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.

A recent trip through old podcasts brought me back to this great interview by David Battino with Peter Drescher, a sound designer who has created some remarkable music that all of us have heard: he’s the guy who makes the default ringtones for various mobile phone manufacturers.

That sounds immediately boring and mechanical and, well, corporate, but he takes his job seriously and all those labels that we are so quick to apply are things he himself knows. His Sisyphian task results in some interesting observations about what makes sound interesting to us, especially musical sounds. One of the things he reminds us is that the kind of ready repetition of music with which we are all now not only familiar but sometimes dependent — that is, recorded music — is really a rather recent phenomena. (The link is to a piece by Peter Drescher entitled “The Myth of Music Ownership.)

Even within recorded music, however, the human mind between the ears seeks variation. Check it out. It’s short and full of great examples: Peter Drescher on Annoying Audio — link is to MP3. (I had an embedded QT player, but I couldn’t get it not to pre-load the audio.)

I came across a link to Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 which narrates the period in U.S. history which saw simultaneously territorial growth, religious revival, booming industrialization, a recalibrating of American democracy, and the rise of nationalist sentiment. This is such a critical period in the formation not only of the nation and the way we imagine the nation but also in a number of folk traditions. I really would like a semester, or at least some three-month period, to immerse myself in exploring the period in much more detail. I wonder if one of my colleague’s in history would have some recommendations.

The Compass app that comes with the iPhone 3GS does what I need it terms of giving me latitude and longitude in degrees and digits, but there’s no way to capture those coordinates except by hand. It would be nice to have an app that would let me copy and paste or at least enter a series of locations which I could then later somehow download.

Apple has some sample code for a Locate Me app here.

I would like to be able to use a term like scope in my work as a folklorist:

scope is an enclosing context where values and expressions are associated … Variables are associated with scopes. Different scoping types affect how local variables are bound.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

Note for readers: this post is currently in process while I am in Boise for the AFS meeting.

For those who attended the forum at the annual meeting of American Folklore Society in Boise this year, here are a few posts that form the background to my current thinking:

• In the Era of the Meta-Platform, Content Is King (20 April 2008) is sort of a foundational statement, for me, of what I think the possibilities are more broadly for the humanities.
• In The Road to Digital Considered (14 August 2008) I discuss …
• In The Cult of the Author in the New Economy (8 August 2009) …
• In The Difference Digital Makes (29 July 2009) …
• In One Digital Difference (16 July 2009) …
• In The Future of Scholarly Publishing from an Individual Perspective (29 January 2009) …

The final draft of the program for the 2009 meeting of the American Folklore Society came out last week and a quick search revealed here’s where I’m going to be:

• On Thursday from 1:30 – 3:30, I will be in the panel “Watery Places” to present my paper “The Ethics of Creativity on the Rice Prairies of Louisiana;
• On Friday from 1:30 – 3:30, I will be in the panel “The Future of Communication in Folklore III: New Media” with old friends Jason Jackson, Jon Kay, and Tom Mould; and, finally,
• Just after the previous session, I will be in the “Meet the Editors” panel with Harry Berger and Giovanna P. del Negro and the super-secret new editor(s) of the Journal of American Folklore.

I’ve seen these photographs a half dozen times over the years, but every time I see them, I am impressed not only by the richness of the color but also by the view into late nineteenth-century life in Europe. (Obviously, Russia, but I imagine the images of peasant life reflect larger patterns.)

And here’s the header note:

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire

At least that’s what she keeps saying. We don’t exactly know from where she grabbed the term, but it’s there and she’s using it to refer to something like a book. We haven’t pressed the matter yet because we’re so tickled by her rambling about the house talking about an index. Of course I am tickled by it, both because of the roles that indices play in folklore studies but also because of their role in information systems in general.

One could argue, I guess, that the folktale and motif indices were simply signs of their times, of the burgeoning of data and information that demanded in many ways that better technology be invented to process it. Perhaps, had the computer arisen earlier, we would still be driven by our typological impulses. Certainly, I am glad for the corrective of the ethnographic impulse. It’s where I’ve done most of my work in the last decade, but now with the rise of humanities computing and tools that can be actually used by mere mortals, I wonder what the future will hold not only for the field but also for myself.

And a quick reminder on what an index is:

An index is a list of words or phrases (‘headings’) and associated pointers (‘locators’) to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document. In a traditional back-of-the-book index the headings will include names of people, places and events, and concepts selected by a person as being relevant and of interest to a possible reader of the book. The pointers are typically page numbers, paragraph numbers or section numbers. In a library catalog the words are authors, titles, subject headings, etc., and the pointers are call numbers. Internet search engines, such as Google, and full text searching help provide access to information but are not as selective as an index, as they provide non-relevant links, and may miss relevant information if it is not phrased in exactly the way they expect.

Wikipedia disambiguates the above from the following:

• Index (mathematics), for various meanings of the word in mathematics
• Index (economics), a single number calculated from an array of prices and quantities. E.g., Price index, a typical price for some good or service, or Operating Index, a tool to compare the operating performance of a company with its peer universe
• Index (typography), a largely obsolete punctuation mark
• Indexing (motion), a kind of motion in many areas of mechanical engineering and machining
• Index (finance), a list of stocks
• Index (database), a feature in a computerized database which allows quick access to the rows in a table
• Index (information technology), either an integer which identifies an array element, or a data structure which enables fast lookup
• Index (search engine), for supporting information retrieval in search engines
• Webserver directory index, a default or index web page in a directory on a web server, such as index.html
• Subject indexing, describing the content of a document by keywords

I’m lucky to have a number of people in my life who are incredibly supportive of the work I do. One of them happens to be my sister-in-law, who sent us a bag of Raven’s Brew Gourmet Coffee called “Wicked Wolf” which had the slogan “Grandma’s Gone but the Coffee’s On” emblazoned across the bottom of the front of the bag:

The blurb on the back begins: “Got big eyes, big ears, big teeth? Are you cross-dressing?”

It’s really good coffee, too. And I say that as someone from South Louisiana who has drank his fair share of “gourmet” coffees and/or “strong” coffees that were really nothing more than burnt. I don’t know what the folks at Raven’s Brew do, but somehow they get a strong, bold taste which really does have some fruit in it — I know, I know: I sound like a wine aficianado — or a coffee aficianado, I guess — but in the case of this coffee, it’s true, I tell you! (I would gladly accept any of their coffees as gifts. If it was available on Amazon, I’d already have it ordered by now. As it is, I’m already doing comparison shopping in my head to see how much I have to buy to justify the shipping cost.)