Work(s)

I like to make things. Sometimes I make things with words, and those things get called essays or papers or something else. Here is a list of all those written things available on this website. Sometimes I make things like CDs or television series or tourism databases or computer labs. A lot of times those things get made with words, but they also include people and organizations (which also include people — see how these things get nested!), among other things. A list of all those things is available here. On a few occasions I have made things entirely of other things that were most definitely not words.

Quick Links

Conference Papers

Please note that I am still in the process of loading conference papers into the post database. I anticipate having this work complete by summer 2011.

AFS 2007

Essays

Sometimes the things one makes is an essay. If you have been around for a while and the least bit sentient, you end up with a fair number of these things on your hands. They aren’t posts, and they aren’t necessarily part of any particular project — be it a making project or a writing project. They are what they are, here are some recent pieces:

My Father’s Sprinklers.

In the middle of the seventies, in the middle of our block, there was a house that for one month one summer sprung sprinklers on its roof…

Narrative of Research and Teaching Interests

In a number of Western discourse conventions, narratives have beginnings, middles, and ends. More narrowly, we know that the least that can be said about a narrative is that one thing follows another, and the causality is often implied or inferred. And it does not hurt that we folklorists are fond of etiologies, both in terms of the object of our study or in how we came to study folklore…

Narrative of Projects & Organizational Work

The academy, like any collective of mature organizations, depends upon an established diet of agreed-upon forms of productivity to circulate its life blood of data, information, and knowledge. For teaching faculty, the usual forms are articles and monographs for scholarship and lectures and handouts for teaching, at least insofar as daily life is concerned. For the annual cycle of evaluation or for those times when you wish to move from one place in the eco-system to another, one prepares or updates a vita and a narrative of research and/or teaching. There is little room within such dietary constraints to reflect upon and to explain other forms of work that get done within the academy, sometimes by academics like myself.

Virtual Vermilionville

With the Louisiana Digital Humanities Lab established, it was time to demonstrate what we could do with it and where we could take it and ourselves in the process. I decided to sketch out a vision for a virtual Vermilionville.

Project Bamboo

I recently had the chance to travel to Chicago for the first workshop offered by Project Bamboo, an effort led by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the University of Chicago, and UC-Berkeley to pull together universities and allied institutions to begin to sketch out and develop an improved infrastructure that would support work by humanities scholars. I’m still, myself, not quite sure where it’s all going, but I met some amazing people and had some terrific conversations. Already, some concrete projects are beginning to emerge. It’s my belief that only good can come of an effort like this. Everything I have written is collected on my own Project Bamboo page, or is also viewed by clicking on the Project Bamboo tag in the sidebar. If you’re here because you’re interested in the 4/6 presentation I gave — which has not yet been turned into a slidecast — you can download the PDF of the slides I used by clicking on the image below.

The Makers of Things

I am currently at work on a book about an artifact that for most people only exists in fairy tales, the boat that goes on land and water. It’s alive and well, and real, in south Louisiana and it’s being used to catch crawfish. Click on the link above, or on the photo below to read more.

Louisiana Folk Masters

The idea for LFM was born out of a series of discussions with my colleagues Carl Brasseaux and Barry Jean Ancelet who wanted very much to make the materials of the Archives accessible beyond the intrepid few willing to find their way to the Archives on the UL-Lafayette campus — where they are tucked in a room behind another room which is itself behind a room in a corner of the third floor of the library — and able to handle reel-to-reel tapes that were getting more and more fragile with age. And so I dreamed up a rubric for a series of productions that would have as their basis the materials either already in the Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore or that materials that were being generated with the Archives in mind. The name of the series, borrowing from something folklorist Nick Spitzer had done during his time at the Smithsonian, was the Louisiana Folk Masters.

Grammy Grant

The state of the Archives, and the dream of leaping forward a technology or two, provided me with the reason to write a [grant to the Grammy Foundation][grammy]. They funded us the entirety of our request, and with that money we were able to hire a local scholar and musician to be trained in digitization by the great Parker Dinkins and to begin the work of digitizing the 1000s of hours of recordings already in the Archives. (A quick note for the conservationists: none of the original recordings were thrown away. We realized full well that each iteration of technology would likely yield better and better results, and so our effort was to take as accurate a digital snapshot of the analog contents of a recording.) Our intent was twofold: 1. Make the best possible digital copy of a recording, 2. Use those digital copies to open up the Archives to a variety of interested individuals with a variety of purposes. We ended up with some pretty amazing results, as you can hear for yourself in the first two CDs released: Varise Conner and Women’s Home Music.

Louisiana Folk Masters on Louisiana Public Broadcasting

With the CD series inaugurated, I turned my eye to the next stage of the Louisiana Folk Masters initiative, which was to take on television. As luck would have it, my casual collaborations with my favorite producer at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, and also my aunt, brought me into contact with some folks who were interested in opening out some of their news programming onto human interest stories that were grounded not only in the state’s folk cultures but also in folkloristic perspectives. My collaboration with Donna LaFleur of LPB resulted in two pilot profiles being shot, edited, and broadcast: one on a Creole filé maker named John Colson and another on a Cajun Mardi Gras mask maker named Lou Trahan. I’m reasonably happy with the results, and I hope to do more in the future. Clickable links to the videos coming soon.

Humanities Research and the Tourism Commission

While all this was going on, and while I was still involved heavily with the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism, the good folks from Acadia Parish came to the Center and asked for help brain-storming possible ways to improve their tourism infrastructure. Some of our conversations with them led to conversations with the Lafayette Convention and Visitors’ Center folks, especially the director Gerald Breaux who is something of a visionary.

What everyone wanted was something new. They imagined that technology would solve their problems, and for a while they locked onto the newest device in museum exhibit design, the visiguide, which is essentially a highly-customized handheld computer. Bu what I heard Gerald Breaux describe to us as he imagined a future was the frustration he had with past and its collection of one-off products — films, kiosks, brochures — that lined the shelves of his closets and was either outdated or unusable for a variety of reasons — some of which had to do with the fact that he didn’t have permission to pull apart a film he had in fact paid for.

As I sat and listened to Gerald talk, I imagined an ideal arrangement in which humanities scholars — faculty and students — would engage in field research whose contents would be of a nature — as good textual descriptions and narrations, as high-quality audio, video, and images — as to be immediately usable in various commodities meant for tourists: audio CDs (for driving tours), CD-ROMs, DVDs, on-line web pages, print-on-demand booklets, maps, and guides, among other possibilities.

Gerald Breaux got it, and funded a first iteration that led to a maintenance grant overseen by another faculty member. The first time around, I ended up calling the project [Rich the First Time: A Media Infrastructure for Tourism][rft]. (It’s a terrible name, but I’m beginning to realize that my better ideas have worse titles and my weaker ideas start with great titles.) Such is life. At least mine.