Festivus Folklore Finds!

Happy Festivus everyone! Hope you all had some quality time to grab the Festivus pole, air your grievances and display great feats of strength. Here is the stuff that filled my folklore folder during the holiday weeks:

• Google introduced a brand new toy: Google Books Ngram viewer. It's a sharp tool that lets you track the use of set words and phrases in Google's collection of millions of scanned books. Jason Baird Jackson has already played with it some. I did too. The Boston Globe discusses the possibilities for scholars. The New York Times, however, is more cautious in its optimism. I think that there is great potential here for the patient scholar - I wish I had this tool when I started my work back in the dark ages of the late nineties :)
• Our sisters and brothers over in the anthropology world are having some sort of brouhaha over their self-definition (as folklorists, we can more than relate). Anthropology in Practice as a fuller recounting of the imbroglio.
• Boing Boing owns the intranets. Here they discuss Wade Davis & drugs, and here they discuss British Oral Histories.
• And the Hindustani Times has an introduction to the study of folklore!

Try not to eat too much figgy pudding and Kwanzaa cake this week!