Realizing the AnthroSource Vision

The Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publication (CFPEP) is launching this AAA community web site to seek advice, contributions and feedback from members regarding developing and expanding AnthroSource to include resources and services that are of value to the membership and that promote and advance anthropology.

AnthroSource began as a vision for a platform for online communications and services for the AAA membership. In 2006, the AnthroSource Steering Group and AnthroSource Working Group merged into the CFPEP, which makes recommendations to the Committee on Scientific Publications regarding AAA publications and other internet services. AnthroSource has initially focussed on the online transition of AAA publishing. In the midst of the benefits and problems that have been borne of this effort, a larger vision has been in the background. CFPEP is exploring how we can realize the larger vision of AnthroSource now that the Association association has completed initial arrangements with Wiley-Blackwell regarding our online journal publications.

We need to consider more generally what could be useful for improving teaching and research, promoting our services discipline to the community, and working through the many ethical issues that will arise. Our teaching and research are supported by information exchanged and made available online on the WWW. Web services, such as Google's shared editing and spreadsheet applications, are platforms for collaborative research. YouTube is a source for of video for teaching and a stage to extend our own reach. Our students and younger staff interact casually and professionally on social platforms such as FaceBook and MySpace. Blogs are used to supplement teaching, discuss research findings and disseminate research as it progresses. Anthropologists are studying and participating in new forms of social, cultural and transcultural interaction on the internet.

Some possibilities for an expanded role for AnthroSource include:

• Repositories for non-journal publications
• Specialized archival repositories for ethnographic media and fieldnotes with secure access
• Social spaces like FaceBook for anthropologists
• Collabatories: formal meeting and working places for collaboration in small or larger groups
• Indexes of online applications and tools for data annotation, management, sharing, analysis and presentation
• Workshops and podcasts covering topical themes, methods and instruction
• Co-ops to deliver specialist and general teaching online on a fee basis
• Online seminars
• Resource guides documenting and organising organizing the existing anthropological web content of the web

Issues that arise include:

• How to enable AAA sections to create content, with technical assistance from the Association association as necessary.
• A vast array of ethical issues arisingEthical concerns involving the including presentation of data, meeting the requirements of funding sources, and enabling public, commercial and governmental access to anthropological material.
• How to fund AnthroSource; different components could be funded as, in full or in part, through membership benefits, sponsorship, advertising, shareware or and subscriptions fees.

AnthroSource will be what we make of it. As anthropologists are fond of declaring, the development of the future is not linear. We are asking you to submit ideas for new kinds of resources and services that might become a part of AnthroSource. Possible contributions include short suggestions for discussion, elaborated descriptions with mock-ups, identifying existing resources and services currently used by anthropologists, or examples of non-anthropologoical resources and services with a discussion about how the their ideas or mechanisms of these might be useful to anthropologists.

Why is the need to examine these issues so important? Our students and younger anthropologists expect, perhaps demand, this of us. They are accustomed to working in network environments with network objects, and expect a lot from thesehave high expectations for resource availability. One of the reasons the AAA recently contracted with Wiley-Blackwell to take over management of our publications was to greatly improve the level of accessibility to AAA publications. Beyond our internal use, AnthroSource is a means for communicating our shared values (and value) to those outside the anthropological community. The internet is the most accessible means we have of interacting with the public. AnthroSource can improve our visibility and ensure that the public not only understands the potential value of anthropology in today's world, but can directly benefit from anthropology. The public includes our research partners, who increasingly look online for information about themselves and their communities.

To participate in this discussion, go to http://cfpep.anthrowikis.org/signup . There are instructions there on how to sign up to be a contributor.

Once logged on you can create pages or comment on and edit most existing pages. For example, to include a useful existing site for discussion select "Examples" from the front menu and follow instructions for creating a new example. This will create a page with the example site in a window with space around it for commentary and discussion. You and others can add notes to the page, or discuss the page in its discussion section.

We look forward to your contributions.

Michael Fischer is professor of anthropological sciences and director of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing. He can be contacted at Department of Anthropology; University of Kent at Canterbury; Canterbury, Kent; UK CT2 7NR (m.d.fischer@kent.ac.uk).