Michael D. Fischer's comprehensive and well-documented website Representing Anthropological Knowledge: Calculating Kinship may help students and others to cope with kinship in anthropology: "Kinship is one of the more important, pervasive and complex systems of culture. All human groups have a kinship terminology, a set of terms used to refer to kin. Many parts of life in all societies are impacted by kinship, and in most societies kinship relations influence things like who one can and can not marry, who one must show respect to, who one can joke with, and who one can count on in a crisis. The study of kinship is the greatest common denominator across the different fractions of social anthropology. [...] This unit introduces how we can use computers to address some of the issues that emerge from the complexity of kinship-related information and anthropological ideas about these." See an older story about an online kinship-tutorial, too.

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If you quote book reviews in anthropological journals, their title is often similar or equivalent to the book title. If you quote this review, it could be confusing. Are there any common solutions?

An example:

Book: Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Ultimate Illustrated Edition. Compiled & Arranged by Cooper Edens. New York: Bantam Books,1989.

Text of Review: "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Ultimate Illustrated Edition. Compiled & Arranged by Cooper Edens. New York: Bantam Books,1989. By Lewis Carroll.

This book is a wonderful new edition of the story of a blabla (...). By Robert Insight"

How to quote this Review?

One possibility: "Insight, Robert: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Ultimate Illustrated Edition. Compiled & Arranged by Cooper Edens. New York: Bantam Books,1989. By Lewis Carroll. In: Journal of Children Literature, Vol. 3 (1992), p. 34-37. " Would it be a common possibility to place the title in quotes, so the reader would understand which is the quote, and which the quote of the quote?

Second possibility: "Insight, Robert: Review to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Ultimate Illustrated Edition (...). In: Journal of Children Literature, Vol. 3 (1992), p. 34-37. "

Any other ideas how this is handled?

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Hi, I wrote some short tutorial (german) explaining how to use audio files in online publications. This is the easy way, not to be confused with my more elabroted project. If you have audio recordings from your fieldwork and want to make them available without forcing the user to download files and to wait (streaming), give this solution a try.

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Just found the archive of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Parliament. Have a look at it, If you are curious how the german government evaluates new technologies. www.tab.fzk.de

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Try acronymfinder.com, a webbased dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms with about 356,000 definitions. If you know something similar or better, please let me know.

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"For the first time in history, the Digital Library of India is digitizing all the significant literary, artistic, and scientific works of mankind and making them freely available, in every corner of the world, for our education, study and appreciation and for all our future generations." Full text search! Lots of technical books, but still buggy. I was not able to display books. Strange order. Via Netbib

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While learning for Zwischenprüfung in another 3 weeks, i found a very nicely done tutorial about kinship and social organization from the University of Manitoba in Canada

[thx to Andrea via mail]

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Ethno::log member praying mantis made some updates to an older article. Here you can find now a load of links to web resources helping you learning the indonesian language.

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for different needs and for free: National Geographic MapMachine

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"Over 700 book reviews, covering all kinds of books - fiction and nonfiction, with a broad range of genre and subject." 27 anthropology reviews, too.

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Edited by german sociocultural anthropologists Hartmut Lang and Michael Schnegg the website "Ethnographic Methods publishes a series of methodological material for anthropologists. At the moment it contains two types of publications. The methodological volumes (currently in German only) give detailed introductions to specific methods of data collection and analysis. They are practical guides, and are suited as teaching material. The data collection tools are a growing compilation of ethnographic questionnaires, observation sheets and other material used for data gathering. We publish these "first hand" tools to enable future researchers to profit from the work that has already been done. We seek data collection tools where the results of the analysis have already been published. It is the purpose of these publications to make ethnography a more transparent enterprise." Especially the topics 'ethnographic census' and 'social network analysis' are treated. Some in the profession may shy away from "those quantitative methods", but e.g. in cyberanthropology, especially research on online-communities, in my opinion a sound quantitative basis is obligatory. And if it's only for orientation's sake.

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In anthropology we have to use very often linguistic symbols to describe foreign words or names. I am not an expert in this, but there seem to be different ways of transcription. One of it is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Some of us, like me, haven't got any idea of phonetics, but would like to painlessly transfer the "hieroglyphics" from our source texts into our own articles, so that at least no information gets lost. But it doesn't seem to be an easy task. The IPA lists some fonts for use with textprocessors like Word or StarOffice on Windows or Mac OS. A lot of fonts are able to write IPA-glyphs. A well known unicode font is Arial Unicode, which is distributed with Microsoft Office. Another great one is Gentium a font explicitly aimed for the use in the scientific community with multilingual requirements. I tried them all, but soon was diappointed: It seems, that all those unicode fonts contain the IPA characters, but some of them like the breve under a letter are only avaliable as "combined diacritical sign". This means, you have to type an normal character like "i", and then select the breve from the table with symbols. This is the result: Because the breve is put under the letter "on the fly", the position is only more or less under the letter. Looks definitly ugly. But after a lot of searching and some help of other science webloggers I found a better solution: The Titus Cyberbit Font is also a unicode font and contains also "combined diacritical signs". But: every unicode font has an area for type-specific signs, and unlike the other fonts this font contains here a lot of ready-made IPA-glyphs. It may not be complete, but at least I found the "i" with a breve under it: Well, this looks a lot better, no? The ready-made IPA-Glyphs are in the "private area" of the font, which is named diferrently on the different wordprocessing programs. Anyway, its the area following to the bopomofo script so you may easy find it. Update: Please note that there could be troubles by using different fonts in one paragraph. But Microsoft Word and Star Office/Open Office both have solutions for this problem. I can only explain in german: You have to choose "Format – Absatz – bei Zeilenabstand "genau" in Word or to activate "Registerhaltigkeit" in Open/Star Office (both in the Absatzeinstellung and the Seiteneinstellung).

Ask in the comments if you have trouble installing the font or inserting the symbols with your textprocessor.

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