Open Access

Ancient Culture Goes Online as National Museum Digitises


Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia
by Christopher Scott, January 29, 2014

 After nine years of locating works, cross-checking records, photographing and finally cataloguing, the National Museum has unveiled its online database, which features more than 16,000 entries ranging from ancient statues to paintings and manuscripts.
Launched on January 3, the database is the only fine arts system of its kind in Cambodia, with its web presence enabling museum curators to locate and document works, as well as providing the public with access.
Funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, the National Museum of Cambodia collaborated with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), an international, non-governmental organisation that supports and promotes research and scholarly exchange with Cambodia.
“It’s extremely important for Cambodians as well as researchers, whether they be just generally interested in Cambodian art, wanting to actually locate, write about or research something in particular in the collection,” Darryl Collins, project director and member of the CKS board of directors, said.
Prior to the online database, museum records were scattered in three different formats, with several French card cataloguing systems, Khmer handwritten inventory lists and a pre-existing database.
“Before it was rather laborious; virtually you had to turn up on the doorstep of the National Museum Of Cambodia to talk to the curatorial staff or the director and find out about a particular piece,” Collins said.
More here. 

A letter from the editors of a fellow AAA journal publication, Cultural Anthropology

Dear Colleagues,
 
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (a section of the American Anthropological Association) is excited to announce a groundbreaking publishing initiative. With the support of the AAA, the influential journal of the SCA, Cultural Anthropology, will become available open access, freely available to everyone in the world. Starting with the first issue of 2014, CA will provide world-wide, instant, free (to the user), and permanent access to all of our content (as well as ten years of our back catalog). This is a boon to our authors, whose work we can guarantee the widest possible readership —and to a new generation of readers inside of anthropology and out. Cultural Anthropology will be the first major, established, high-impact journal in anthropology to offer open access to all of its research, and we hope that our experience with open access will provide the AAA as a whole, as well as other journals in the social and human sciences, valuable guidance as we explore alternative publishing models together.
 
While the current content of Cultural Anthropology will be available via open access, the current AAA contract with Wiley-Blackwell requires that the AAA continue to provide the journal to our library and member subscribers. Thus, CA will also continue to be available, in full, to library subscribers and all AAA members via the Anthrosource portal. Indeed, if you have access to a library subscription, or enjoy the benefits of AAA membership, we hope that you will continue to access CA by means of Anthrosource. The statistics these downloads generate continue to play an important part in the allocation of revenue, including to Cultural Anthropology, and thus help subsidize this new publishing venture.  In the future, our goal, and that of AAA, is to sustain Cultural Anthropology independently as a preeminent publication, produced with the hard work of editors and authors, and the contributions made by the members of the SCA.
 
This change opens up new possibilities and new questions for Cultural Anthropology. The most important aspect of the journal is the quality of the research it publishes, and CA will continue its practice of detailed and critical peer review and extensive editorial involvement in the publication of articles. CA will also explore new ways of communicating its content, making it visible to the world beyond our members and subscribers. SCA will also begin to explore other sources of revenue, and consider options for making print versions of the journal available on demand. We are confident that CA can continue to maintain the extraordinarily high standard of scholarship it currently enjoys; indeed, we expect that this new opportunity will attract ever more interesting work.  We want to thank the Executive Board and the publishing office of the AAA, and especially all of the members of the SCA, for their encouragement and support of this new project.  The members of the SCA Board look forward to working with our editorial team, as well as our colleagues across the academy, and in the library world, as we undertake this important endeavor.  
 
Brad Weiss
President, Society for Cultural Anthropology

Occupy and Open Access

The March 2012 issue of Anthropologies is out, and editor Ryan Anderson has put together an important collection on anthropology, the open access movement inside the field, and how anthropologists are engaging with the Occupy movement. This issue is so full of good ideas, good review of literature and writing, and well-articulated taking of positions. I hope it is widely-read, as it has the potential to mark a shift towards a new way of doing anthropology, a new articulation for the field that won’t be found in any other journal.

More here

HAU: A New Online Journal

HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, is an international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal which aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline.

The journal is motivated by the need to reinstate ethnographic theorization in contemporary anthropology as a potent alternative to its 'explanation' or 'contextualization' by philosophical arguments, moves which have resulted in a loss of the discipline’s distinctive theoretical nerve. By drawing out its potential to critically engage and challenge Western cosmological assumptions and conceptual determinations, HAU aims to provide an exciting new arena for evaluating ethnography as a daring enterprise for 'worlding' alien terms and forms of life, by exploiting their potential for rethinking humanity and alterity.

HAU takes its name from Mauss’ Spirit of the Gift, an anthropological concept that derives its theoretical potential precisely from the translational inadequations and equivocations involved in comparing the incomparable. Through their reversibility, such inferential misunderstandings invite us to explore how encounters with alterity occasion the resurgence and revisitation of indigenous knowledge practices. As an online journal, HAU stresses immediacy of publication, allowing for the timely publication and distribution of untimely ideas. Aiming to attract the most daring thinkers in the discipline, regardless of position or background, HAU also plachttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifes no restriction on further publication of material published by the journal.

HAU welcomes submissions that strengthen ethnographic engagement with received knowledges, and revive the vibrant themes of anthropology through debate and engagement with other disciplines and explore domains held until recently to be the province of economics, philosophy and the natural sciences. Topics addressed by the journal include indigenous ontologies and systems of knowledge, forms of human engagement and relationality, cosmology and myth, magic, witchcraft and sorcery, truth and falsehood, indigenous theories of kinship and relatedness with humans and non-humans, hierarchy, materiality, perception, environment and space, time and temporality, personhood and subjectivity, alternative metaphysics of morality.

More here

Online Engagement

An interesting article about online efforts at museums:

Museums pursue engagement online
By Carol Vogel

New York Times

Shelley Bernstein lives with her computer. Most days she hunkers down in her spartan office at the Brooklyn Museum where, as chief technology officer, she invents ways to keep people visiting the museum and its website, brooklynmuseum.org.

Every night she bicycles home to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn to be with Teddy, her beloved pit bull, and monitors the institution's presence on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare and Twitter, where it has nearly 183,000 followers ...

Read more here.

Open Folklore

An exciting new venture called Open Folklore.

The American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries are creating a prototype of a new scholarly resource called Open Folklore. The vision for this open-access online portal for folklore studies is to make a greater number and variety of useful resources, both published and unpublished, available for the field of folklore studies and the communities with which folklore scholars partner. In its full form, we intend for Open Folklore to be a multi-faceted project that combines digitization and digital preservation of data, publications, educational materials, and scholarship in folklore; promotes open access to these materials; and provides an online search tool to enhance discoverability of relevant, reliable resources for folklore studies. In its initial phase, the partners will construct a prototype to gather feedback from the folklore community to shape its future growth and development.

Ethics and Information Technology

Initially, this call for papers seemed a bit far afield for Museum Anthropology. But, then, we got thinking about the discussion surrounding open source, and began considering the ways in which these technologies intersect with questions of ethics. Perhaps these issues should deeply concern museums because they hold and channel information to different communities in different ways. From a news release:

Call for Papers for a Special Issue with Ethics and Information Technology on “ICT and the capability approach”

Some influential theories of distributive justice, fairness and equality, like that of John Rawls, discuss fair distribution in terms of shares of primary goods available to people. The main criticism of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum of these views is that it is not the goods that are ultimately important, but what they allow us to do and be, the kind of lives they enable us to live. Giving everyone a laptop or some other piece of technology is no good in and by itself, according to their ‘capability approach’.

Some people will be able to make good use of it and increase their level of functioning, whereas others who are for example illiterate or do not have access to a reliable power supply cannot possibly convert their possession of this particular technology into anything useful in their lives. Human functioning and capabilities are therefore at the centre of the work of Nussbaum and Sen. The capability approach is thoroughly normative, since it demands that people are brought to a minimum level of capabilities necessary to lead flourishing lives.

Although the capability approach has been widely adopted in development thinking, hardly any work has been done on the interrelations between the capability approach and technology. This is remarkable, since technology by definition aims at expanding human capabilities. In recent years, however, publications have started emerging on this topic, most of them concerned with ICT and more in particular with ICT and developing countries. A possible reason for this may be the high expectations regarding the positive contributions ICT will make in issues concerning development and global justice. One of the icons of ‘ICT for Development’ or e-development is the poor farmer in a developing country who now has access to crop prizes thanks to his mobile phone and as a result can eliminate the middlemen. The capability approach may be able to provide a lens through which such ICT applications can be critically scrutinized and evaluated.

In this special issue of Ethics and Information Technology the relevance and implications of the capability approach for ICT will further be explored, though not merely confined to the context of developing countries. We invite contributions concerning both theoretical and applied issues from all over the world and with relevance for either Western countries, developing countries, or both. Some of the issues that can be addressed are the following:
  • Case studies about specific ICTs / capabilities / groups of people / contexts
  • The capability approach and the digital divide
  • System level effects of ICT and the capability approach
  • Designing ICT for human capabilities
  • The capability approach and evaluation of e-development projects
  • Complexity of capability effects of ICT: short versus long term, enabling as well as constraining, etc.
  • The tension between agency versus well-being in ICT4D practise
  • ICT, objective capabilities, subjective valuations & adaptive preferences
  • The capability approach, participation and ICT
  • The capability approach, ICT and (neutrality towards) the good lifeICT and individual / collective / external capabilities
  • Applied ontology of ICT and human capabilities

The editors at Ethics and Information Technology are seeking articles for a special issue in this area. Submissions will be double‐blind refereed for relevance to the theme as well as academic rigor and originality. High quality articles not deemed to be sufficiently relevant to the special issue may be considered for publication in a subsequent non-themed issue. Closing date for submissions: February 28nd, 2010.

To submit your paper, please use the online submission system, to be found at www.editorialmanager.com/etin. For any questions or information regarding this special issue, please contact the managing editor, Noëmi Manders‐Huits, N.L.J.L.Manders‐Huits@tudelft.nl

Open Access Compact

An article on a new open access agreement, signed by five elite universities. The agreement compels the universities to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions' scholars.

The article presents different viewpoints on whether or not this proposed model is a good one. (A good string of comments at the end of the article too.) We wonder in particular about the implications for museum and applied anthropologists. If scholars are not part of a university system, but employed in small institutions, non-profits, or even private companies, is requiring payment in order to publish truly equitable and sustainable? This agreement is perhaps a visible struggle of the contending goals of opening up a journal's readership while still encouraging broad authorship.

Jason Baird Jackson -- current editor of Museum Anthropology Review, and former editor of our own Museum Anthropology -- is quoted. Jackson voices some legitimate concerns, but offers that in principle, this compact is an "awesome thing." We agree that the agreement seems to open up some very exciting possibilities.