On Monday I joined in the Student Solidarity March for Occupy Boston together with a few friends and I thought I would share a few notes. I don’t have much experience with protesting. Though I consider myself active politically, I have joined less than half a dozen large protest rallies and marches, and almost all [...]
Watching the events as they unfold in Egypt and earlier in Tunisia, I have been fascinated by the evolving role of the police. Though also true in the Tunisian case, the Egyptian police has long been particularly infamous for its rampant use of torture, a fact sometimes taken advantage of by the US. These police [...]
The following is reposting of an entry I contributed to the THATCamp New England blog: I am excited to have the opportunity to join THATCamp New England this November and look forward to learning from everyone I meet there. I was asked to post an entry here about the issues that I hope will be [...]
I have a bibliographic database in Zotero. The citation information is easy to scrape from web databases such as my own library, Amazon, and the many journal databases that I use. It is convenient to be able to tag and organize my sources and can use Zotero to format footnotes and bibliographies for my dissertation [...]
Though I continue to enjoy using the excellent software Scrivener to compose my dissertation, I am still unhappy with my note taking strategies and how I collect and organize this information digitally. After writing several postings on what I wish existed in terms of a software solution for doing research for a book or dissertation [...]
During my field research in Korea, Taiwan, and China I carried around a hefty camera with me to archives and libraries. On those fortunate occasions when I was allowed to use it, I snapped nice high-contrast “text mode” photos of everything from handwritten documents, mimeographed newspapers, pages of books, and thousands of pictures of microfilm [...]
I recently broke down and got an iPad. I use it mostly for reading PDFs on the run, watching movies, taking notes (with external bluetooth keyboard), and studying my daily flashcards. After trying (and writing reviews of) many different flashcard programs over the years, and even designing some of my own many years ago, I [...]
I found lots of interesting book offerings in the Routledge Asian Studies catalog I got in the mail today. Government and Politics in Taiwan is out in paperback, I’d love to learn a bit more about that. Oh, $43 seems a little much for a paperback. Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War looks interesting. Hmm, $125 [...]
I am deeply frustrated with the sometimes closed atmosphere in academic life. I feel a profound discomfort when I encounter students and scholars who are paranoid that their research ideas will be stolen, that their sources will be discovered and, shock and horror, will be used by someone else. I’m simply incapable of sympathizing with [...]
I dropped in on a history department event for graduate students about the job market for the coming year. I didn’t stay for some of the reports from those who have seen the market and lived to tell the tale but essentially the main message of the opening session was: the market sucks, but you’ll [...]