PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK  ISSUES | FOLKLORE  IN ARCHIVES | FOLK  ARTISTS  SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH

A few months ago, Oral Tradition became eOT, an open-access electronic journal. Simply put, this means that, from the moment each issue is published, anyone with Internet access can download articles from this journal directly and without a fee. In addition to the current issue of the journal, many back issues are also available on the journal’s web site (http://journal.oraltradition.org). As this column goes to press, only the journal’s first two years (1986 and 1987) and the past seven years (1999 to the present) are available, but all twenty volumes of the journal will be available online within the next two years. Oral Tradition, which was “founded in 1986 to serve as an international and interdisciplinary forum for discussion of worldwide oral traditions and related forms,” had previously been available only by subscription—either in print or, for recent issues only, in Project Muse, an online subscription database for academic journals. According to the journal’s web site, the recent switch was inspired by concern that their conventional journal distribution channels “unavoidably excluded a substantial segment of OT’s potential readership, particularly non-Western academics and institutions.” By providing OT in freely available electronic media, the journal’s leadership is hoping to “remove many of the natural barriers created by print-based and subscription media.” Readers may wonder how such a venture can be undertaken without underwriting from subscriptions. The journal is edited by university staff and graduate students affiliated with the Center for the Study of Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri at Columbia. The university’s Center for eResearch, which developed the eOT web site and continues to administer it using open-source software, hosts the journal on its own server. OT has particularly compelling reasons to pursue this more inclusive distribution method: the journal’s content is explicitly international in scope. Indeed, most folklore journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) specifically address international subjects or audiences. Before eOT’s launch, John Miles Foley, the journal’s editor, received about one letter a week from scholars located in Asia, Africa, and South America, whose universities could not afford to subscribe to the print journal or to Project Muse. Of course, non-Western cultures are often particularly rich in the oral traditions that are the journal’s subject matter. With fewer local voices from these regions contributing to the discourse, the entire journal’s readership was being disadvantaged—not just those individual scholars without access. Foley reports that the situation has already started to change. The journal’s web site brought 5,000 distinct hits from around the world in just the first two weeks. Scholars who did not have access to the journal before eOT have already submitted articles for publication. Journals that address subjects such as oral tradition have at least one other more fundamental reason to transcend the printed page. Internet publication offers audiovisual possibilities that generations of folklorists and related scholars before us could only have dreamed about. Take, for example, “‘Whistlin’ Towards the Devil’s House’: Poetic Transformations and Natural Metaphysics in an Appalachian Folktale Performance,” an article by folklorist Joseph Sobol in the current issue of eOT (http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/ 21i/sobol). The article examines the poetic aspects of the craft of a well-known North Carolina storyteller, the late Ray Hicks. It ends with a verbatim transcript of the story cited in the title, rendered in an ethnopoetic style that uses line breaks and spacing to indicate the cadences of Hick’s artful performance as well as written words can allow. “Ethnopoetic transcriptions,” as Sobol explains, “are intended as modes of translation between folk narrative in its living context and the acts of making and reading printed texts.” Sobol goes on to note that even careful translations such as these are by necessity “limited by a series of compromises—between the demands of the ear and the eye, between the existential wholeness of performance and the permanence and cultural authority of print.” It is exactly such limitations that eOT’s new electronic format helps to address, allowing the author—and the storyteller—to transcend the written medium. An “eCompanion” link from the article’s title page on the eOT web site provides streaming audio of the recording transcribed in the article, allowing the reader to experience more directly the intimate storytelling performance that Hicks gave in his home back in 1986. I urge Voices readers to give this a try: first download and read Sobol’s article, then listen to the audio while reading the transcript provided. Sobol’s artful rendering of the performance text immeasurably enhanced my own listening experience, and I imagine the same would be true for others. The success of this article inspires me to think about a future in which new technologies will increasingly allow aural artistry to stand directly beside the scholarship written to help us understand it better. Of course, a journal does not have to be open access to provide such linkages. The New York Folklore Society’s web site offers direct access to many past Voices articles; selected articles from each issue are posted as soon as the following issue has been published. A “listening icon” on selected articles provides links to recordings of related music, including— so far—sacred steel, merengue tipico, and Celtic fiddle. The society’s web site includes audio documentaries from the “Voices of New York Tradition” radio series. This section of the web site (http://www.nyfolklore. org/progs/radiodoc.html) also provides links, when available, to related articles previously published in Voices. Through an introductory article and an opening column on the subject of e-resources in two previous issues of Voices, I’ve tried to alert readers to the existence of scholarly folklore articles in digital format that are available only through subscription databases and to indicate libraries where those not affiliated with academia might access these resources. With this column I’m beginning a much broader task: informing readers about the plethora of folklore resources available directly on the Internet. Would any of you be willing to provide me with guidance on areas of particular interest? I would welcome such suggestions; please e-mail me at condonk@aol.com.

HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP | SEARCH | CONTACT US