Internet on strike against censorship

Wednesday, Jan 18, much of the Internet will be on strike to protest the censorship legislation now before Congress. The bill, known as "Stop Online Piracy Act," will have a chilling effect on the use of the internet in the U.S. and around the world. Scholarship and free expression will be reduced, while large media corporations will increase their profits. Lots of basic scholarly practice will become criminalized.

For information see the SOPA STRIKE site (including ways to write your congressman, code to temporarily black out your site for the day (as Wikipedia will do), and other materials.

Wikipedia has a very nice article, with pro and con views, supporters and detractors, technical details, and such.

New Online Anthropology "Journals": Semi- Quasi- or Pseudo- ?

Since this is open access week, here are some thoughts on a couple of new online "journals" or journal-like entities, in the field of anthropology. They are Anthropologies, and Anthropology of this Century. I've published in the first, but not the second. Each has published some interesting papers. They seem to favor works relating to contemporary issues or contemporary disciplinary concerns.

This is the blurb for Anthropologies:

"This goal of this site is to explore contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence "anthropologies."  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences."

For Anthropology of This Century, the description is:

"ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY (AOTC) publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles. There are three issues per academic year – in October, January and May."


This is not a full analysis of these two things, just some random thoughts and queries. Should we call them journals? Each has a name that sounds like it could be the name of a journal, and each is arranged in numbered volumes or issues, each with several papers (often on a theme). So outwardly these look like journals. Anthropologies calls itself variously a "site" and a "collaborative online project." Does that collaboration refer to the three members of the "Editorial Team," or to all the authors? Perhaps I am a collaborator in this project by virtue of the inclusion of my article; I'm not sure about this. AOTC does not call itself anything, perhaps on purpose. It has a list of people as "Our Authors," and one person is listed as "Publisher and Editor."

Semi-Journal ("half journal" or "partial journal") might be an appropriate name for these things. That is, they have some attributes of journals (editors, articles by scholars, numbered volumes), but not others (peer review; clear submission guidelines, editorial boards). Or perhaps Quasi-Journal (almost a journal, as if it were a journal)? I wouldn't call them Pseudo-Journals (false or fraudulent journals), since they do not claim to be academic journals. And they aren't blogs or wikis.

This name issue is not as trivial as it might sound. What is the intellectual and professional status of these things? When I mention my article in Anthropologies, I am never sure what to call it. ("Yes, I published something on that topic in an online _______" WHAT??). What should I call this on my CV? It is certainly not a peer reviewed journal article. I couldn't remember what I did with it, so I just checked my CV. Guess what - I forget to add it to my CV! And there is no appropriate category there to include it! Hmm, I will have to modify or add to the categories of written work on my CV to accommodate this article.

My confusion here is part of the general situation of flux in the online production of intellectual work throughout the disciplines. I must admit here, I am one of those old fashioned academics ("fossilized" some will say) who sees the value of peer-reviewed journals as much greater than things like blogs and online semi-journals. This and my other blogs are all well and good, a way to let off steam, but as a scholar I want to be known and appreciated for my scientific and scholarly publications. This issue came up in discussion on Neuroanthropology and other anthropology-related blogs recently. Greg Downey argued that blog writing should be taken more seriously by tenure and promotion committees, and judged as true intellectual production. I disagreed, suggesting that blogging is better viewed as a service activity, separate from intellectual contributions like peer-reviewed articles, books, grants, etc. Some other folks supported Greg (e.g., Jason Anstrosio; see posts on his very nice blog, Living Anthropologically), and praised blogs that discussed real scholarly topics, combining citations to the peer-reviewed literature with links to blogs and other internet venues (like semi-journals).

Perhaps one part of the disagreement here has to do with disciplinary differences. Blogs like Neuroanthropology often take on real scientific issues and discuss them in a sophisticated way, with citations to the relevant research. The archaeology blogs I am familiar with, on the other hand, mostly communicate to non-specialists, or else discuss disciplinary issues (like this one), but rarely take on serious intellectual issues. The papers on Anthropologies and AOTC are closer to the serious end of this spectrum, and perhaps they deserve more status or consideration than the typical archaeology blog. Nevertheless, they are not peer-reviewed. Say what you like about the criticisms and problems of peer-review; it is still the best filtering method available for maintaining the quality of academic production in scholarly disciplines.

I wouldn't mind calling Anthropologies and AOTC and other similar things "semi-journals," or literally, "half-journals." But I would emphasize that the half that they lack includes the most important thing for science and scholarship -- peer review. That said, these are interesting and important new venues, and it is hard to predict where internet scholarship will be 5 or 10 years from now. Check these out, especially Anthropologies, which is quite good and exciting.

What happens when digital archives disappear?

In looking at the website of historian Richard J. Salvucci, I came across links to the disappearance of an important digital archive of historical Mexican newspapers. The archive, called "Paper of Record," is an important source for historians of Mexico. Two years ago, Google secretly purchased the archive from its owner, and then they took it down. Historians who used it regularly lost access. After some protest, the archive was restored by its original owner, with a high access fee. Presumably Google will start hosting the archive at some point in the future (perhaps with a big fat fee).

The episode is described in these 2009 posts:

                "Digital Archives that Disappear"

                 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/22/record

                "Who The Hell is Google" (Librarian April 2009)

                 http://librarian.lishost.org/?p=2356

 For a later, more comprehensive treatment of the disappearance of digital archives in Miller-McCune, see:

       "Digital Disappearance" (Melinda Burns)

                http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/digital-disappearance-9777/

This paper compares "digital disappearance" to the "rectification" of the Records Department in Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Salvucci (who was a regular user of Paper of Record) is quoted in the paper:

"With what I know right now, every time I hear somebody is going to digitize something for posterity, I think to myself, 'Good luck.' Because if you can digitize it, you can vaporize it. This is not just a vision of some crazed social democrat in Britain" he said, in a reference to Orwell. " This is no joke. This is happening."

Pretty scary. I have had a digital archive sort of disappear. I had some collections of Toluca Valley Postclassic pottery, in the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, posted on my website at my former university (similar to the pot shown here, which is from Calixtlahuaca). When I moved to ASU and switched my websites over, I assumed that everything would work well, and with some minor adjustments that was the case. But the site with the pottery photos does not work anymore. The museums had imposed strict requirements that required hand-editing the html in several hundred files (the galleries were generated automatically by a program called Arles, but then the html had to be edited by hand, by a kind student, to satisfy the museums). I'm not sure I have the skill to re-edit the html files, so my digital archive has effectively disappeared until I can figure out how to fix it.

Are internet articles real publications, or are they fluff?

This question lies behind an interesting recent article, "The Scholarly Apparatus: When Should it Be There?" by Harrison Eiteljorg II in the CSA Newsletter of April, 2010. He takes some archaeology websites to task for including scholarly information but no attribution of author, date, etc.

I agree completely. Without the "scholarly apparatus" such websites are fluff, not scholarship. Even entries in Wikipedia have authorship (although you have to track that down, and it's not always completely clear).

There is also a page with reader commentaries.

Working Papers

“Working Papers” are semi-published papers, typically posted on the internet as part of a series sponsored by an institution or organization. They are often first drafts, perhaps as presented at a meeting, that later will be revised and published in journals. In some fields such as economics and physics, working papers are standard forms of scholarly communication, whereas in others (such as archaeology and anthropology) they are rare. Working papers provide a way to get feedback on work in progress, and they also let people know what an author has been writing about recently.

What are the pros and cons of working papers as a form of publication? My assumption here is that these are early drafts, most of which will later be published in a peer-reviewed venue. In evaluating working papers it helps to consider their formal relationship to peer-reviewed journal publications.

The main functions of peer-reviewed scholarly publications are (from Mabe and Amin 2002):

1. Dissemination: making the results of research known to an audience.

2. Registration: dating the initial appearance of an author’s ideas, data, or analysis.

3. Certification: to assure that the work has been peer reviewed.

4. Archiving: making a work permanently available

(Ober et al. 2007 combine the first 2 features and call this “Making public”)

Working papers (“WP”), in comparison:

• Dissemination: WP also disseminate research results, often much sooner than a peer-reviewed publication. WP perform the task of circulating drafts to colleagues, but in a more public fashion.

• Registration: WP have the same role as a journal article, but, again, often at an earlier stage and at an earlier date.

• Certification: WP are not peer reviewed, so they do NOT perform the role of certification.

• Archiving: WP serve as limited of variable version of this function. In many cases, working papers are maintained in repositories in perpetuity. In other cases, the working papers are removed when they are published in a formal scholarly source.

To me, working papers are a very positive venue and can serve important roles in the research and publication processes. For an author, they can provide more feedback from readers than is typical when circulating a draft to a small group of colleagues. For readers, working papers let people know what an author has been working on. I have found some sites in economics and classics (see below) very helpful, particularly in exploring disciplines beyond my own.

The down side of working papers (apart from the time and resources needed to set up a series like this) is that one is exposing one’s work prior to formal publication. Now the discussion of four attributes above suggests that the positives (dissemination and registration) outweigh the negatives (the notion that someone is going to “steal” one’s data and ideas). Nevertheless, many scholars worry about this and would rather not have their work available until it is fully published in peer-review form. My hunch is that with the direction in which scholarly publishing and internet scholarship are heading, working papers will become more popular and will play in increasing role in archaeological scholarship and publishing.

Here are a few examples of working papers web sites:

Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics. This is a very useful series from which I have gotten a number of good papers. It has the advantage of a having a nice description of how it came about (Ober et al. 2007)

The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany has a nice series.

University of Colorado, Denver, Department of Anthropology, has a small series of working papers, with a nice web interface and good description and explanation of what working papers are all above.

REFERENCES:

Kling, Rob

2004 The Internet and Unrefereed Scholarly Publishing. Annual Review of Information and Technology 38:591-631.

Kling, Rob, Lisa Spector, and Geoff McKim

2002 Locally Controlled Scholarly Publishing Via the Internet: The Guild Model. Journal of Electronic Publishing 8:1.

Mabe, Michael A., and Mayur Amin

2002 Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde: Author-Reader Asymmetries in Scholarly Publishing. ASLIB Proceedings 54:149-157.

Ober, Josiah, Walter Scheidel, Brent D. Shaw, and Donna Sanclemente

2007 Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics. Hesperia 76:229-242.

Why Aren't More Museum Collections Published?

I just posted photos of a very odd ceramic object on my Calixtlahuaca Archaeological Project blog. I have no idea what this thing was used for, and I am hoping that someone will provide some clues or suggestions. Our puzzlement over this object brings back my complaints about the lack of publication of museum collections of Aztec materials (Smith 2004). Aztec ceramics (the materials I work most closely with) are very poorly published. There is not a single adequate descriptive report on an excavated collection of Aztec ceramics (I know, I shouldn't throw stones -- I'm sure my colleagues are asking why my book on Tlahuica Ceramics has been listed as "in press" for ten years now. But that is another story..... ).

Museums in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe are full of Aztec ceramic objects that remain unpublished. Most Aztec ceramics aren't as nice as, say Classic Maya polychromes or Mixteca-Puebla polychromes, so they haven't attracted much attention from connoisseurs or art historians. Many examples of the finer Aztec ceramics, such as the fancy stuff excavated from offerings at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, are published in expensive art books and elsewhere. But at the provincial sites I excavate, we don't get too many of these fine objects. But we do get some rare and complex things like musical instruments and various kinds of incense burners. But they are almost always in very fragmentary form, and the lack of publication of the whole objects in museum storage collections really hampers the intepretation of these things; this is the theme of my 2004 paper.

But why aren't these museum collections published? Here are some off-the-cuff answers to that question.

1. Its too expensive publish museum collections. Even for internet publication, which saves the costs of printing and binding, someone has to take the time to photograph and document the museum collections, organize the data, and write descriptions (not to mention producing the html and host the project).
   
2. Its not fashionable to do documentation projects. Most art historians would rather spend all their time on a couple of really fine objects than on documenting the range of variation within a material category. Its difficult or impossible in art history or archaeology to get funding for documentation projects; they just aren't sexy enough. When museums start documenting their collections digitally, the Aztec ceramics are pretty low on their priority scale.
   
3. Museums don't have the resources to document their collections. When I started working at Calixtlahuaca, I wrote to museums in Europe to see if they had collections from the site (it was a favored stop for foreign collectors in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and many museums have collections from that time). One beleaguered curator replied that he had absolutely no idea whether his museum had anything from the site, and that he had no way to even find that out, given recent budget cuts.
4. Museums often put up roadblocks. Some museums charge a fee for any use of images of their objects, whether for print publication or internet posting. Others allow such images to be posted, but add restrictions. For example, as an experiment a few years ago I posted a collection of ceramic vessels from Calixtlahuaca and other sites in two U.S. museums. I got permission from the museums, but one required that their reproduction policy be available within a single click of each image. That seems reasonable, but it meant that the automated program I used (it was called Arles) was unable to produce the html files, which required hours of hand editing.
5. Archaeologists avoid museum collections, since most are poorly documented with many unprovenienced objects. Yet I don't need to know precisely where a particular Aztec ceramic widget came from in order to get some use out of the object.
   

I don't have any big conclusions or solutions here. One of my many fantasy "retirement projects" is to travel to the great museums of Europe and document their collections of Aztec ceramic objects. But that is a long way off, and I would really like to know NOW what some of the weird ceramic fragments we get really are.

Smith, Michael E.
2004 Aztec Materials in Museum Collections: Some Frustrations of a Field Archaeologist. Nahua Newsletter 38:21-28.

ADDENDUM:

I just found a news story stating the the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has just announced a new initiative to digitize its entire inventory and post images and information on the internet (but I couldn't find any information about this on the University Museum's web site. Hmmmmm). This is great news. I know they have some Aztec pottery; maybe they have a complete example of one of these weird objects.....