Kerim's Lifelog

Aix-en-Provence, France

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:21:04 GMT

Aix-en-Provence, France from June 30th to July 14th

SSCI and Open Access

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:53:54 GMT

I was very impressed to read this blog post by Jeremy Trombley:

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.

How do we mobilize anthropologists to support open access?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:53:27 GMT

We’ve been here before.

We’ve tried to explain why it is important.

We’ve written a lot about it.

But nothing seems to have changed.

What can we do to make anthropologists care about open access? To make them care what the AAA says about open access?

[This is an open thread for constructive suggestions about how mobilize for open access, not a place to rehash old debates about the merits of open access. Thanks!]

Morning light

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:27:15 GMT

Morning light

Snow!

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:27:15 GMT

Snow!

How Juno lets me know it's time for her walk…

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:29:13 GMT

How Juno lets me know it's time for her walk…

Liyu mountain from below

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:27:44 GMT

Liyu mountain from below

New Century Village in the New Year

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:54:04 GMT

New Century Village in the New Year

From the Archives: Savage Minds vs. Jared Diamond

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:41:13 GMT

Those of you following Savage Minds since the beginning will remember when this blog was the object of scorn and ridicule across the blogsphere as a result of our temerity in attacking Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. The debate was nicely summed up at the time by Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik:

And in the last week, a relatively new blog in anthropology — Savage Minds — has set off a huge debate over the book. Two of the eight people who lead Savage Minds posted their objections to the book, and things have taken off from there, with several prominent blogs in the social sciences picking up the debate, and adding to it. Hundreds of scholars are posting and cross-posting in an unusually intense and broad debate for a book that has been out for eight years.

A collection of links related to the discussion was posted here on Savage Minds as well. But the discussion did not end there. It is for that reason that I thought it might be a good time to highlight how the discussion continued after 2005. Although it got less attention, we subsequently had Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our very first guest bloggers (establishing a long running tradition on this blog). They drew from their book Yali’s Question to write a series of posts bringing significant expertise and nuance to the questions which had been raised about Diamond’s book. They were later interviewed for a NY Times piece about Diamond’s new book, Collapse.In 2006 we had a few posts on Collapse, but not anything significant. My own posts on Collapse largely consisted of relaying emails others had sent me, while Rex linked to this review article. In 2010, however, Rex returned to Collapse with an in-depth blog post about the edited volume Questioning Collapse.

Diamond’s 2008 New Yorker piece, “Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even” led to a number of Savage Minds posts. It started off with this post by Rex:

At root, the problem — and it is not a fatal flaw, just a problem — with Diamond’s article is that it teaches us that Other Ways Of Life Have Something To Offer Us, but the only way it can do so is by making Papua New Guineans appear more Other to us than they really are.

[Apologies for the awful formatting on some of these older posts, we used to use a Markdown syntax plugin on our site, but we removed it when it became apparent it was slowing down the site. As a result, many of Rex's older posts are now unformatted.]

Then came Rhonda Shearer’s piece “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse:
New Yorker Mag’s Papua New Guinea Revenge Tale Untrue, Tribal Members Angry, Want Justice” which Rex wrote about here, and a letter from Mako John Kuwimb, one of the people named in the lawsuit. Rex later complained that the problem with Diamond was that “his piece ran under the banner ‘annals of anthropology’” thus sending an “off-brand message to our audience.” Then, in conjunction with Stinky Journalism (now iMedia Ethics), a series of posts were published on Diamond’s “vengeance” article and the Daniel Wemp affair: Nancy Sullivan, Rex, Andrew Mack, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Rex again, and yet again. The last post links to this article which Rex says is “the lengthiest, most competent, and most incisive account of the short-comings of Diamond’s article.”

In looking back on all of this, I feel that the NY Times article on Collapse got to the heart of the problem anthropologists have talking to those outside of the discipline:

For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to “contextualize,” “complexify,” “relativize,” “particularize” and even “problematize,” a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin.

So it is interesting that the very last blogger on Savage Minds to discuss Jared Diamond was David Graeber, who asked “Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books?” Unfortunately, he then became a media darling for having done just that, and never had time to follow up on his initial post.

So there you have it. If nothing else, Jared Diamond has given us all a lot to talk about.

Shadow Puppets #juno

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:49:08 GMT

Shadow Puppets #juno

Sunny morning

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:11:04 GMT

Sunny morning

Ferns

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:33:31 GMT

Ferns

Any Other Naked Woman

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:17:02 GMT

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Henri Leclerc:

At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman.

Gayle Rubin, in her famous essay “The Traffic in Women”

Marx once asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar is the price of sugar.” One might paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.

[h/t to Aaron Bady]

Mixed messages from my students

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:20:46 GMT

Mixed messages from my students

The Aborigine outfits of Tsai Ing-wen

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:39:18 GMT

The Aborigine outfits of Tsai Ing-wen
Election season in Hualien, Taiwan

Dead leaves

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:16:35 GMT

Dead leaves

Paw Pillow

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 06:57:40 GMT

Paw Pillow

Peak

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:31:45 GMT

Peak

Hualien panorama

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:04:23 GMT

Hualien panorama

Wrong camouflage.

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:50:26 GMT

Wrong camouflage.

Cozy

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:47:56 GMT

Cozy

Lap Dog

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:30:17 GMT

Lap Dog

Moral Hazard

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:39:00 GMT

Writing in the WSJ about a program to provide food security to India’s poor, Rupa Subramanya reveals her ideological bias in towards the end of the article:

After all, if someone is offering to give you free food, why would you bother to get a job and earn income so that you can feed yourself? Economists recognize this problem as “moral hazard” in which a welfare program leads to perverse incentives which perpetuate its existence.

I would really like someone to apply this logic to CEO pay. After all, many CEOs are now paid more in a single year than most people need in a lifetime, even taking into account differences in “lifestyle.” Shouldn’t they just be given the bare minimum to live from year to year in order to keep them motivated to work the next year as well? Or does moral hazard only apply to poor people?

Picking a Graduate School

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:12:52 GMT

Here at Savage Minds headquarters we regularly get emails from people seeking help finding an appropriate graduate program in Anthropology. Looking through our archives, I realize that while I’ve written about making long-term plans, and Rex has written about preparing your application for graduate school (twice, actually), we haven’t really addressed this important question. So here it goes…

Before you do anything else, you should answer the following question: why are you are going to graduate school in anthropology?

If the answer is that you want an academic career in anthropology, you might think twice about graduate school. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I think the percentage of current anthropology Ph.D.s who are likely to find tenure track jobs in an anthropology department isn’t much better than the percentage of people in college rock bands who go on to sign deals with major record labels. If rock ‘n roll is in your veins, nobody is going to dissuade you from trying to make a career of it, and if you feel the same way about anthropology I say “Go for it!” Otherwise, I’d suggest something else.

Of course, even within academia there are a range of choices. If signing a tenure track contract at Chicago is the pinnacle of the academic job market there are lots of decent options further down the slope: including teaching in another field or an interdisciplinary department (I’m in a program on “ethnic relations and culture”), teaching at a community college, or teaching outside of the U.S., etc. But even if you do get a job, know that academia almost everywhere is under attack from a range of neoliberal policies and budgetary cutbacks, so be ready for a rough ride.

Some of you might be interested in applied careers. Here I think there are a lot more options and I would be much more encouraging. There is a real demand for people with anthropology degrees in a variety of careers. The AAA has a page listing some of them, and I like this list from the counseling centre at the University of Manitoba, but I think the real list is nearly infinite. Basically anything you can do without an anthropology degree can be done better with an anthropology degree. Or at least I think so, and so (it seems) do many employers.

Knowing the answer to the first question will affect what you do next. I won’t spell out all the possible permutations, but suffice to say that if you want a job at one of the top anthropology programs in the US, you would be best off attending such a program. Sure, someone from a third tier university still has a shot at getting a job a the top programs, but know that the odds are stacked against you. Partially because the top universities are more likely to give you the funding, support, and training necessary to do top-quality work and partially because of the sometimes incestuous nature of the discipline. Still, there are many good reasons you might not simply choose a university based on its ranking. For instance, there might be supporting programs which you might wish to make use of at another university, such as a good film school, or medical school, or linguistics program, etc. This could be especially useful for those going into more applied programs.

One thing I tell international students looking to go to the US is that they are best off applying for a Ph.D. program. Many countries more clearly demarcate the M.A. and Ph.D. and so it is good to know that these programs are likely to be combined in the U.S. Rather than writing an M.A. thesis, you will be required to take the same courses as M.A. students and will receive your M.A. upon completion of your qualifying examinations (and/or submission of your dissertation research proposal). As such, it doesn’t really make sense to apply for an M.A. and doing so will often disqualify you from funding opportunities.

Now we get to the hard part. How to pick the program which is right for you? My response to this question is that if you don’t already know the answer you should give yourself six months to a year to do research on graduate programs. I know it sounds like a long time, but the truth is that it is a very difficult question and researching the answer requires doing a lot of reading. That’s because I think you are best off researching professors, not programs [but see note #1 below]. You need to find people who are doing work that you like, that excites you, that makes you want to give up seven to nine years of your life doing something similar. And the time will be well spent because knowing the answer to this question will not only help you pick good a graduate school, it will also help you prepare your application, making it more likely that you will be accepted to the program of your choice.

Of course, knowing you like the work of a particular professor doesn’t necessarily answer the question of which graduate program you should attend. Because the current job market is such a mess someone who does great work might be unemployed or might be teaching somewhere other than in a graduate program in anthropology. But you can write to that person and ask for advice. Perhaps you could study with their teacher, or one of their classmates, who are at a university better suited to your needs. It also sometimes happens that great programs get split up and the professors scatter to a number of other universities. To sort all this out you need to become a scholar of the recent history of academic anthropology. You should also attend AAA meetings and try to talk your way into some of the various parties being held by the graduate programs you are interested in (often in their hotel rooms after the meetings are over), or perhaps just visit the school and try to talk with some of the graduate students. The point is that if you aren’t simply choosing programs based on the name of the university, it is a difficult choice and requires some careful research. Take the time and do it right.

Finally, everyone should have a “Plan B” (and even “C”). It is sometimes possible to transfer to your first choice program after spending a year or two somewhere else. It is also possible that your second choice turns out to be better than you thought. But also be ready to do something else if a career in anthropology doesn’t turn out the way you wanted. A number of my friends dropped out of academia and while fellow academics treated this as a kind of death, they themselves seem much happier as a result. Sure, they miss it sometimes, but then they come to their senses.

NOTES:

1. Since I recommended choosing a gradate program based on how much you like the work being done by individual professors, I should add a word of warning: professors can get sick, they can loose their jobs, and they can move to other universities. While finding an individual professor is a good way to start the job hunt, be wary of picking a program because of just one faculty member. Best if there are a couple of professors you would be willing to work with at the same university. You are going to have to take courses with the rest of the faculty anyway, so you’d better like them.

Reading Fast, Reading Slow (Tools We Use)

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:23:07 GMT

Over the course of a single day I engage in a number of different activities for which the word “reading” doesn’t seem to do justice: I scan my social networks, I check my email, I review student work, I browse articles and books related to my research, and I engage in deep sustained examination of a single text. Each of these tasks require a different frame of mind and, increasingly, different technologies. To simplify matters, I will talk about only three types of reading, each of which encompasses several of these reading-related activities: scanning, browsing and devouring.

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

But if you are in scanning mode, what do you do when you find something interesting to read? There are now a number of “read later” services, but my favorite is still Instapaper which gives you a nicely formatted offline reading experience on your smart phone or Kindle. Flipboard and many other apps have Instapaper support built-in. But this doesn’t work for everything. What if someone links to a book? Or a movie? Or an article which doesn’t work in Instapaper? Or perhaps it is just a website you want to save for later?

In that case, my favorite option is the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in. Pinboard can be set to archive your Twitter account and even automatically bookmark every link in your Twitter feed. But I prefer more selective control. For that there is an option to only bookmark “starred” tweets. This means that as I read Twitter I can “favorite” something and know it will be bookmarked in Pinboard. I can then return later and process the links accordingly. I will usually add books to my Amazon wishlist, movies to my RottenTomatoes “want to see” list, and articles to my Zotero list.

Browsing

Browsing is a more engaged and purposeful type of scanning. This is what I do when I’m doing research. There are really a couple of different activities I might be engaged in when I’m browsing. I might be actively searching online, in which case I’ll add finds to my Amazon wish list or Zotero, or perhaps save a website to Evernote (Pinboard can also archive websites offline, but I prefer Evernote because I can also save PDFs, and I can select which part of a webpage I wish to archive – it also works well on iOS.) I also get various TOC and Google Scholar Search alerts via email. But here I want to focus on another type of browsing which is the process of going through actual texts and figuring out what you want to do with them.

I used to use Sente for this, but increasingly I find it easier to simply save PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox account which seamlessly syncs with my favorite PDF reading application: GoodReader. It is much easier to sit on the couch with my iPad and quickly scan these PDFs than it is to do at my desktop. The articles I must read go in a “must read” folder. For books, I download sample book chapters to Kindle, and use the Kindle iPad app in the same way. The books I decide to read I then buy from Amazon. If the book isn’t available on Amazon (or anywhere else), I will scan the book in Google Books if I can, or sometimes the publisher has a sample chapter.

Increasingly many books are available online in PDF even if the publisher doesn’t officially make them available as texts. This happened with the music industry earlier, and I think academic publishers would do well to learn from the past by making their books available via legitimate services like Amazon and Apple. One interesting new option is 1dollarscan which will scan your books at a rate of $1 for 100 pages. The downside is that (for copyright reasons) they will then pulp the book after scanning it for you. For a cheap PDF of a book not currently available, one could purchase a cheap used copy online and send it to 1dollarscan. I haven’t tried this, but you might even be able to have the book sent to them directly.

Devouring

So you’ve finally got your articles in Instapaper, Kindle, and/or GoodReader and want to sit down with a cup of tea and engage in some more careful reading. Things still aren’t that simple. What if you want to take notes? While printed texts can all be dealt with in the same way: a highlighter and/or a pencil, electronic texts have different restrictions depending on the software and publisher. Instapaper lets you save articles you like directly to Evernote. GoodReader lets you highlight text and then email a summary of your highlights, which you can send to Evernote via your private Evernote email address. A more complicated scenario is when you have a PDF that doesn’t have text which can be selected. Then you either need to run it through OCR software on your computer, or use GoodReader’s other annotation tools which let you draw over the PDF. (I usually use the “box” tool and simply draw a box around the text I am interested in.) The annotated PDF can then be sent to Evernote, which will do it’s own OCR, allowing you to search the full-text of the PDF (assuming you have a “pro” account).

Kindle is more difficult. Kindle lets you make highlights (read this tutorial), but then you need to go to the webpage and copy those annotations back to your computer. There is no way to simply copy or email these annotations from the Kindle app. Because some publishers restrict how many annotations you are allowed to make on a single book, you might need to backup and delete some of your annotations before you can make additional highlights. For the tech savvy, there are also ways to crack the Kindle DRM and save the book you’ve bought as a PDF in GoodReader, where you will be free of such restrictions.

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to find oneself spending far too much time “scanning” and “browsing” and not nearly enough time actually “devouring” the books and articles that we have already decided to read. It is too easy to be distracted by the constant stream of incoming distractions. Research shows we are far worse at getting back to concentrating on the task at hand than we think we are. My solution for this has been to adopt the Pomodoro approach. This means you set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes during which you don’t do anything except read. When I started doing this I found myself itching to check Twitter after about ten minutes. Slowly, using this approach, I’ve re-trained myself to go for longer without seeking distractions. You then “reward” yourself with 5-10 min of scanning before doing another “Pomodoro.” I personally found Pomodoropro to be the best Pomodoro app for iOS. They don’t yet have an iPad version, but the iPhone version works just fine on the iPad.

That’s it for now. A year ago I wrote a similar post about “going paperless” but a lot has changed in a year. I imagine next year this will all look hopelessly out of date. If you have your own suggestions, or a more Android friendly version of some of the iOS apps I listed above, feel free to share them in the comments.

PleaseSir_banner-600px

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:54:52 GMT

PleaseSir_banner-600px

Electricity

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:12:47 GMT

Electricity

Birds on the wire

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:51:28 GMT

Birds on the wire

Looking down

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:39:00 GMT

Looking down

Looking up

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:21:09 GMT

Looking up

Bosch-esque creature in Taipei Station

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:02:07 GMT

Bosch-esque creature in Taipei Station

Where is my day off? 我要休假。robot

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:57:21 GMT

Where is my day off? 我要休假。robot

Where is my day off? 我要休假。protester

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:53:23 GMT

Where is my day off? 我要休假。protester

Where is my day off? 我要休假。Poster.

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:49:53 GMT

Where is my day off? 我要休假。Poster.

There are many reasons to love Taipei's MRT. Beautiful architecture isn't one...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:36:03 GMT

There are many reasons to love Taipei's MRT. Beautiful architecture isn't one of them…

Deepak Ram and Abhiman Kaushal at Sinica

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:47:45 GMT

Deepak Ram and Abhiman Kaushal at Sinica

Camel at Songshan station

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:21:48 GMT

Camel at Songshan station

Please Don't Beat Me, Sir! Movie Poster [A4]

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:35:13 GMT

Please Don't Beat Me, Sir! Movie Poster [A4]
Official movie poster, for the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!. The poster is based on original artwork by Daisy Rockwell. You can see the original painting here: www.flickr.com/photos/kerim/6262511224/in/set-72157624855...

Design work by S. Ashraf Meer and Arsheya Rauf, with some modifications by Kellen Parker and P. Kerim Friedman.

Copyright Four Nine and a Half Pictures, Inc. 2011.

Happiness is a new bone.

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:43:45 GMT

Happiness is a new bone.

Dry dog

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:17:48 GMT

Dry dog