Enhancing the OAC through anthro-relevant news feed aggregation

[Francine Barone]

A recent suggestion by Philip Pocock: "i would suggest right off the top your directorial team define a set of anthropology terms - topics and institutes - and site designer/programmer build a news feed aggregator, perhaps a navigation colulm tag cloud of these anthropological news feed to both increase visilibity for oac and add content automatically"

Some feed aggregation on the OAC front page could help to enhance the diversity of external materials reaching the site. Alternatively, mixing up OAC content with an easy to distribute RSS feed can also extend the reach of our own content.

There are technical implications to adding many feeds to the front page, but it is well worth considering and a relatively easy fix. What are you interested in reading and from which sources? What content should we aggregate? In what ways can this help to increase the visibility of the OAC?

[Francine Barone]

There was a previous discussion about mixing and combining feeds and keeping up with OAC content that may be relevant here (with links to helpful tools).

[Charles Kirke]

I am all in favour of viewing current news through the insights of anthropology - but I suggesr that if we attempt this it should be a practical application that is open and as free of jargon as possible. As a soldier (I have retired but I still feel like one - there is anthropology in that!) I have been encouraged to prefer clarity in communication over obscurity.

The British media treatment of MPs' expenses claims might be a possible place to start. What conventions does it reveal about 'keeping to the rules' in Parliament? What were the moral grounds on which this became seen as a serious issue? How much money was really involved in claims that were subequently declared 'wrong' [I think it was about £300,000 over five years]? Given that the financial loss to the UK Government was tiny, why were the moral issues treated as so important? Who defined them?

I personally find the definition of formal and informal rules a never-ending fascination - so if anybody else wants to join in...

Charles

[Francine Barone]

Sorry, Charles, I forgot to close this discussion when I moved it to main OAC Forum. I'll repost your insightful comment there so that more people can see and read it.