“As goes General Motors, so goes the nation,” Lee Iacocca reportedly said. With GM’s bankruptcy headlining the news in recent days, Ken Jameson’s article in USpace called “Castle or the tipi: rationalization or irrationality in the American economy” seems timely (originally published in 1972 in the journal Review of Politics). Written in response to the American economy in the 1960s, the article discusses the tension between an economy based on the castle and one based on the tipi. Jameson concludes that the contradictions in these two economic approaches can lead to fundamental change. GM represents the castle metaphor Jameson uses: it’s multinational, expansive and has several lines and brands. Now owned 60% by the federal government, perhaps Jameson would say GM is moving more towards the tipi: fewer distinct products, smaller geographic area of business and fewer mergers and acquisitions. While we watch what happens with GM (and our nation’s economy as a whole), Jameson’s final analysis provides some perspective: “castle and tipi interrelate in a fashion which yields stability to a system which would otherwise be unstable.”
About a month ago, over 100,000 people began working for the 2010 Census . The upcoming census has already been generating news in some states, partly because of a concern that some immigrant populations will be undercounted. Why am I thinking about the 2010 Census? Well, we recently uploaded a new article, Leaving Gateway Metropolitan Areas in the United States: Immigrants and the Housing Market , by Gary Painter of USC and Zhou Yu, an Assistant Professor in Family and Consumer Studies here at The University of Utah. The article details where the new emerging immigrant gateways are in the United States and also presents some surprising findings related to immigrant populations and homeownership. The data used for the article was from the 2000 Census. Now as we prepare for 2010, I’m wondering what the newest census data will yield for scholars like Painter and Yu.
Open Access News
How the internet is transforming scholarly research and publication
More on U-SKIS
By Peter Suber
Anne Morrow and Allyson Mower, University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System: A Workflow System for Institutional Repositories, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 47, 3-4 (2009) pp. 286-296.
Abstract: The University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) provides workspace for institutional repository staff. U-SKIS tracks files, communications, and publishers’ archiving policies to determine what may be added to a repository. A team at the University of Utah developed the system as part of a strategy to gather previously published peer-reviewed articles. As campus outreach programs developed, coordinators quickly amassed thousands of journal articles requiring copyright research and permission. This article describes the creation of U-SKIS, addresses the educational role U-SKIS plays in the scholarly communication arena, and explores the implications of implementing scalable workflow systems for other digital collections.
PS: Also see our past posts on U-SKIS.
Data are at the heart of any discipline no matter if its chemistry, nursing, education, ophthalmology, social work, fine arts or business. Understanding the data, interpreting them and deriving meaning will, of course, depend on those working within the discipline. A research team at the University of Utah was formed to explore these notions by looking for new ways of gathering data across disciplines and finding ways of visualizing them for end users. The team–called Center for the Representation of Multi-Dimensional Information (CROMDI)–received grants from both the National Institutes of Health and the State of Utah to work on the “the display of information in five domains: anesthesiology, finance, process control, network security and monitoring, and live art performance.” The project cyberPRINT was a result of this group as well as numerous journal articles and performances. The most recent journal article, “Between art, science and technology: data representation architecture,” can be found in the U Scholar Works collection of USpace: http://content.lib.utah.edu/u?/ir-main,14299
Before I get to the article of the day, I thought I would give a brief overview of what USpace is. It’s a digital collection of scholarly materials produced at The University of Utah. Our goal is to collect and archive these materials–the U’s “intellectual capital”–and make them freely available on the Internet.
One of our USpace collections, UScholar Works, showcases the work of our faculty and researchers. We approach faculty at the U and request their permission to archive their articles. Sometimes we aren’t able to archive all of a faculty member’s works in UScholar Works because we can’t get permission from some publishers, but we persevere.
Really, you could call us hunter-gatherers. We hunt through faculty vitas and websites in search of articles. We use UScholar Works as a place to gather those materials and share them with the world. Anyone, anywhere, can visit the site and search any subject or phrase, say, “hunter-gatherers,” and find some of what U faculty has produced on that subject.
So, that brings me to the article of the day, by Dr. Kristen Hawkes, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology: Why Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of the Problem of Public Goods. Drawing on her fieldwork with the Ache of eastern Paraguay and Hadza of northern Tanzania, Dr. Hawkes offers an alternative hypothesis on differential resource sharing of hunter-gatherers, looking at the issue of why hunter-gatherers share some categories of foods more widely than others. Are you curious to know some more? Check it out in USpace.