Founded in 1949 at Yale University, the Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF) is an internationally recognized organization in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology. HRAF's mission is to encourage and facilitate the cross-cultural study of human culture, society, and behavior in the past and present. HRAF produces two online databases: eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, and other resources for teaching and research. The membership-based, annually growing eHRAF databases are organized by cultures, ethnic groups, indigenous people, and/or archaeological traditions. eHRAF is unique in having subject indexing at the page and paragraph level. These subject categories allow for detailed and precise searching for concepts not easily found with keywords.
Join me in exploring our award-winning eHRAF World Cultures & eHRAF Archaeology databases (each voted by Choice Magazine "Top 10 Internet Resources”). We’ll start out by taking a closer look at eHRAF’s truly unique document (e.g., analyzed and subject-indexed books, journal articles, dissertations, etc.) and collection structure (ethnographic documents organized by culture names). We then turn to eHRAF’s powerful search mechanism that automatically filters results by major geographic locations and even subsistence and sample types. We’ll discuss how these and other features make eHRAF a great research tool, especially for cross-cultural and comparative studies. Lastly we’ll explore how Teaching eHRAF, an online portal with 40+ online student exercises, paper assignments, quizzes, can provide new ideas for teaching under- and graduate-level classes in the social sciences and other disciplines with an interest in cultural and ethnic diversity.