Those friends and colleagues who have followed my adventures in open access publishing or who have participated with me in discussions such as those that unfolded in my graduate seminar Contesting Culture as Property may find Chris Kelty’s new book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software of particular interest. Chris’ book has just been published by Duke University Press and Duke has signed off on an innovative series of experiments that Chris is orchestrating in connection with the book’s publication. In addition to traditional purchase of the print object, Chris and Duke have made the book available for download as a free PDF. Even more interesting is its availability in a CommentPress and html format. Chris encourages interested readers to “modulate” the book in a wide range of ways–something that is possible given its Creative Commons license. Rather that read me talking about it, I urge folks to visit the book’s website at http://twobits.net/. Congratulations go to Chris and thanks go to Duke University Press for its openness to innovation.

Congratulations to the student organizers who hosted the Translation/Transformation conference last Friday and Saturday (May 16-17) at The Ohio State University. This was a conference organized by the Folklore Student Association at OSU and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology students from Indiana University. It was a wonderful, lively, productive graduate student conference in which faculty from the two programs were asked to serve as panel discussants. The student papers, from those delivered by undergraduates to those offered by seasoned dissertation writers, were uniformly excellent and the OSU students, as local hosts, really rolled out the red carpet for everyone participating. It was a wonderful event, with plenty of time for fruitful discussion and social networking. The faculty participants, including myself, seemed uniformly pleased with, and impressed by, the overall effort. The student organizers clearly worked very hard to make the event a success. Until the link goes away, the conference program can be found online here.

Teri Klassen has recently completed her doctoral qualifying exams in folklore here at Indiana University in preparation for a doctoral dissertation focused on the social life of quilts in the United States. She has also now received grant funding for a phase of her project titled “Quilt Styles of West Tennessee Sharecroppers and Tenant Farmers of the Early to Mid 1900s.” Her award is the 2008-2009 Lucy Hilty Research Fund Grant  given by the American Quilt Study Group.

Earlier this year, she curated the exhibition “Family Patterns of Tradition” for Bloomington Restorations Inc. It is an exhibit of 32 quilts made from about 1930 to 2000 by Erdine Brown and two of her daughters, Betty Cates and Faye Doolin, of western Kentucky. The exhibit will be open to the public one more time, from 1-4 p.m., Saturday, May 31, at BRI headquarters, 2920 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington IN 47408. For more information, call BRI (812) 336-0909.

Following up on news of Jim Seaver’s summer position at the National Gallery of Art, I am pleased to report on two more IU students (and Curatorship course alumni) headed to great paid graduate internships for the summer. Carrie Hertz, a doctoral student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, will be headed to Stratford Hall (birthplace of Robert E. Lee), for a position in its Textile Collection, while Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe, also a doctoral student in folklore, will be headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she will also work with textiles in its Antonio Ratti Textile Center. These are wonderful summer museum jobs going to excellent students. Congratulations!

Congratulations go to Michael P. Jordan, Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, upon his reciept of two significant grant awards in support of his upcoming doctoral research in Southwestern Oklahoma. Mike has been awarded a Jacobs Fund Grant from the Whatcom Museum Society and a Morris and Lucille Opler Research Award from the OU Department of Anthropology. Mike has a significant track record of research work in the ethnography and ethnohistory of the Southern Plains and is a museum anthropologist with a number of projects to his credit. He is also involved in the work of publishing Museum Anthropology Review. Well done.

Thanks go to everyone who participated on Friday [4-18] and Saturday [4-19] in the symposium on dress and adornment that Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe, Pravina Shukla and I organized. The paper presentations were diverse, interesting and innovative and it was exciting to talk shop with faculty and students drawn from the IU departments of anthropology, apparel merchandising and interior design, folklore and ethnomusicology and history of art. In addition to the faculty and student presenters, thanks also go to those who came to take in, and comment upon, the presentations. While the Saturday events took place at the IU Memorial Union, the presentations on Friday were held at the Wylie House Museum, where our host was the museum’s director Jo Burgess and our kickoff activity was a tour (by Suzanne) of the new exhibition What Women Wore: Clothing and Accessories of the 19th Century. The Friday papers were a special treat, delivered as they were in the first floor of Wylie House. The house was dark enough to see the slides of the presenters, but it was open to the breeze and to just enough sunlight on a beautiful Bloomington afternoon. The experience was a great reminder of what a wonderful resource Wylie House is for the IU community.

We are very pleased that the next issue of Museum Anthropology Review (volume 2, number 1) has just been published. Find it here. The issue contains some fine reviews as well as two peer-reviewed articles. These articles are the first peer-reviewed works to appear in the journal. Find more information on the new issue here.

I am happy to have recently accepted an invitation to join the editorial board for Cultural Analysis, an excellent open access journal whose virtues I have celebrated on several occasions (such as here, here, and here). As its editors describe it:

Cultural Analysis is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to investigating expressive and everyday culture. The journal features analytical research articles, but also includes notes, reviews, and cross-disciplinary responses. Cultural Analysis is global in scope, with an international editorial board.

Best wishes to the journal and to everyone involved in its work. Keep its free, easy to access offerings in mind in your teaching and research and consider sending them your most complelling manuscripts.

Congratulations go to IU Department of History doctoral student James Seaver, who has just been awarded a nine-week summer internship in the Curatorial Records and Files Division of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Along with sophisticated general training and experience in museum work, Jim will have an opportunity to focus on World War II provenance issues in a museum context. This theme relates to his wider interesta in the circulation of material culture in times of war and in the contemporary significance of World War II associated objects.  A Ph.D. minor in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Jim participated during 2007 in the Curatorship and Theories of Material Culture graduate seminars.

Today, on the first day of the Central States Anthropological Association meetings in Indianapolis, Indiana, four members of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology gave outstanding papers reflecting their broader work in the study of material culture.  Panel organizer Teri Klassen gave a fine museum-based, collections-study paper looking at a collection of Eastern Cherokee dolls in the collections of the Mathers Museum.  Gabrielle A. Berlinger presented her current thesis research on commonalities and variation in the meaning of Sukkah building in the Jewish community of Bloomington, Indiana.  Carrie Hertz presented her work on “inalienable clutter” in the lives and closets of middle class twenty-somethings and Liora Sarfati explored the role of commercially produced and distributed material culture in the practice of contemporary Korean shamanism. Liora’s paper was a first public glimpse of recently completed doctoral fieldwork undertaken last year in Seoul, South Korea.  All four papers were first rate works, combing closely studied detail and smart analysis. The audience was large (as these things go) and attentive.  The panel followed on a fine group of museum studies presentations by a team of Butler University undergraduates, making it a great day for museum and material culture studies at CSAS.