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Announcements For Japas 9(2), Japas Editors

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

No abstract provided.

Review Of: Kleinsasser, Ian. 2019. Blessings And Burdens: 100 Years Of Hutterites In Manitoba., Martin Lutz

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Ian Kleinsasser’s short book on Hutterites in Manitoba deserves attention. It is based on three lectures given at the inaugural Jacob D. Maendel Lectures in 2019. This lecture series was established in honor of Jacob Maendel (1911-1972) in the context of the centennial preparation of permanent Hutterite settlement in Canada. The three lectures were held in Portage la Prairie, and as the book’s introduction points out, were attended by representatives of both Schmiedeleut I and II groups. Jacob D. Maendel was a prominent Schmiedeleut leader of his generation and a driving force in advancing Hutterite education. His initiative led to …

Review Of: Handrick, Frances. 2019. Amish Women: Work And Change- An Investigation Into The Lives Of Amish Women In Pennsylvania And Ohio., Amy Schlabach

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

I opened the dissertation with hopeful interest. Would “Amish Women: Work and Change” be the factual, realistic view I had hoped for so many times before? The British author, Frances M. Handrick, interviewed 30 Amish women in Pennsylvania and Ohio. She compares our lives with the lives of Amish women 30 to 50 years ago. She also gleans bits of information from other writers and researchers, and the end result is a mixture of fact and the usual stereotypes. I want to recognize that, from what I understand, Ms. Handrick researched and wrote the dissertation for her own use, not …

Penn State Extension Services And Plain People: An Inside Perspective On A Trust-Based Relationship, Phillip Martin

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This perspective on Penn State Extension Services and plain people is based on my personal experiences as a plain person, in which I interacted with Extension Services first as a farmer, and then (while working on a doctorate) as a part of the Extension system. Penn State Extension started over a century ago and was deliberate in reaching out to plain (conservative Anabaptist) farmers since the beginning, which led to a history of trust-based cooperation. For all these successes there remain challenges to effective cooperation with certain plain individuals and subgroups. I suggest these challenges are broadly similar to those …

Hotline Number To Reach And Offer Agricultural Information To Plain Anabaptists During The Covid-19 Workplace Closures, Emily Shoop, Carly Becker, Nathan Glenn Briggs, Danielle Smarsh

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The Penn State Extension Animal Systems Team developed a toll-free hotline phone number to convey short educational messages to maintain contact and outreach to Pennsylvania’s animal producing Amish, Mennonite, and other plain Anabaptist populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Penn State Extension’s programming went largely online via webinars, online courses, and emails. This change in programming excluded a large sector of Pennsylvania farmers who do not use or have access to the internet and, as such, were liable to miss important best management practice reviews and timely updates in animal agriculture. The Animal Systems Hotline offered callers the choice to listen …

Agricultural Support For The Old Colony Mennonites Of Belize: A Collaborative Effort Between North American Old Order Mennonites And A Cornell Extension Educator, Judson Reid

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The Old Colony Mennonites of Belize practice a conservative form of Anabaptism where technology, dress and lifestyle choices are informed by church standards. Members live in a spatially contiguous Colony, which creates land pressure over time as population increases. The development of new Colonies is necessary for the Mennonites to participate in agricultural livelihoods. The Indian Creek Colony of Belize has experienced agricultural and economic hardships since its inception in the 1989 due to land costs, crop failures and debt structure. Old Order Mennonites of North America developed an outreach effort to assist with on-farm production of vegetable crops to …

Providing Agricultural Information To Amish And Mennonite Farmers: Creative Adaptations To Wisconsin Extension Programs And Communications, Richard Halopka

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This service provider report taps into the experience of a longtime Extension Educator in Wisconsin. Pulling from his work in Clark County, WI, where Amish and Old Order Mennonites have been particularly important to the local agricultural economy, he provides examples of how Extension can modify programming to meet the needs of plain producers. Topics of interest to Amish and Mennonite farmers include nutrient management, forage quality, and farm safety. Areas of program modification include approaches to communication, training, and support in ways that are culturally sensitive to church restrictions. In-person training and informational voicemail recordings have been particularly useful …

Effective Communication And Programming When Working With Amish Farmers: Reflections From A Wisconsin Agriculture Educator, Vance Haugen

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The author, an agricultural educator who worked with the Amish in Wisconsin for over 30 years, discusses his outreach efforts, which have been focused on managed grazing, a method well suited to Amish producers. Managed grazing offers agronomic, economic, and ecological benefits. A key educational tool for communicating managed grazing practices is the pasture walk, and the author relates lessons learned from these events. The communal nature and focus on farmer-to-farmer information exchange is well received by Amish producers. It is helpful if pasture walk scheduling is done well in advance and is focused on farmer-based problems with farmer-based solutions …

Ohio’S Amish And Mennonite Produce Growers: Farm Trends, Information Needs, And Agricultural Communication Preferences, Brad Bergefurd

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This study (1) describes the characteristics of Ohio Amish and Mennonite produce farmers and their operations; (2) determines awareness of and participation in OSU Extension programs by Amish and Mennonite produce farmers; (3) determines the methods used by Amish and Mennonite produce farmers to acquire farming information; and (4) identifies subject matter needs of Amish and Mennonite produce farmers for future Extension programming. In order to provide effective future Extension programming efforts for this particular clientele, a mail survey was used to collect data from 345 Ohio Amish and Mennonite farmers who participate at Ohio produce auctions. They were asked …

The Success Of Plain People’S Produce Auctions And Partnership With Missouri Extension, James Quinn, John Kruse, Londa Nwadike, James C. Piñero, David Trinklein

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

The number of produce auctions led by plain Anabaptist producers has surged since the mid-1990s. Typically grower-owned, these businesses are centralized facilities providing a wholesale market to area growers for a diverse group of buyers. For growers seeking an adequate living from growing produce, these facilities help reduce marketing time and product transportation, and provide frequent sales events that guarantee payment. As such, they have developed into a solid and long-standing market for local produce. However, plain growers have experienced challenges trying new crops or scaling up production. This article details how Missouri Extension assisted plain farmers with their challenges …

Farm Food Safety Training For Amish Produce Growers Covered Under The Food Safety Modernization Act (Fsma), Luke Laborde, Jeffrey Stoltzfus, Kaila Thorn

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Commercial production of fruits and vegetables on Amish farms provides significant amounts of fresh produce that are regionally distributed through wholesale markets. In response to several multi-state foodborne disease outbreaks linked to contamination of fresh produce, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandated farm food safety standards that most commercial produce growers must implement. Although there have been no foodborne disease outbreaks attributed to fresh produce grown on Amish farms, this regulation poses regulatory challenges for those who sell produce at wholesale produce auctions, cooperatives, and distribution warehouses. This article describes recent farm food safety standards issued by the …

Methodological Considerations For Amish-Focused Opinion Research: Lessons From A Study Of Beliefs And Practices About Agriculture And The Environment, David Hockman-Wert

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Certain aspects of Amish agriculture have been studied extensively but much is still unknown about Amish environmental attitudes and beliefs. This is due, in part, to the difficulty of directly soliciting responses from adherents. This article—part of a larger study of the Kishacoquillas Valley Amish settlement in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania—reflects on methodological challenges that arose during a study on Amish environmental attitudes and behaviors. Farmers from two Amish groups, as well as two non-Amish groups used for comparison, were interviewed about their environmental attitudes. Recruiting Amish participants for interviews was difficult due to the limited use of modern telecommunications technology, …

Performing Amish Agrarianism: Negotiating Tradition In The Maintenance Of Pennsylvania Dairy Farms, Nicole Welk-Joerger

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Amish people have a reputation for being ecologically and environmentally conscientious. As numerous scholars in Amish and Plain Anabaptist studies have demonstrated, Amish views of the environment are diverse and ultimately anchored in the understanding that God made nature for human use. In these cases, Amish views of the environment could be described as much more anchored in traditional philosophical notions of “agrarianism” than “environmentalism.” In this article, I explore how some Amish approach agrarianism with a turn from more traditional farm life toward necessary economic engagement with multi-faceted operations and diversification. Based on intensive ethnographic research and participant observation, …

Caring For The Land And The Livestock: Anabaptist Agricultural Practices In Europe And Colonial Pennsylvania, Rebecca Shenton

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Anabaptists have a strong history of agricultural innovation and care for the land. Their innovative spirit was forged out of persecution, migration, and the need to survive in challenging circumstances. This article examines the agricultural practices of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Swiss and South German Anabaptist farmers and those of eighteenth-century Anabaptist immigrants to Pennsylvania. European Anabaptist tenant farmers distinguished themselves by their family-centered mixed agriculture and their investment in both the land (using manure, lime, gypsum, and crop rotation to improve the soil) and livestock (improving natural meadows and planting pastures for fodder, maintaining clean barns, practicing confinement feeding, and …

Guest Editor’S Introduction: Outreach And Applied Agriculture Research With Plain Anabaptists: Lessons Learned And Future Directions, Caroline Brock

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

This issue of the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies (JAPAS) contributes to a dearth of literature on ways to understand how plain Anabaptist culture influences agri-environmental beliefs and practices and how it informs outreach and research. Only a few studies currently focus on outreach with plain Anabaptist growers (e.g., Brock, Ulrich-Schad, and Prokopy 2018; Bergefurd 2011; Jepsen and Mann 2015; Stoltzfus 2019; Hoorman and Spencer 2001/2002). This issue of JAPAS is the first comprehensive publication to include research articles and service provider reports focusing on plain people and agriculture. This issue addresses the history of Anabaptist …

Title Page And Table Of Contents 9(2), Japas Editors

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

No abstract provided.

Storm Warnings: Time Sensitive Proximity, Carrie A. Boettcher, Laurie J. Bonnici, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Weather-predictive tasks during high risk severe weather events are carried out for the common good of the community by virtual teams of weather professionals. Severe weather predictors are responsible for producing the early warnings that inform people in harms way and potentially save lives. Should we be concerned with the use of “other-generated” information from social media used by these professionals?

Teams extend understanding of an event by looking to external sources of situationally relevant information such as storm spotters, publicly generated photos and comments posted to online social media (OSM), and communication with community partners. Situationally relevant OSM, specifically …

“Living Document”: From Documents To Documentality, From Mimesis To Performative Indexicality, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)).

I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted …

More Than Meets The Eye: Proximity To Crises Through Presidential Photographs, Laurie J. Bonnici, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We look at three photographs, each made at a time of profound crisis, in order to tease out notions of proximity. Vision gives us proximity at a distance. Photographs may give us a similar proximity. Human vision depends on experience built up from individual events of seeing. Can a photograph made in a fraction of a second by someone else at some other time and some other place provide anything more than data about some surfaces in front of the lens? Can words and other images from the photographers enhance the viewer’s proximity to the original? Can we make use …

Take That Covid! Positive Documents Emerging From The Museum Sector, Kiersten F. Latham, Katherine F. Jaede

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Although the field of museology has discussed many concepts found in other positive disciplines, such as flow in positive psychology, the field itself has not yet developed a purposeful framework for positive museology. A long history of research in museum studies and on museal endeavors reveals aspects of a positive approach already exist but have yet to be woven together into a synthetic whole. In 2020-2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, museums themselves showed their positive strengths and virtues through documents such as social media and field-wide communication, revealing their capacity for a positive approach. This paper uses a developing framework …

Documentary Practices Of Hospital Librarians In Evidence-Based Medicine: The Example Of Health Technology Assessment In Swedish Healthcare, Sara Ahlryd, Fredrik Hanell

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Today’s healthcare rely on a basis of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and in modern healthcare there are demands for rational decision-making about new methods, technology and treatments. HTA (Health Technology Assessment) supports decision-making in healthcare and in this study we turn to documentary practices of hospital librarians in HTA, as well as how documentary practices shape and are shaped by the work and roles of hospital librarians. Five central documentary practices were identified as initial searching, negotiating a search strategy, the main searching, making a selection, and documenting the search process. These practices construct the work and roles of hospital librarians …

A Nation In Crisis... In Three Acts, William D. Senn

Proceedings from the Document Academy

A dramatic, spoken-word performance based on a detailed examination of the text of more than 1.7 million tweets concerning coronavirus and covid that were sent during the hours surrounding the president's declaration of emergency on March 13, 2020 including the transcript of the remarks made at the Rose Garden press conference. The researcher used the Twitter JSON API to retrieve all of the tweets containing the search terms "covid" and "corona" occurring during the timeframe. A text analysis was performed to identify the most frequently occurring n-grams present in the corpus of tweets. Thematic analysis and sentiment analysis were used …

On The Ground, Documents On My (Pandemic) Walks, Kiersten F. Latham

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The pandemic has led us to a multitude of activities we have not done before. For me, this included hour-long walks around my new neighborhood every day, rain or shine. Before the pandemic, my “walks” were directed, as my goal was to get to work, not “have a walk.” Now, these walks are an integral part of my thinking—to both clear my mind and to learn. I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and sometimes nothing at all. I have taken to very intentional looking on my walks, noticing the details on the houses, dreaming of what they might look like on …

The Documentality Of “Smong” As Social Control For Disaster Risk Reduction In Simeulue Island, Rusdan Kamil, Dian Novita Fitriani, Niswa Nabila Sri Bintang Alam, Zulfatun Sofiyani

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Aim – This study aims to analyze nandong smong as an oral tradition with the documentality approach by Frohmann.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This study analyzes nandong smong using qualitative method, especially case study research. The data collected in this study used secondary data obtained from literature sources or journal documents and previous research related to nandong smong. In this research, data analysis document analysis.

Finding – Nandong smong is one of the oral traditions that has become a disaster mitigation tool for the people of Simeulue. According to Frohmann's concept of documentality, Nandong Smong has four aspects of documentality, as …

Modeling Deception: A Case Study Of Email Phishing, Abdullah Almoqbil, Brian C. O'Connor, Richard Anderson, Jibril Shittu, Patrick Mcleod

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Information manipulation for deception continues to evolve at a remarkable rate. Artificial intelligence has greatly reduced the burden of combing through documents for evidence of manipulation; but it has also enabled the development of clever modes of deception.

In this study, we modeled deception attacks by examining phishing emails that successfully evaded detection by the Microsoft 365 filtering system. The sample population selected for this study was the University of North Texas students, faculty, staff, alumni and retirees who maintain their university email accounts. The model explains why certain individuals and organizations are selected as targets, and identifies potential counter …

Documentation Influence In Brazilian Library And Information Science: The Case Of University Of São Paulo, Luciana Corts Mendes

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Johanna W. Smit studied under Jean Meyriat and Jean-Claude Gardin in France, and upon becoming a professor at the Library Science and Documentation Department of the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, introduced to it the then current developments in French Documentation, mainly those related to documentary analysis. In 1986, Professor Smit and a group of professors of USP founded TEMMA Group, a research group devoted to issues concerning document organisation and representation, which lasted for 30 years and incorporated professors of São Paulo State University. In this paper, I present to a …

Emergence: Documents In Crisis, Wayne De Fremery

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This essay suggests the etymologies of emergence, emergency, and crisis create a useful framework for theorizing documents. Indeed, the overlapping semantic associations of the words allow for the idea that documents emerge in crisis. The semantic overlap also allows a means for theorizing how documents descend into crisis. Theorizing documents in crisis, the essay argues, usefully complements documentalist theories of documentary representation suggested by thinkers like Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet, as well newer conceptualizations of documentality as conceived by Michael Buckland and Maurizio Ferraris and documentarity as described by Ronald Day.

Bringing Political Upheaval And Cultural Trauma Into Order: A Document-Theoretical Approach To The Social Significance Of Bibliographic Classification Systems, Joacim Hansson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper explores the ability to define bibliographic classification systems as socially significant documents in a way that goes beyond their immediate function in the information retrieval process. It does so in dialog with theory on documents and documentality, and knowledge organization theory. Two examples show how development of new classification systems address social and cultural structures in periods of rapid social and cultural change and crisis. The first example discusses the design of a classification system for Swedish public libraries in the late 1910s, and the second addresses the re-formulation of the Holocaust experience in American Jewish library classification …

Documents In The Dynarchive: Questioning The Total Revolution Of The Digital Archive, Rachel Pierce

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The digital archive is often described in opposition to its physical counterpart. Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst has coined the term “dynarchive” to describe the former, a phrase that neatly contrasts digital archival remixability with the statis of the physical archive and its hierarchical fond structure. The article both uses and questions this characterization by examining the archive’s physical and digital document practices in three areas: (1) Hierarchical collection description versus individual document description; (2) Original order versus relevance-based results; and (3) Archival selection practices and the illusion of completeness. Archival structure and description have been central to the authority and …

Commuters’ Health Certificate As Social Control During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Suprayitno Suprayitno, Rahmi Rahmi, Lydia Christiani

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In Indonesia, a regulation on large-scale social restrictions (“Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar” or PSBB) restricted citizens’ activities in the cultural, social, and economic sectors. These large-scale social restrictions also impact Jakarta’s activities from the commuting communities of Central Java, the Yogyakarta Special Region, and East Java Provinces. As a result, these commuters have become accustomed to travelling back to their hometowns every Friday afternoon. On Sundays, they return to Jakarta and arrive in Jakarta on Monday mornings to go to work. This activity is often referred to as “Pulang Jumat Kembali Ahad” (PJKA) or Going Home Every Friday Evening and …