Muninn

On my way back to Seoul after two weeks or so in the United States I looked through the past year’s worth of pictures, calendar events, diary entries, blog postings, audio recordings, and emails—the historical archive of my life in the year 2007. What kind of narrative can be constructed from the mountain of fragments of so recent a past? What failures and tragedies omitted? What triumphs will be glorified? What distortions will my own reflections produce?

The first five months of the year find me in Cambridge, MA for the Spring semester of the third year of my PhD program in history. I lived in an apartment some fifteen minutes walk from the university campus together with one of my best friends and fellow historians Fabian who, in addition to filling my dinners and evenings with the joys of wonderful and highly educational conversations, introduced me to the wonders that are balsamic vinegar and hummus. Not to be laughed at, these two new additions to my heavily bread-based diet provide me with two possible replacements for cheese when the environment (e.g. the USA and Korea) has little worthy of the name to offer.

The year opens with a bang as my fellow third year PhD students and I desperately assemble that prophetic document: the Dissertation Prospectus. The process of making third year students assemble a dissertation prospectus, as I came to understand it at the time, is designed to measure three important skills of the Academicus Novitius in the three following tasks.

• The first is the bread and butter of the institution: to demonstrate a mastery of the literature and expansive knowledge about a field which one has yet to master and has, as yet, little knowledge about. For this, the process of preparing for one’s oral examinations in the second year has provided ample training.
• Second, to ask an interesting and broad question related to one’s topic and explain in some detail what fascinating answers and claims such a question might lead to. The trick with this second task, apparently, is not to seem to know the answer already – since one has yet to begin one’s research into the question such a presumption would be deeply problematic – but also one must not seem like one has no answer to the question because this leaves open the terrifying dual possibility that either a) the answer is unattainable or at least beyond the reach of a humble graduate student or b) the answer is completely uninteresting.
• Finally, the prospectus is designed to measure the basic oracular proficiency of the graduate student. This is closely linked with the second task. The prospectus is essentially a prophetic document, wherein one predicts which books and archives will be found useful, what methodology will be found effective, and what structure and argument the as yet unwritten and un-researched dissertation will ultimately take. Unfortunately, one is not permitted to present the prospectus in Delphic riddles, which is a shame, since the preparation would probably be much more fun. I believe the entire ritual ought best be concluded with a ceremonial burying of the prospectus in a time capsule, perhaps under the floor of the history department’s lower library, where the prospectus conference is held. This might be combined with the digging up of the prospectuses of PhD candidates who have just submitted their dissertation. Those who wrote a dissertation remotely resembling their prospectus could get an award, perhaps the “Order of Delphi,” and the third year students could all look on in admiration.

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Some notes from my recent trip to the United States for Christmas from Seoul:

Transitions – When going to and from East Asia, I love passing through airports like San Francisco and LA (one gets a similar experience passing through London when I visit Norway). On the way back to the US I transferred in San Francisco. After spending 6 months in Korea, the most immediately striking thing was the amazing diversity. From the time I disembarked to the time I got on to the second leg of my journey I counted 6 languages. “So what?” you might ask, it is an international airport, after all. Yes, but I counted 6 language among the airport staff, not among the traveling passengers.

On the way back to Seoul, I passed through LA. The process is reversed. Going from a place like Oklahoma, with only slightly more diversity than Korea, the transfer in LA has the effect of easing me back into Asia. Announcements at the airport are given in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, as if to reacquaint me with the languages of the region.

Asian food can be found everywhere, except strangely, passed security in the international terminal. All they have is a hot dog stand which also offers sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. A Chinese couple in front of me with the strong southern “s”es in their accent had the following exchange: Woman:”Chicken noodle是什麽樣的noodle?” Man:”是一種soup.” They decided to order six small Chicken noodle soups and three sandwiches for the family. I hope they weren’t disappointed.

TSA Language Skills – On my way back to Seoul, I had to change to the international terminal at the airport in LA, going through security again. The lines were hectic and full of people, a scene which, in my experience, is often made worse by stressed out and yelling TSA officials. As if to confirm my stereotypes of TSA, I heard one TSA official get frustrated with a passenger and then yell from somewhere closer to the X-ray machines, “Make sure you have all signed your passport!”

Another young blonde TSA official, hair shaved in short military fashion checked boarding passes and passports nearby. A family of Malaysians were ahead of me. As the woman in the family, who seemed to be the one responsible, handed the young man her passport I heard him speak to her in what sounded like Arabic (it didn’t sound like Malaysian). The woman seemed to understand and replied in the same language. They continued with a short exchange, including something found humorous by both of them, and the young man, who looked barely old enough be out of college, let her and her family through the barrier strap and into a line which had just become shorter than our own.

This was the most pleasant encounter I have ever had with TSA. I had never seen any TSA official speak to anyone in anything but English and the occasional Spanish and was impressed not only at his language skills (which I can hardly judge, since I’m not even sure what language he was speaking – but he seemed to be communicating successfully) but even more the young man’s friendly approach to the woman and her impatient children.

Asiana English – I went through lots of horrible cancellations and rescheduling on my way back to Seoul because of weather problems in Denver, putting me back in Korea 2 days later than I had originally planned. I got put on an Asiana flight to Seoul which is my first time with the airline. I had heard good things and overall the service and food was indeed good. However, I couldn’t help noticing how incredibly bad their English was. Everyone, including the pilot and all the airline stewards and stewardesses who I heard interacting with passengers spoke phenomenally bad English. This was not limited to the Korean employees, because this was also the case with their two Japanese and Chinese staff members.

I sympathize with the fact that the incredible range of nationalities among their passengers (I sat next to passengers from the Philippines, and was otherwise surrounded by Chinese voices) but was amazed that even the standard announcements that get read out in English were sometimes unintelligible due to horrendous pronunciation and their utterances sometimes barely constituted sentences, let alone grammatically correct ones. While I can pick up what I need from announcements in other languages, many of those on the plane will not understand the Korean. Aren’t they reading from a pre-translated card or something? If so, they need to go back and work on it. Whatever the reason is, and I really shouldn’t generalize from a single flight, this trip gave me the distinct impression that Asiana’s hiring practices put far more weight on the physical appearance of their staff than on language skills.

My mother, Siri, made a trip to Norway recently to meet various WWII veterans from the Norwegian merchant marine and to attend some of their events as an honorary member. She has many friends and dedicated fans among their surviving members, thanks to her years of hard work creating the the best and most extensive online resource out there about them at her website Warsailors.com (Direct link to ship list here).

While Siri was back in the country a few Norwegian journalists picked up on her story and interviewed her about her online project which is inspired by her father (my grandfather) and his own exploits in the merchant marines during the war both at sea and as a prisoner in German POW camps in North Africa.

Last week a four page article about her and her project in the most well known of the publications to pick up the story came out. The article can be found in the December 17 Christmas issue of the popular women’s magazine Allers (p50-53). and thus on the shelves of supermarkets around Norway. While my mother was more impressed with the quality of the research and writing in some of the other articles published in smaller magazines elsewhere, it is nice to get this historical issue, the often forgotten story of the thousands of sailors who were the logistical lifeline in the oceans of WWII, onto the pages of a well-read popular magazine. The article focuses mostly on my grandfather’s story and the “war sailors” (krigsseilere) but some mention of my mother’s online project and a link to her online archive is found in the first paragraph.

Click on the images if you want to download the large original size:

After my family acquired a “family pack” license, I installed the Mac OS X Leopard operating system on my machine last night and everything went smoothly with the installation. I did a clean install on a new larger hard drive and migrated over my user files using the migration assistant. Things seem to be going fine with a few free updates here and there except for my older Macromedia apps (Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks MX) which I won’t be able to afford upgrading.

I suppose that some of the smaller things about Leopard will either grow on me or annoy me with time. The only thing I have gotten really excited about so far, however, is the improved “Dictionary” application. It now has four Japanese dictionaries: 大辞泉, プログレッシブ英和・和英中辞典, and 類語例解辞典. They are not shown by default (in the English version of the OS, I assume they are default on Japanese language installations) and you need to activate them in the Dictionary application’s preferences.

I usually use my portable electronic dictionary for J-J, J-E, and E-J (plus C-J, J-C, and Kanji dictionary) and can always look words up various places online. Asahi.com’s dictionary site has 大辞林（国語辞典）, エクシード英和, and エクシード和英. Yahoo Japan’s Dictionary site has both 大辞泉 and 大辞林 as well as the same プログレッシブ dictionaries Apple has licensed. However, it is wonderful to have all this accessible offline write on my mac.

Some snapshots, click image for larger version:

大辞泉:

プログレッシブ英和・和英中辞典:

類語例解辞典:

I wish they had included the front and back matter for these dictionaries, as they did for the English language dictionary in the new version of the application, with all its interesting reference information.

I also really hope some day that the China and Korea markets will become important enough to Apple that they will consider licensing dictionaries in those languages.

Communicating with my 16 month nephew Loki (I have recently all but abandoned his name at birth, Liam) is a challenge. He doesn’t seem to understand my attempts to discuss abstract metaphysical issues with him, or even the more concrete banalities of contemporary politics. He is probably experiencing a certain degree of confusion as well since my mother and I speak Norwegian to the child while my father and his father speak to him in English. My sister, Loki’s mother, speaks to him in a mix of English and occasional Norwegian. The baby’s books are also a mix of Norwegian and English language children’s books that we all read to him.

To be honest though, the prospects for a fully bilingual child are not that great. Living in the United States as they do, with a huge majority of those around him speaking English, he may develop decent listening skills and some limited speaking skills in Norwegian, but since my sister is most comfortable speaking in English, this will probably mean that in the long term Loki won’t be growing up in a two language household.

For now, however, he not saying anything at all. I don’t know if he is supposed to be saying anything at 16 months, but even if he is, this is to be expected in a mixed language environment. I apparently didn’t start speaking muddled Norwegian and English until I was two or so.

Loki is, however, communicating. Since two spoken languages were apparently not enough, the parents have been teaching the child simple signs from American Sign Language. I understand that this is the newest trend in the “teach your kids to do tricks” genre, but I have discovered that it has a real practical value with a 16 month old child that does not yet emit anything more than extremely entertaining gurgles.

Here is my brother-in-law Mike’s posting about this. Here is what he says:

I’ve been teaching Liam sign language for the past few months now, and I wanted to keep a record of the signs he’s learned. Here’s what he knows so far:

Light

Fan

More

Water

Eat

Shoe

Dog

Bath

I think that’s all. I proud of him, and myself as well, this is the sort of thing that I would start and then just give up on, and I almost did, but then he just exploded with all these new signs that, after months and months of practice, finally just started popping out of him.

I was rather skeptical when I read this but since I have come to visit them in the United States, I am pleasantly surprised to see that this child, who otherwise expresses his likes and dislikes by pushing things away, pointing, and screaming is able to give these signs and convey his desires very nicely.

Of course, the child speaks a unique dialect of this small set of ASL, having changed many of the signs somewhat.

I have had a bit of catching up to do to learn his dialect. This morning we were teaching him the word for ‘berry’ so at least I will be able to recognize the newest addition to his gestural vocabulary. Here are some examples of his communication so far:

Situation #1: Loki is crawling up and down the stairs. He looks pooped. He turns around to me, stands still, and begins slapping his cheek and mouth with his hand in very regular motion. I yell to my sister in the kitchen, “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -”He is telling you he is thirsty.” We get the boy some water.

Situation #2: Loki discovers one of his favorite mechanical devices: a small light plugged into the wall which lights up when things are dark (or when you cover it with your hand). The light is not on, but he recognizes the object for what it is. He stands up, turns around and starts flicking his hand behind his right ear. “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -”He is giving the signal for ‘light.’” UPDATE: Loki also did this whenever he noticed the lights on the Christmas tree.

Situation #3: Loki is bouncing on the couch next to me while I eat cereal. He stops, walks carefully over to me, looks like he is going to grab my spoon and I give him a stern look to indicate that I don’t want him to grab my spoon. He seems to acknowledge this and then begins to repeatedly and slowly put his clenched fists together. “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -”He is saying that he is hungry.” We take the boy into the kitchen and feed him. UPDATE: Loki mixes this sign up with the sign for shoe, and thus later in the evening, when he saw one of my shoes, I thought he was hungry.

Google recently announced its new Knol Project. Quite a number of news articles and many more blog postings have appeared to comment on the launch of the new project.

I’m rather puzzled by a lot of concerns shown by some whose writing on similar issues I usually admire. Further down in this posting, I will respond to some of the critiques of Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin made in his posting Knols, wikis and reality and if:book’s Ben Vershbow rough notes on knols.

This new Google project in some ways reminds me of that other competitor of Wikipedia that rarely seems to get mentioned, Everything2. Like the new Knol project, articles at Everything2 are written by single authors and can be rated by community members. There are even Google ads. Like the Knol project, there can be many articles on a given topic, which vary widely in content, length, quality, and often offer completely different kinds of material on similar topics.

It also reminds me of a software project I started designing a few years ago but never got around to writing up (funny how a PhD program can get in the way of one’s amateur programming projects). My plan was to create a history knowledge-base which contained contributed articles, all under a Creative Commons or other similar license, which were rated by the community of readers and which competed directly with other contributed articles on similar topics. The number of points any reader could give was a function of their own “value” in the community as judged by the aggregate point value of their own contributions (in the form of articles and comments). This was not to be pure democracy but a tyranny of meritocracy – a huge difference with Wikipedia but similar in some ways to Everything2. In my own system, the currently “winning” article would be the most prominently listed or displayed article on a topic but might always be replaced with a new better article. The most important feature was this: since all future writers on a topic were free to copy/steal any amount of any previous article new articles could, like Wikipedia articles are supposed to, be small incremental improvements of any previous article. However, unlike Wikipedia but like Everything2, I also wanted to design the system so it encouraged “new narratives” and completely fresh approaches to old topics.

By contrast, in Wikipedia if you decide to completely rewrite a popular and controversial entry on the Nanjing Massacre, which you certainly have the power to do and I have been tempted to do, the chances are your efforts will be completely wasted as you newly written article is completely reverted to whatever chaotic and inconsistent mess prevailed before your arrival. Thus, hidden in the long list of revisions on any popular wikipedia article might lurk alternative narratives that can still be viewed, but only if they are looked for by patient visitors to the site.

Wikipedia is at its core an Enlightenment project.

Its god, NPOV (Neutral Point of View), the very core of its being, is a myth. The policy requires “that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly” and that views be presented “without bias.” NPOV is a useful myth, and not one that we should spend too much time mocking (especially those of us aspiring to professionalism in academic life), but we should always be conscious of its limits. I think every 6th grade elementary school student of the future should be given an exercise wherein they are given the opportunity to discover how any controversial Wikipedia article one might pick, no matter how well written, not only completely violates NPOV but can never hope to achieve anything remotely close to NPOV. NPOV is impossible. The greatest theoretical challenge of the post-Enlightment world is, “How do we deal with that?”

I think that we must have a strong competitor to Wikipedia which is based on the fundamental idea that we need competing narratives, we need them juxtaposed, we need them competing with each-other, and we need the ability to monitor their changes and popularity across time so that we don’t completely become slaves of the present. This doesn’t mean we have to completely abandon the incremental approach and the amazing power of building upon the work of others, but also allow for easy access to competing approaches to a problem in a single tidy, convenient, and familiar interface. Despite some key innovations, projects like Everything2 have failed to challenge Wikipedia. My own abandoned ideas for a project were half-baked and I have no time to spend in the kitchen.

So what about Google Knol? All we have seen of what it might become is in this single screenshot. It is surely a little early to judge.

John Quiggin of the wonderful group weblog Crooked Timber has looked at the sample article from the screenshot and is not happy with its author centered approach:

As regards simple factual statements anyone is likely to care about, I’d rather go with Wikipedia than with an individually written article, even one by an expert. Wikipedia will usually have a citation, and, if there are conflicting claims, report them. With an individual author, it’s much harder to tell if a given statistic is generally agreed to be accurate and representative of the situation.

I find this really hard to understand. A friend of mine, now a professor in his field, used to help edit dozens of articles related to pre-modern Chinese history before he abandoned it in exhaustion. I really want to like Wikipedia – there is a kind of “storm the Bastille” kind of excitement in its democratic vision. Yet, in the end, having read through dozens of Wikipedia talk pages where my friend battled desperately against irrational and, unfortunately, completely ignorant voices, I see that quite often it is completely mistaken “simple factual statements,” of the kind Quiggin is speaking of, including those which get a citation, which get inserted by contributors that have little or no access to good materials, no training in judging their sources, and no knowledge of context. The sad reality is that for many topics, the rational, knowledgeable, and in many simple cases the accurate contributions get drowned out in talk pages by voices that are either more numerous or which have more idle time to dedicate to the “edit wars” that can result. I really can’t understand why a mass edited Wikipedia article with citations will win by default over an article written by an expert. Will either have a monopoly on good research? Certainly no. Will the latter always use the best data or come to the correct conclusion? Of course not. But an author based approach does not have any inherent weaknesses that outweigh similar inherent weaknesses of the average Wikipedia article.

if:book is one of my favorite weblogs that discusses the future of reading, writing, narration, and the technologies that go with them. Ben Vershbow has posted some of his notes on the Knol project.

Vershbow has a lot of concerns, beginning with the term “knol” which he says is “possibly the worst Internet neologism in recent memory.” I am actually quite fond of it, it reminds me of similar wards like “node” and other single syllable words familiar to programmers that are used to represent single atomic units of something. It can hardly qualify as the worst, a position which I believe is still safely held by the word “blog.”

Vershbow points out some of the features of the knol project which I think are commendable and which resemble some of the best ideas out there: 1) Anyone can write 2) Multiple knols can compete on a single topic 2) Readers can rate the articles 3) a “Darwinian writers’ market where the fittest knols rise to the top.

This sounds a lot like what I had imagined for a CMS but I think the key would be a license that would allow any future or competing writers to use any or all of previous knols to build better articles.

One of Vershbow’s main concerns, which he shares with Anil Dash of Six Apart, is that Google is suffering from a kind of lack of “theory of mind” – an inability to understand the contradiction between what it is: a large profit-run corporation whose profits are intricately connected to the kind of content its searches produce, and its altruistic dreams.

While I share with Vershbow and other Google critics a whole host of complaints about Google projects such as Google books, which I have on occasion gone into some length here at Muninn, I am a bit surprised at critiques like this which seem to attack Google’s new projects almost on principle. He also has deep worries for the future when knol articles might come to displace untainted non-Google articles in the search results.

It is not so much that I disagree with Vershbow’s deep suspicions about Google or pessimism about the role of mammoths like Google in both being a host of content (Youtube, Google Books, Knol) and the most popular manager and ranker of metadata about such content, since I’m sure I can be persuaded with good arguments.

It is the complete lack of confidence in the contributors of content, in the authors, experts, and web users of the future. I think Google’s hegemony is limited and requires our continued complicity. The knol project doesn’t lock content in, as far as I understand it, especially if users can choose their own licenses.

Finally, Vershbow, like Quiggin, has doubts about the author-centric nature of the project.

The basic unit of authorial action in Wikipedia is the edit. Edits by multiple contributors are combined, through a complicated consensus process, into a single amalgamated product. On Google’s encyclopedia the basic unit is the knol. For each knol (god, it’s hard to keep writing that word) there is a one to one correspondence with an individual, identifiable voice. There may be multiple competing knols, and by extension competing voices (you have this on Wikipedia too, but it’s relegated to the discussion pages).

Vershbow intelligently withholds final judgment on whether this author based approach, similar to Larry Sanger’s Citizendium, will work out but raises many doubts:

I wonder… whether this system will really produce quality. Whether there are enough checks and balances. Whether the community rating mechanisms will be meaningful and confidence-inspiring. Whether self-appointed experts will seem authoritative in this context or shabby, second-rate and opportunistic. Whether this will have the feeling of an enlightened knowledge project or of sleezy intellectual link farming (or something perfectly useful in between).

I think he is right to have such doubts, but could we not raise a whole host of similar questions about Wikipedia, the tool which know even its most hostile detractors around me use on a daily basis? Ultimately, Vershbow is inclined to trust Wikipedia, which “wears its flaws on its sleeve” and works for a “higher aim.” Google’s project, after all, is born in sin, tainted as it is by its capitalist origins.

My own feeling is that as long as the content is not locked in, signed away to Google, we shouldn’t conflate the sinner with the products of her collaborating contributors. This is a great time to test a (at least in some ways) new model for knowledge sharing.

I still believe this new approach would stand the best chance of making an improvement over existing alternatives if it was more dictatorial in one respect: that all contributions should be released with some license which requires a minimum level of permission for sharing – so that future competing writers of knols can either provide fresh competing articles, or, at some or all sections, quickly and easily lift and modify chunks of earlier knols, perhaps with due attribution accessible somewhere from the Knol’s page. That would allow it to combine the best of Wikipedia’s collaborative approach, with the benefits of author-based control.

I just heard an interesting segment on NPR radio’s Fresh Air on Gospel Music Historian Robert Darden. He is an English professor at Baylor University and runs the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. Darden and his team are doing their best to hunt down gospel recordings from 1945 to 1970, restore them, and preserve a digital copy of them.

This sounds like a wonderful project and some of the clips of music played were fantastic. It is great that this preservation work is going on but I worry that the project will not be able to share the fruits of their labor widely.

In the interview Darden says he chose the period from 1945 to 1970 because it is the most “at risk” and speculated that perhaps 70% or more of the gospel recordings from this period are already lost. Older works which are out of copyright are not protected and thus can be easily re-released for the profit of anyone who thinks it will sell, such that a greater number of these very old works can be found. Much more recent works under copyright are not as difficult to find or are still in print.

However, the period from 1945-1970, Darden explains, contains a great many works which are probably still protected by copyright but which in many cases it is extremely difficult to hunt down the holder of the rights. He describes one case where, only after several years of hunting, they were able to find the owner of the license. In other cases, they never can be.

This is a classic example of the problem of orphaned works. I encounter this a lot as a history PhD student studying the 1930s and 1940s. There are a huge number of works out there of every form (texts, music, film, etc.) which are still protected by copyright but which are not in print. I can do almost nothing with these works because, even if I wanted to get permission to use them, the challenge of locating the owners of the rights is prohibitively difficult.

I very much hope that the next few years will see serious reforms of copyright laws which, instead of further restricting the creation of culture, promote its preservation and unleashes the possibilities of wider distribution of orphaned works.

For more info, pay a visit to Eldred.cc and consider supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation. See also the US government’s Orphan Works report, some developments in Congress. I am not sure what the most recent developments have been, the most recent thing I have seen on it is in this article at the EFF.

I am back in the US for a few weeks. I’m writing this sitting in my favorite Butler library hangout in Columbia University, where I am visiting friends for a few days.

C. W. Hayford has posted a wonderful collection of links at Asian History Carnival #18.

One of the many things he noted is what looks like an interesting new journal with articles available free online: Taiwan in Comparative Perspective.

He also noted that the Gutenberg-e collection of online dissertations is now Open Access!! This is wonderful news as there are some very interesting dissertations hosted here. If the project was still ongoing I think I would have applied for my own as-yet-unwritten dissertation to be considered. Here is one of hte Gutenberg-e projects pointed to by Professor Hayford: How Taiwan Became Chinese.