self arching repositories, internet promotion on Youtube and blogs etc, have all taken up the roles traditionally held by journals. In many ways, the discussion brings to light the failure of traditional scholarly societies/journals/publishers to properly promote material and build interest, and that scholars are bypassing these instutions using new communication technologies to achieve results far greater than ever achieved by the AAA and its publishing program.

It is a great discussion. In the paper they link to a site where more discussion can take place, but its not working right now. Hopefully it will be up soon. (http://culanth.org/incirculation)

authority, technology and teaching

[pardon my slow return from the woods, I returned home to find my motherboard had fried – I’ll have limited connectivity for a week or two]

It’s easy to get excited about incorporating new communication technologies in the classroom, but it’s not always so easy and the benefits are not always clear. Pamthropologist discusses her resistance to teaching strategies advocated by Michael Wesch, arguing that theres a line between motivating, and pampering – and that her initial reaction has been to retreat to tradition:

“So, as I review the great move toward technological innovation in the classroom. I find, myself recoiling in horror. I just don’t get it. Michael Wesch’s youtube of his oh so forlorn students who don’t read and can only become excited when engaging with their own methods of discourse drove me crazy.”

In her discussion she brings up the difference between “deep reading” and “power browsing”, and the idea that online communication technologies are a students “own method of discourse”. I have trouble with this idea that deep reading being associated with a particular medium or style – reading with Google offers the opportunity to quickly access related information. Googling, and wikipedia are helping people read deeper by helping them get to more relevant material.

Many disagree however, as shown in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which Pamthropologist references:

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I think theres something to be said for how one participates online. Yes, many people skip along the surface, but I believe the community nature of the blogsphere, with its direct and personal interactions between authors, is allowing for a much deeper kind of communication. There are numerous ways to use the internet and Google is only one part of it. The above quote misses the depth of learning that occurs through online engagement [their study is blinded by the position that reading online leads to “disengagement”… see below]

The article cites a few studies that show how online researchers would jump from site to site, rarely taking the whole thing in. One study concluded “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”  According to another researcher, Maryanne Wolf:

“When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

I’m not sure how these studies were done or with what kind of researchers, but I have an alternate take. Academic essays in anthropology almost always include numerous jumps to other related essays – making it impossible to decode any single anthropological essay without conferring with numerous others. Let’s not get into the fact that much of the very same material is available offline and online, and that the researchers are actively choosing to filter through the material to get at better sources of information which would not have been available otherwise. But what do I know, I am struggling with Bourdieu 🙂     [Also see Enkerli’s discussion of online literacy in his response to a previous post.]

Michael Wesch responds to Pamthropologist, arguing that his strategies work to build personal connections to the material. He argues that the bottom up design empowers students to “… make real contributions to the class.” Of course, this isn’t just new communication technologies being discussed, but rather new teaching methods that happen to benefit from them.

It’s a fascinating and passionate discussion which really brings up interesting angles and perspectives relating to teaching strategies and to some extent new communication technologies. I tend to side with Wesch since I’m a huge fan of his anti-teaching essay, but Pamthropologist makes some good arguments supporting a more traditional style. It’s interesting to look at this discussion in terms of the social reproduction and education (I have been reading Bourdieu afterall).

Discussing the way authority manifested itself in academia, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) chose the term “symbolic violence” to describe how particular styles of speech, writing, discussion and behaving worked to legitimate ideas and meanings that were then passed down or internalized by successive generations. [ala social reproduction]

Here is Bourdieu and Passeron’s description of a traditional lecture –

“The lecturer finds in the particularities of the space which the traditional institution arranges for him (the platform, the professorial chair at the focal point on which all gazes converge) material and symbolic conditions which enable him to keep the students at a respectful distance and would oblige him to do so even if he did not wish to. Elevated and enclosed in the space which crowns him orator, seperated from his audience, if numbers permit, by a few empty rows which materially mark the distance the laity fearfully keep before the mana of the Word and which at all events are only ever occupied by the most seasoned zealots, pious ministers of the material utterance, the professor, remote and intangible, shrouded in vague and terrifying rumour, is condemned to theatrical monologue and virtuoso exhibition by a necessity of position far more coercive than the most imperious regulations.” (Bourdieu and Passeron. 1977)

Interestingly the above passage comes from a prestigious academic publication but it still carries all the bias and attitude of a great blog post.

Pamthropologist, with her open and honest discussion shows another side to the traditional lecture hall – and maybe its not that bad afterall. She writes

“Anyway my bias is: I love lecture. I loved it throughout undergraduate and graduate school. I was interested and involved because of lecture. I read because of lecture. I think it works well is small classes. I think it can work in large classes.”

So we have resistance Wesch’s anti-teaching strategies and so maybe its fair to call it a revolutionary approach. At the same time, its easy to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon, and thinking about how Bourdieu and Passeron discuss the reproduction of society and culture in education perhaps it helps to avoid such simple categorizations.

Is it really revolutionary? Wesch describes himself as a manager within the classroom, so there are still traditional forms of authority being imposed and “inculcated” [ie. professional distance between teacher and student]. I’ll be thinking much more about this, and thanks to Pamthropologist and Michael Wesch for a fascinating discussion!

[some random notes:

Inspiring learning seems to be a common theme, with disagreement as to how best motivate it. Relationships with broader community vs teacher -> student.

There are different kinds of authority – “teacher/student” is too simple. Authority to select readings, choose problems.

Studies of online research techniques have ignored broader online participation, focusing too much on “reading” instead of “communicating”.

In what ways is it revolutionary? Teacher/student roles maintained -> authority of teacher, authority of sources, ways to filter information. Project management skills, working in a team,

Being engaged with material vs. engaged with a question   -> source of inspiration, higher motivation, -> deeper reading.   [Wesch arguing for bottom up approach to motivate engagement, Pamthropologist arguing that traditional lectures can also inspire (Wesch agreeing).   Different styles.

And lets not get carried away with oppositions – new communication styles/strategies/technologies can also promote long ass lectures ala davidharvey.com.  or see Academhack’s recent post on video lectures.

]

Waking up in the field

Today I officially begin a four month fieldwork period where I will be investigating how the internet is fueling change in anthropology.  Of course I’ve been thinking about this topic, making observations, and involving myself online for the past year. But not all research projects take up such an accessible topic and hence they rely more on intense and limited data gathering periods.

Traditionally I would take fieldnotes for 4 months, then reflect on (err analyze) them for a few more months , and finally write them up.  But in researching something so close to me, a field I can enter from just about anywhere, I find this divide between gathering data and writing it up unnecessary. However many anthropologists I’ve spoken to have said that the time for reflection between the fieldwork, and the final writeup was extremely valuable. So I’m going to try a compromise – I’m going to try and write it up as I go, and revise it with time to reflect.

The first chapter/vignette I intend to write up is the online debate surrounding the Human Terrain System (anthropologists working for the U.S. military). Over the next 2 weeks I will be dedicating a few hours a day to thinking about how anthropologists used the blogsphere to debate in public, rather than behind closed walls. I’m not assuming all the debate was held in public, or even the most important aspects.  I will use these observations to form a set of questions for anthropologists based on my observations.

I will tie the HTS debate into discussions of the “social field” of anthropology, looking at the internet and blogsphere as an arena, and the HTS debate as a “social drama”. This will be an experiment with Bourdieu’s concepts advocated by John Postill.

The second chapter of my research will involve a more reflexive investigation into how I am using online communication technologies to do research, and to learn about anthropology. I will talk about community and network formations.  Speaking of which, yesterday some classmates and I decided we would start up a private blog to share and discuss our fieldnotes. I encouraged everyone to start a public blog as well, but we agreed that by making a private one we could share all our field notes as we go and give each other feedback on issues we weren’t comfortable writing about publicly.

And yes, dear anthropologists, my eyes and ears are on you! No, no, I’m not staring, “I’m observing”.

community, the internet, and anthropology

Through the Media Anthropology Network I’ve been introduced to a wealth of information on social networks, online communities, and the troubles encountered using such terms. I like the word “community” to describe a group of identifiable people with some common relationship – ala “anthropology”. But the term community is used to describe many things, and hence using the word is about as descriptive as the word “culture” (another anthro favourite). Vague, general words that sound nice and are hard to use effectively.

In his essay “Localising the Internet beyond communities and networks” (2008), John Postill discusses some of the problems that a reliance on these words can bring. He brings up the work of one of my teachers Dr. Amit, writing:

“Amit cautions that expressions of community always ‘require sceptical investigation rather than providing a ready-made social unit upon which to hang analysis’ (2002: 14). Relying on emotionally charged, bounded notions such as community (or diaspora, nation, ethnic group, etc) is unwise, she adds, for there are numerous sets of social relations that cannot be brought under these banners.”

I often say I’m looking at the online anthropology community, but in my proposal I tried to steer clear of such a description, opting instead to focus on problems (and questions) rather than people and places. I think by leaving the “field” vague, I can use the term community in an unbounded sense. But Postill suggests some other terminology which I am happy to use but am not quite sold on their advantage:

” One advantage of field is that it is a neutral, technical term lacking the normative idealism of both public sphere and community.” [referring to social field]

Why I like the word community is, it will make sense to tech savvy internet users caught up in “2.0”. The community in this sense is the users, the authors, and the relationships in between. So its pretty vague, and has no sense of being bounded or coherent. I also have concern that using concepts like “social field” might bring unnecessary jargon specialist vocabulary – and probably I don’t quite get the difference yet. Is it mostly a matter of semantics and translation?

Postill writes:

“As I have argued earlier, community is a vague notion favoured in public rhetoric, not a sharp analytical tool with an identifiable empirical object. Amit (2002: 14) puts it well: ‘Invocations of community… do not present analysts with clear-cut groupings so much as signal fields of complex processes through which sociality is sought, rejected, argued over, realised, interpreted, exploited or enforced’ (my emphasis).”

I admit I’m a fan of public rhetoric, but I’m also a fan of Bourdieu so I’m happy to go either way. I’m pretty sure I need to read this article some more to understand what other differences such definitions bring. Can I use social field interchangeably? At that point, isn’t a “social field” just as problematic a concept:

“As I have argued earlier, social field is a vague notion favored in anthropological rhetoric, not a sharp analytical tool with an identifiable empirical object.”

I wonder if any of these terms can be used without a great deal of contextualizing. [And I haven’t had time for this essay to sink in, but I find that when I post ideas on this blog, I can’t stop thinking about them, so heres to thinking]

Some key distinctions discussed in Postill’s essay:

• Social network analysis overemphasizes relationships at the expense of social other forms of capital (Thanks to Dr. Postill’s corrections below!)
  
• Postill argues interactions do need to be taken into account, and can be worked into Bourdieu’s concept of a “social field”. [aka finding a middle ground]
• Kinds of sociality – how do we describe the networks/communities/field I’m engaged in. [do I need a general concepts for this? I wonder if the bigger problem is trying to get around writing context by using generalizing concepts for sociality].

Apologies to Dr. John Postill, as I’m sure I missed a lot of important points, but thanks for a constructive essay discussing issues with the terminology and approaches. He brings up more discussion surrounding the essay on his blog.

new audiences, new participants, new ways of speaking

Over at Savage Minds theres an interesting discussion surrounding Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life. I’ve been looking at anthropology online with an eye for “new audiences, new participants, new ways of speaking” etc, and I think the following quote from Dusan Writer shows how anthropology IS spreading beyond its normal confines. Dusan writes:

“First, let me express my biases: I am NOT an anthropologist, I am a fan of Second Life in particular and virtual worlds in general, and Tom’s book accomplished a few things for me: it helped to create a framework for understanding sociality in Second Life, and it made me interested in learning more about anthropology – so if nothing else, it may serve as a recruiting tool for what I see as an important field of study to help make sense of the rapidly expanding domains of human expression.”

So we have an ethnographic study generating interdisciplinary interest, and a public space to discuss it. Very cool.

Doing a little digging – Golub and Sahlins interview

Thanks to Jeremy Fewster’s recent comment on power, I did some searching for “creative anthropology”, and instead found a brilliant interview between Alex Golub and Marshall Sahlins posted on the Creative Commons website a few years back. They discuss the Prickly Paradigm Press, internet publishing, and how internet publishing may or may not be a threat to traditional forms.  Sahlins also relates blogging to “pamphleteering”.  I’m tagging this one for the research as well.

“CC: So there’s really an idea that it’s sort of a pamphleteering outfit in the old style of public distribution of pamphlets?

MS: Yes. The object was to give people free reign to talk about things that they wouldn’t normally talk about or that were beyond their particular discipline, something that they thought was of general interest, that they could get off their chest without having a big scholarly apparatus, footnotes and so on. We wanted them to just let go, and that’s the way we’ve published. It’s the old pamphlet form, yes. But the fact that we are going into a Creative Commons licensing scheme also indicates something that was said about us very early on in the New York Times, namely, that we raise the question issue of whether the Internet is the new pamphlet arena. There is something to be said for the notion that bloggers and their like are a new form of pamphleteering. So the fact that we’re going onto the Net in this way is consistent with the observation that the Net has taken over the function of discussion in the public sphere, and it’s consistent with our own approach and spirit.”

The whole interview is relevant and interesting to the questions I’ve been touching on in the proposal.

A Call For Feedback! (a research proposal)

Dear world,

With the guidance of Dr. Forte, I am almost finished my thesis research proposal. I am trying to build a more collaborative research framework using this blog to generate feedback and as a place to let people know what exactly I’m doing – so if you have time, check it out and voice your concerns and ideas! This written section compliments the presentation I created earlier, and the two together form my research proposal so far.

Thanks to everyone involved, especially Dr. Forte, for having put up with unending delays, whining, bitching, and other lovely unprofessional behavior. The workload over the past semester has been excruciating, leaving me feeling a bit demented. Hopefully such dementia hasn’t infiltrated my writing too much – although evidence of it certainly exists on this blog!

Edit #3 – added more bibliographic information, and brutally deleted and edited incoherent sections. You might as well start here, although I feel I may have cut too much – I wanted to incorporate more about “decolonizing anthropology” but since I hadn’t worded it well, I nuked it. It may make its way back in.

Research proposal draft beta 0.4 (lots of editing, deleting)

old versions

old research proposal draft. (with more about decolonizing)

And if you do take the time to leave some feedback, I will certainly do my best to incorporate it into the research. So please contribute (and by doing so you can say you contributed to the success of using a blog as a research tool! check out Erkan saka’s paper linked on left side of his blog)

Sincerely,

Owen Wiltshire

Why do anthropologists blog?

Over the past few months I’ve been looking into the question “why do anthropologists blog?”. I’ve written up my reflections into a “mini ethnography” of sorts. The project involved a small survey, interviews, and a focus group – involving students and teachers. I would have kept it short and sweet, but there was a bit of a length competition going on in the class, and I encouraged myself to write perhaps a bit too much.

Yes, it’s a class assignment – it weaves in debates that are less interesting to people not involved in the class, but for those interested in academic blogging and the culture of publishing in anthropology, why not give it a read and let me know what you think.

I was holding off on posting this till it was reviewed by my professor and classmates, but as is the problem with all forms of review – it takes a lot of time! So here it is, mostly unreviewed, raw, and certainly in need of some revision. Feel free to comment anonymously, and again, flame on! (especially at how I just drop this reference to Wacquant and then drift off into nothingness… someone pick up on this and comment because im just too tired to critique myself!).

“Why do anthropologists blog?” – a mini ethnography, and class assignment.

Abstract

In the past few years Anthropologists have increasingly taken up blogging. The anthropology blogsphere is a rapidly growing community that has created a new space for all levels of the anthropological hierarchy to express themselves. It has also opened doors to engagement with those outside anthropology. Within debates surrounding traditional publishing formats, this report examines the ways blogs might work to allow anthropologists to reflect and discuss more, while officially publishing less. It is an exploration into the culture of publishing in anthropology, and the reasons anthropologists do, or do not, blog.

 

Blogging and the classroom

Over at Antropologi.info there is an interesting discussion into the ways blogging can play an important role in fieldwork. This blog is part of my field notes, thats for sure. They argue that the use of a blog for reflecting on the field works to stimulate interest and to increase collaboration with other researchers.

Linked to that great link is a discussion on how blogging your field notes equals “open access field notes“. Well your reading mine. Enjoy 🙂

Prof. Forte of openanthropology.wordpress.com is also getting his students to blog. I’m taking his cyberethnography class – and while all the students in the class are encouraged to write a blog, they are not necessarily encouraged to make it openly available. (for privacy and maybe liability reasons?)

The Need To Imagine

Ursula K. Leguin, daughter of the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber, writes:

“Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.” (LeGuin, 1989:6)

Our class has been looking into “otherness” in anthropology, and its colonial roots. The subsequent debates into cultural relativism were quite heated. I found this quote just recently, but it certainly fits. LeGuin argues that a lot of science fiction has consisted of standard western colonial stereotypes – where women are objectified, and men save the universe. In looking at colonialism and anthropology, its clear that literature and anthropology share the same problems when it comes to acting responsibly. Leguin writes:

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself – as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation, you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.” (LeGuin, 1989:95)

She argues that the most important part of writing is the development of characters. Good science fiction for her is not just about space ships and vast dominating empires. It is good when it transcends those stereotypes, and reveals truth about individuals. Like many anthropologists (maybe we can even say the good ones?), she is critical of those who uphold domination. Her science fiction is anti-colonial, in that it plays and presents alternative realities. I think literature has a lot to offer in terms of addressing the individual, which is often lost when looking at the world in general.

more on this to come…