eInside Recognition

Rick Feinberg, Department of Anthropology, donated a collection of 55 objects to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. on May 4, 2012. Feinberg received an acknowledgement of acceptance of the deed of gift May 9, 2012. He obtained the collection in 1972-73 while conducting doctoral fieldwork on Anuta, a remote Polynesian outlier in the Solomon Islands. On Aug. 16 and 17, he visited the Smithsonian to assist in the documentation of the artifacts by providing local names for the objects and explained their construction, uses and circumstances of acquisition. The collection includes objects such as bone fishhooks, bow and arrows and a coconut-grating stool that islanders made for him. The collection also includes such items as bark-cloth garments and pandanus mats that are in everyday use and are common gifts among islanders. A unique assemblage from this region, the Anuta material provides important points of comparison to William Mann's Solomon Island collection (1916) and the NMNH's extensive Polynesian collections from Hawai‘i, Samoa, Tonga and French Polynesia. The collection is available for study by qualified researchers.

Yoshinobu Hakutani, Department of English, presented "The Wright-Dreiser Nexus and Tradition" at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, Calif., May 24-27, 2012.

Kiersten Latham, School of Library and Information Science, presented "A Tale of Two Document Storytelling Perspectives" at the 2012 DOCAM (The Document Academy) in London, Ontario, on Aug. 15-17, 2012.

Athena Salaba, School of Library and Information Science, presented "Modeling Subject Authority Data: FRSAD Overview and Implementation Examples" at the American Association of Law Libraries in Boston, Mass., on July 21-24, 2012.

Marcia Zeng, School of Library and Information Science, and Shu-juin Chen, presented "Alignment of conceptual structures in controlled vocabularies in the domain of Chinese art – A discussion of issues and patterns" at the 12th International ISKO Conference in Mysore, India, on Aug. 6-9, 2012.

Catherine Closet-Crane, School of Library and Information Science, authored the section "The discursive construction of the academic library as learning place in A2K" in Libraries Driving Access to Knowledge, 1st ed., (Berlin/Munich:De Gruyter Saur -IFLA Publications) J. Lau, A.M. Tammaro and T. Bothma, (2012), 215-246. Website link: www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110263121/9783110263121.215/9783110263121.215.xml?format=EBOK

Yoshinobu Hakutani, Department of English, Robert L. Tener, Department of English, edited with Notes and Afterword Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, 1st ed., (New York, N.Y. :Arcade Publishing), (2012).

Richard Feinberg, Department of Anthropology, Richard Scaglion, edited Polynesian Outliers: The State of the Art, 1st ed., Pittsburgh, Pa.: Ethnology Monographs, No. 21/University of Pittsburgh, 2012.

Additional comments: “Polynesia” includes thousands of islands, most arranged in a rough triangle bounded by Hawai‘i, New Zealand and Easter Island. Outside this triangle, in the western Pacific, lie about two dozen islands, rather small and widely separated, whose inhabitants speak Polynesian languages. These are the Polynesian outliers. Because of their geographic isolation and other factors, many experienced little European contact until relatively recently, making them crucial for the comparative study of Polynesia. Who are these peoples? Where did they originate, and how did they come to settle in these remote islands? What is their relationship to the better-known Polynesian cultures? Can they, in some way, be thought of as representing Polynesian society before it became permanently altered by contact with Europeans? This volume explores these and other questions and provides the first synthetic, comparative treatment of these unique islands.