An Interview with Craig Mishler, Cultural Anthropologist

Reprinted with Permission

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askSam: Craig, please tell us about your work.

CRAIG MISHLER:  I work as a cultural anthropologist for the State of  Alaska and am the statewide coordinator for a project on subsistence uses of marine mammals.

askSam: Can you tell us how you use askSam and the askSam Electronic Publisher?

CRAIG MISHLER: We have an askSam text database called WHISKERS! which is a collection of indigenous local knowledge about Alaskan marine mammals.  It was compiled by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game from key respondent interviews with Alaska Natives in approximately 60 Alaska coastal communities between 1992 and 1996.  Some of this knowledge is traditional and some of it is based on recent observations.  It is organized into notes from six geographic regions: Southeast, Bristol Bay, North Pacific Rim, Kodiak, Aleutians and Pribilofs, and the Alaska Peninsula.

The purpose for collecting and compiling this information is to contribute to scientific knowledge about Alaskan marine mammals, especially harbor seals and Steller sea lions, whose populations have been declining at an alarming rate in certain portions of their range. Hopefully, this information will promote better cross-cultural understanding of the importance of these animals to subsistence users and assist in the management and recovery of stressed populations.

Although primarily designed to facilitate research on harbor seals and Steller sea lions, WHISKERS! also contains information on other marine mammals such as beluga whales, sea otters, killer whales, ringed seals, walrus, and dolphins. WHISKERS! now consists of over 2,700 notes or documents and is constantly being updated.  

askSam: How has askSam made your job any easier, faster or more efficient?

CRAIG MISHLER: It has allowed us to help establish better communications between Native subsistence users of marine mammals and marine mammal biologists on a wide variety of topics. We use a variety of key words related to ecology, resources, place names, and sociocultural uses.  This helps make it user friendly.

askSam: How did you decide on askSam?

CRAIG MISHLER: I started using askSam in 1988 when it was still in a text-only DOS version.  At that time I used it to organize my field notes on Athapaskan Indian place names and personal names.  Now that it has been upgraded for Windows, we see lots of potential for its use as a multimedia delivery system.  We have hopes of developing the program to include photographs and sound clips as well as text and may go to a CD-ROM version. It is also a very happy coincidence that askSam's logo is a marine mammal.

askSam: Can you tell me about what kind of customer support you have received as a user?

CRAIG MISHLER: I have talked to your programmers over the telephone on at least two occasions and have found that they responded quickly and helpfully to resolve my problems.  I did not have to wait long to be connected, which was also reassuring.

askSam: Would you recommend askSam and why?

CRAIG MISHLER:  I think it is a fabulous program in the way it allows you to search for specific topics in a vast sea of information (please forgive the metaphor).  askSam gathers in all the relevant notes for a given topic and allows the user to focus attention on that topic and then immediately print the results of the search or save the results to disk.  The speed at which this information is gathered is one of the program's best and most attractive features.  We liked the program so much we bought the Electronic Publisher version so we could distribute it with our database.

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Craig Mishler

Subsistence Resource Specialist

Alaska Department of Fish & Game

Division of Subsistence

333 Raspberry Road

Anchorage AK 99518-1599

Email:craigm@fishgame.state.ak.us