Peter Seitel

Senior Folklorist
Smithsonian Institution
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
750 9th Street N.W. Suite 4100
Washington, DC
20712 USA
http://www.folklife.si.edu/index.html

Peter Seitel joined the Center’s permanent staff in 1978 and has served as senior foklorist, webmaster, acting director, and director. Prior to service at the Smithsonian, Seitel was an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. He earned his PhD. in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, writing a dissertation based on 18-months fieldwork in northwestern Tanzania on the conversational use of proverbs and logical structures in metaphor. He has written on metaphor, on narrative, and on the concept of genre as a method in interpreting oral literature. He is fairly fluent in Swahili and Basic programming language and can get by with help in LuHaya (a Bantu language) and HTML.

Peter will demonstrate Synchrotext: A Tool for Curating and Publishing Media Content.