I am very pleased to announce the official launch of Museum Anthropology Review as a part of IUScholarWorks Journals. In its new home with its new publisher–the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries–MAR will be using Open Journal Systems software, the leading software tool for the complete publication of open access scholarly journals. Read all about it on the MAR WordPress site and find the press release at IU Media Relations here. See the journal itself here. Please consider registering with the journal. Its free, it brings benefits to you, and it helps us demonstrate that the journal has a large and growing user base.

[It] shows us her hometown from a unique perspective. Focusing solely on the abandoned and neglected, Zarrow brings Tulsa’s forgotten architecture back to life. Abandoned Tulsa takes the reader inside a variety of vacant structures: the birthplace of televangelism, a Camelot-themed hotel, a deserted bowling alley, and more. Part urban adventure, part historic record, Zarrow’s documentation spotlights the last human traces inside rapidly decaying buildings. Photos of fading signs and collapsed furniture provide a poignant narrative of inhabitations before and after the owners moved on. Zarrow’s personal observations of these visits are framed in a historic context, providing an illuminating view of Tulsa’s social and architectural development.

The book is filled with beautiful, haunting, surprising photographs. For those who know Tulsa, it is especially engaging.

Her more recent project is a book titled Wish You Were Here: Oklahoma’s All-Black Towns 100 Years after Statehood, which she published through Blub.com this year. (Find it here.) While sharing with her earlier book an interest in photographs of historic, sometimes neglected, structures and the built environment more broadly, Wish You Were Here also includes compelling, humane images of people and social life that testify to the continued vitality of important Oklahoma communities such as Boley, Taft, and Rentiesville. Oklahoma’s rich tradition of black rodeo is given special attention and is the subject of some of her most compelling photographs–several of which can be seen in her online portfolio, found here. The photography project that led to Wish You Were Here was supported by Stanford’s Hass Center for Public Service.

In support of her book projects, Ms. Zarrow also maintains, in addition to her portfolio, a weblog, which can be found here. It is to be hoped, that Ms. Zarrow will keep her camera lens trained on the richness of Oklahoma’s cultural heritage. She is to be commended for finding multiple ways of making her work accessible, including in open formats online.

You can test it, upload content, make your own user profile and test out adding restrictions to content etc. We’ve populated the archive with some content already so you can see how the search functions and interface work even without uploading any content yourself.

The demo can be accessed directly at: http://demo.mukurtuarchive.org/ or you can navigate to it from the Mukurtu website (http: www.mukurtuarchive.org) by clicking on the “demo” tab and then clicking on the “go to the online demo” button.

For now, we’d love it if people tested out the archive and gave us feedback.

I look forward to trying it out myself.

In a related development, the project was mentioned favorably in a recent interview of Robert Leopold, Director of the National Anthropological Archives, that has just appeared in the January 2008 issue of Anthropology News.

a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.

Two papers made available on the ARC site are of special relevance as they address the general nature and potentials of laboratories and collaboratories in the human sciences. See Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff’s  2006 ARC Working Paper “What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?” and Paul Rabinow’s 2007 ARC Concept Note “Steps Towards an Anthropological Laboratory.” Extremely helpful  and productive is Chris Kelty‘s discussion of ARC on the weblog Savage Minds, which can be found here.

For a quick introduction to collaboratories in general, consult the wikipedia entry here.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a browser-based digital archive created by the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek, N.T. Australia in collaboration with researchers Kimberly Christen, Craig Dietrich, Chris Cooney, and Tim Dietrich.

The archive, housed at the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, contains photos, digital video clips, audio files, and digital reproductions of cultural artifacts and documents. The content in the archive is defined by access parameters based on a set of Warumungu cultural protocols for the viewing and distribution of cultural knowledge. These protocols provide the basis for the archive’s internal logic and architecture.

Kim has very productively described the project and its wider significances in a number of venues, including her weblog Long Road, in guest postings to Savage Minds, and in a number of very valuable research publications. I can’t do the project justice in a brief post. It is remarkable and worth looking at up close. The key point to note here is that the Warumungu community archive is built with software tools (and community collaboration principles) that will be portable to other communities and collaborations within which they can be adapted to local cultural values and needs.

Perhaps the best illustration of these trends for those concerned with the richness of Oklahoma’s cultural fabric is the Creek Language Archive project, a long-term effort being pursued by Margaret Mauldin and Gloria McCarty of the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Jack B. Martin of the College of William and Mary. Margaret and Gloria teach the Muskogee (Creek) language at OU. Jack is a linguist who has studied Muskogee and related languages since the 1980s. All three have collaborated intensively on the documentation, preservation, revitalization and analysis of Muskogee. Their work has included extensive use of unpublished archival materials assembled by Creek and non-Creek scholars such as Earnest Gouge, Mary Haas, and John R. Swanton.

In the Creek Language Archive, the project collaborators have made available a wealth of primary materials of great value for anyone interested in the Muskogee language, the oral traditions of the native Southeast, or early literary work in Muskogee by Creek authors. The site provides not only PDF documents, but many audio recordings related to the collections that are presented and interpreted. Of special interest are the primary text collections that the collaborators have devoted great energy to preparing for publication. For anyone aware of how much effort has gone into preparing the materials that it contains, the richness of the Creek Language Archive is truly staggering.