Open Folklore is up and running. Many thanks to Jason Jackson, Moira Smith, and Tim Lloyd for their vision and hard work. Jason Jackson has many more posts on his blog, including one entitled “What can Open Folklore help me do now?”.
When I get more of a chance to try it out, I will report my results.
Congratulations go to Tim Tangherlini for quite a coup: he and Peter Leonard were one of o 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities to be awarded Google’s Digital Humanities Research Awards. Their project is entitled “Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.” Here’s the link
In an episode of Modern Marvels on the History channel, the history of agricultural labor was delineated as follows:
I can’t tell if this set of photographs on Flickr is the work of one person or many, but it’s pretty amazing documentation of signs seen at recent Tea Party events, a number of which feature unfortunate, if not highly ironic, misunderstandings of grammar or spelling of the English language.
For all my fellow folklorists, the good folks at College Humor bring us a bridge with an internet troll under it.
All of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to Maida Owens and the Louisiana Folklife Program. She has single-handedly persevered in getting almost all the contents, at least the tables of such if not the content itself, of the entire run of the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany online. Later issues, like the two issues I edited on Cultural Catholicism and In the Wake of the Storms also have the articles available. (The contents are in chronological order with the oldest first, so those issues are toward the bottom of the page.)
I am delighted, and fascinated, by the emergence in the last few years of interest in the mechanical arts, for lack of a better description. Mechanics, machinists, and metal workers of various kinds (welders and fabricators among many others) suddenly find themselves in the spotlight. While only a few people are familiar with Douglas Harper’s classic study of a one-man agricultural equipment repair and fabrication shop, Local Knowledge, most will have seen Richard Sennett’s somewhat overly-romanticized The Craftsman as well as Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft.
These books are, of course, joined by shows like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the Travel Channels Made in America (which is no longer in production). If you throw into the bargain the assembly-line porn that is Science Channel’s How It’s Made, which regularly re-runs on the History Channel I believe, and the Food Network’s Unwrapped, then what seems to have been revealed is huge thirst in America for, as our president put it in his inaugural address, “the makers of things.”
And, it seems, those makers seems to be folks with dirt underneath their fingernails.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in their discussion of “the new industrial revolution” that Wired chose for their cover the image of a wrench turning a nut … powered by a greasy hand, which is exposed to the world by the presence of a rolled-up shirt sleeve.
One of the dominant figures for “let’s get to work” is rolling up one’s sleeve. The arm and the hand go away, but the wrench remains in this Shell ad for “ideas into action”:
The abstracted wrench here transforms into a pencil, both emphasizing the “work of creativity,” of idea generation, and also the necessity of finding “ideas that work.”1
There is also, I would argue, a subtle reinforcing of the leveling of the playing field between hand-work and idea-work. In fact, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review makes precisely that argument. In “Restoring American Competitiveness”, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argue that the rush to commoditize manufacturing — resulting in outsourcing — of contemporary corporations has resulted in a breaking of the link between the folks in research and development on the one hand and the folks on the shop floor actually making the products.2 What is lost is the productive conversation, the feedback loop, between those two groups, and that means ideas are lost. There suggestion is that the U.S. must encourage the rebuilding of an “industrial commons.” (Here’s a link to the article but be forewarned that it’s only to a summary page and that the download requires payment.)
My thanks to my colleague Mary Ann Wilson for loaning me her copy of The Atlantic. She noted: “The wrench poster reminds me of the WWII poster, WE Can Do It, of the working woman with her sleeves rolled up, and nothing but muscle — and brain — power suggested.” The Shell advertisement appears on page 45 of the February 2010 issue. ↩
Interestingly, it’s been Harvard itself, and HBR, which have led the attack on the MBA as the source of business problems and not the solution. Pisano and Shih argue that it’s MBAs who have led the charge to see manufacturing as a “low value” endeavor deserving outsourcing. Crawford’s argument is much the same, but he goes further to note that, in the end, many blue-collar jobs will be safe precisely because they must be local — your car mechanic, plumber, electrician — while many white collar jobs will eventually be outsourced, e.g. radiological analyses now being done in the Philippines. ↩
At some point after the Saints won the playoff game against the Vikings I realized that that joke that regularly gets sent to me by a family member or friend suddenly had whole new possibilities. This bears watching, I thought to myself, maybe even collecting! And so was born the idea to collect various pieces of folklore relating to this rare historical moment:
For those who either have never seen the joke or who do not remember it, here it is:
A Cajun who died went to hell.
The devil assigned him the usual punishment…put him in the mass pit where the heat was melting others. The devil came back sometime later surprised to find the Cajun just sitting around, not even misting, much less sweating. “How come you’re not so much as sweating here where everyone else is screaming for relief from the heat?”
The Cajun laughed and said, “Man, I was raised in the bayous of Sout Looziana. Dis ain’t nothin’ but May in Morgan City to me!”
The devil decided to really put the Cajun through it. He put him in a sealed off cave in the pit with open blazes and four extra furnaces blasting. When he came back, days later, the Cajun was sitting pretty, had barely begun to bead up with sweat. The devil was outraged. “How is this possible!? You should be melted to a shrieking puddle in these conditions!.”
The Cajun laughed even harder than before. “Hey, man! I done tole you. I was raised in Sout Looziana. You tink dis is heat?! Dis ain’t nothin’ but August in Cow Island !”
So the devil thought, ‘Alright, a little reverse ought to do the trick.’ He put the Cajun into a corner of hell where no heat ever reached. It was freezing and to add to the Cajun’s misery, he added massive icebergs and blasting frozen air. When he returned, the Cajun was shivering, ice hung from every part of him but he was grinning like it was Christmas.
Exasperated, the devil asked “HOW!? How is it possible?! You’re impervious to heat and here you sit in conditions you can’t be used to…freezing cold and yet you’re happier than if you were in heaven. WHY?!”
The Cajun kept grinning and asked, “Don’t dis mean de Saints won da Super Bowl?”
Dear NFL Commissioner,
Sesame Street just called and said that they own the letters, “N”, “F”, and “L”. This message is being brought to you today by the Who Dat Nation, and the number 1 … !
E-mail subject line read “Recently seen in New Orleans”
Our Lady of Fatima is located in Lafayette, Louisiana
E-mail subject line read “Priest at Saint Louis Cathedral”
The National Academies Press has just released a 180-page book on Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The link will take you to the book’s page on the press’s website. It’s available as a paperback for $31.46, as a PDF for $27, or as a combo for $41. You can also follow a link on the page to read it on-line for free.
I have never heard of “cultural and activity research” until a CFP (call for papers) came across the Digital Humanities mailing list. But here’s a CFP for the Nordic Conference on Activity Theory and the Forth Finnish Conference on Cultural and Activity Researc which describes itself as:
The conference is dedicated to examining human creative activities. The conference theme is “Perspectives on social creativity, designing and activity”. We conceive of design as a field of knowledge and activity concerned with the creation of artifacts. Creative activities operate with diverse modes of knowing and representations. Creativity is a social quality that involves communication and community formation. Creative activities and design are needed when humans transform their circumstances by developing new technologies and institutions. Creation of the new relies on cultural mediation and historically accumulated resources. Activity theory and socio-cultural approaches offer fresh perspectives on these themes. The conference aims at bringing together diverse points of view and disciplinary orientations to discuss social creativity, design and activity.
It looks great, but the conference comes at the end of this academic year, which is also close to the end of the university’s fiscal year. And, as many know, there just isn’t that much money to begin with. Let along enough to help subsidize a flight to Helsinki and a $350 (200€) registration fee.
Sigh. It looks amazing.