Category Archives: Academia

Academia, academic institutions, academic models, academic publishing, Anthropology, Food, food and society, interdisciplinarity

Baptism By Warm Fudge

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Last Thursday, June 8, was my first direct encounter with the academic study of food and culture, thanks to the joint conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS). Was presenting a paper on craft beer and cultural identity that day, before getting a real feel of the conference. Came back psyched, hyped, pleased, happy, energized.
These two academic societies form a very interesting crowd. Been trying to find descriptive terms for that crowd, none is ideal. Welcoming, charitable, nurturing, friendly, warm, thoughtful, insightful, thought-provoking, interested, passionate…

Not only was my positive feeling of the conference strong but it was apparently shared by many attendees. A few hypotheses about this.

  • It's a very interdisciplinary context. As such, people can't assume that you have read so-and-so's work and will in fact help you to find relevant sources for your work.
  • Surprisingly enough, it's a relatively new field, this study of food and society. In fact, many attendees hadn't attended that many conferences. Less bagage than older fields.
  • People come to it from the sidelines. In fact, it's my case, coming as I do as a linguistic anthropologist and ethnomusicologist.
  • Food is associated with passions and it's quite ok to be passionate about food when you work on food and society.
  • Food has an intimate quality that goes well with a nurturing attitude.
  • Perhaps because of prevailing (though semi-hidden) gender roles, a good proportion of conference participants were women, some of them coming with kids in tow or in womb (there were four fregnant women out of 350 participants).
  • The selection of papers for presentation is quite democratic and students are certainly encouraged to present.
  • The conference is happening at a time of year when faculty members and students aren't too caught up in their work.
  • The location, Boston University, was relatively quiet during the conference.
  • Food and society scholars are likely to eat together, which generates a lot of fascinating discussion.
  • Food is a good ice-breaker.
  • Food is universal and particular, like so many other things we study in anthropology.
  • Work on food isn't necessarily part of the primary academic identity of those involved.
  • Though small and growing, food and society has a rather cohesive body of literature.

These may all just be factors in making this food and society conference such a pleasant and powerful experience.

Academia, academic publishing

Scholarly Search

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Was looking for a resource to import citations/references for book chapters into a citation manager. Turns out Google Scholar does export to several citation managers:

Google Scholar Help
How can I add the full citation of a result on Google Scholar to my bibliography manager?

Just visit the Scholar Preferences page and select your preferred citation format in the “Bibliography Manager” section. We currently support RefWorks, RefMan, EndNote, and BibTeX. Once you’ve saved your preferences, you can import a citation by clicking on the appropriate link in your Google Scholar search results.

Had been using Google Scholar since it came out but had never noticed this feature. D’oh! (Simpson 1989).

It’s not perfect, of course. The data for most citations is quite minimal (initials instead of first names, no abstracts…) but the principle is sound. Plus, Google Scholar links to a lot of external resources, including full-text articles, which usually do have much more data. It helps to either be on-campus at an institution which subscribes to most of the important resources or to have a VPN to such a campus. In that case, Google Scholar’s links do bring you to a lot of full-text articles.

No idea what the API for Google Scholar allows but chances are that some neat features could be added from within a citation manager. The open-source ones would be good bets. At this point, my favourite open-source citation manager is BibDesk. It uses the BibTeX format and takes advantage of several features of Mac OS X such as the Services menu and Spotlight searching.
While it’s not open-source, RefWorks is a very interesting citation management system which often available to all members of an academic institution. Because it uses a Web interface, RefWorks can be difficult to connect to some other tools. But it has a surprisingly large range of features and can be used as a central repository for references. Among its most useful features for courses, RefWorks allows for reference sharing.
Thomson’s EndNote has become something of a de facto standard in the world of academic publishing. It has several disadvantages, including a habit of expensive incremental updates and lack of support for a wide range of text editors and word processors. EndNote also has several interesting features, including connection to library catalogs through the Z39.50 standard and data visualization. Because of its prominence, it tends to be well-supported by most reference databases, including Google Scholar. Indiana University has site-licenses for EndNote and other citation managers.

And there are many other tools available, each with their own sets of features. The citation management scene has evolved nicely, in my humble opinion, but the perfect solution is still far on the horizon, it seems. Ah, well…

Academia, Education, fieldwork, iPod, iTunes, mac os x, podcasting, Teaching

iPod Recording: Getting There

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UPDATE: Purchased an iRiver H120 jukebox/recorder.
So we're getting closer to appropriate recording solutions on the iPod 5G (with video). Apart from the drain on battery life, Griffin's soon-to-be-released (and iLounge-tested) iTalkPro looks quite promising:

Griffin iTalkPro Stereo Microphone for iPod 5G | First Look

Continue reading iPod Recording: Getting There →

Academia, academic institutions, academic models, Anthropology, ethnomusicology, innovation, interdisciplinarity, ivory tower, Medici effect

A Department Is Like…

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Alex Golub on Academic Departments as Factory, lab, guild, studioAn interesting heuristic model. Not too dissimilar from Eric Raymond’s well-known The Cathedral and the Bazaar. More specific to academic departments but some of the same ideas. Continue reading A Department Is Like… →