I just tried the Sperling’s BestPlaces survey and It would appear the top 10 places for me to live in the US are: San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington, DC, Tacoma (WA), Long Island (NY), Syracuse (NY), San Jose (CA), Minneapolis-St. Paul (MN-WI), and Denver (CO). I’m a bit confused about some of them, but the top three includes both the place I live now (Boston) and the place I would most like to live in the US (Seattle).
Author: Muninn
Frog In A Well – Japan Postings
Just a pointer to some recent postings I made over at Frog In A Well:
- Links to Japanese Historical Maps
- First or Last Name – On referring to women by their first name and men by their surname in history
- Social Management – About Sheldon Garon’s discussion of social management and example of it in the US
- Women During the Meiji Restoration – Discussion of women Marius Jansen’s work on the Meiji Restoration
Jonathan Dresner, Thomas Ekholm, and Nick Kapur have also added excellent posts to Frog In A Well so far this month.
Newall: Review of Cantor
I recently enjoyed this analytic philosopher’s (I make this assumption given his over-simplistic reference to postmodern historians as “anti-representationalists” and his outdated analytic philosophy of history article) short review of Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (Also reprinted here).
Blogenspiel has already responded to it but was more than anything venting anger at Cantor. This means failing to notice the fact that Paul Newall’s review is more than anything an indirect shot at the “postmodern” historians who he thinks have failed to consider the sociological dimension. In disgust Blogenspiel asks, “Do any working historians actually take his thesis that seriously?” I am no medievalist so I’m reluctant to make claims about that field in particular, but we might answer that by noting that the book was reviewed by the American Historical Review (Dec. 1992 Vol. 97, No. 5, p. 1500) which took it to task on some of the particulars but concluded, “the originality of this inquiry, and the breadth of learning and imagination it displays, make it a very important study.” As Blogenspiel hints though, Cantor’s study of 20th century medieval history is a story is only carried through 1965. Richard W. Praff’s review of it in the journal of medieval history, Speculum (Jan. 1993 Vol. 68, No. 1), where Cantor’s book hits much closer to home, gives a much harsher view but takes it very seriously, concluding that “The widespread circulation of this mean-spirited and tendentious work is a grievous blow to medieval studies.”
The response to it doesn’t take me by surprise. Historians, especially those of a more traditional positivist flavor, dislike this sort of book. It very well may have have been shoddy on the empirical side. However, I was amused that Paul Newall thinks the 1991 book “represented a new direction in historiography.” It may have dealt a “grievous blow to medieval studies” but this isn’t a new direction in historiography. The book is a straight-up discourse history. This has not been a “new direction” for history since at least Foucault in the 1970s with perhaps the most inflammatory example with historiographical impact being Said’s Orientalism of 1978. If you think the trend towards discourse history by the structuralist and post-structuralist “anti-representationalists” is not worthy of discussion you can point to other “invention” or “imagining” works which followed in the 1980s such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s famous Imagined Communities, both from 1983.
Music Plasma
I played around a little with the Music Plasma website. Put in a favorite singer and get a spatial map of music “surrounding” that artist. It is fascinating to use, but more importantly, when combined with something like the iTunes music store for browsing the songs of various artists (30 second snippets of each song) it has been incredible in introducing me to new artists or ones I have simply never bothered to listen to before.
Apophenia: IM Presence Vs. Communication
There is a “culture divide” in the instant messaging world and I think that this post by Zaphoria is close to pinning it down. Being online for chat has a tendency to signal different things to different people.
One specific tiny annoying thing I experience in this “presence vs. communication” aspect of the IM world is that when I get up in the morning (or middle of night or whenever my sleeping schedule reaches the “wake up” stage) I will wake my computer and check email and maybe read the news or flip through RSS feeds. Adium, which is often open, automatically logs me on to AIM and MSN. Sometimes I get bombarded with messages…only seconds after gaining consciousness. I think I need a feature in my chat program which delays the log-in-when-waking-computer feature by about 15 minutes to give me time to let the world come into focus.
I think the solution to much of the cultural difference in the IM world is to be found in 3 things:
1) Allow us to control which group of people can view us online at any time. That means we can filter out our “log on only for conversation” friends from our “always on and conveniently reachable for quick questions etc.” types – and be able to do this without them knowing it so they don’t get hurt that we don’t always let them see us online.
2) Ditch the simple binary “Here” vs. “Away” status to have a more rich range of status. You can do this now in many chat programs with text in the status line, but the problem is that people usually ignore them completely even if their program can shows this status line text.
3) Propagate as a universally tolerated practice the sensible idea in my “IM culture” that instant messaging isn’t always (or usually) about a sustained conversation where immediate answers are forthcoming (like a phone conversation) but can involve significant delays in reply and be incorporated into our multi-tasking. Thus I can read a book, read a page or two or three, then reply to an incoming IM (or several queued incoming IM messages) and go back to reading a while – or whatever task I was doing. Too many people I know think that if I say something to them on IM, then I’m doing nothing but IM…which may be true for them but certainly not for me.
These will all contribute, I think to incorporating IM productively into our lives.
WordPress 1.5
I just upgraded to 1.5 of WordPress, which is the blogging software I use to run this site. Not sure when I will get the “theme” more personalized. As those of you visiting the site may notice, I’m currently using the default “theme” that came with the upgrade. I’m hoping this new version will handle comment/trackback spam better and already I like some of its small changes.
Primary Materials on Norway During WWII
I have been collecting some materials on occupied Denmark and Norway in various languages from the Harvard libraries. I was flipping through a great book I found today called Parti og Plakat NS 1933-1945 which is a collection of some 250 propaganda posters from Norway’s Nasjonal Samling party (the Norwegian national socialists).
I told my mom about my discovery and she pointed out that you can find basically all of these posters and many more directly online through the Norwegian National Library’s database of propaganda materials. She then soon put me on to NorgesLexi, which is a site hosting a dictionary of wartime reference information, and pictures and documentary propaganda movies from the occupation period. Elsewhere on the Norwegian National Library’s online databases was a set of pages on humor in occupied Norway which is also the topic of the book Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940-1945.
Finally, the National Library hosts dozens of RealAudio streams of English-language “Norwegian Information Service” wartime news/propaganda radio reports (see the list by topic). I can get my fill of 5-15 minute clips updating me on the latest valiant efforts of the “patriotic” Norwegian resistance fighters and the “treacherous plots” of the “puppet quislings” in occupied Norway. Lots of interesting material, not all of it news reports, which gives you a great look into 1940s life and times. For example, check out this 15 minute clip by a Norwegian talking about his 23 years in China.
Kim Minsu
There is an editorial in Hankyoreh about some former Seoul National University professor Kim Minsu who was apparently let go because he didn’t have enough research publications. He apparently won a lawsuit against the university. However, the editorial also says, “As a result of the court’s findings, Kim’s assertion that the real reason SNU did not rehire him is because of a paper he wrote about the pro-Japanese, collaborationist activities of the professors who proceeded him in the university’s Colleg [sic] of Fine Arts becomes more convincing.”
I wonder where this article he wrote is and what he said? I’m absolutely fascinated how much this collaboration stuff is in the news these days… Looks like there are lots of articles in the Korean news about it (Google News hits and Naver hits) but I am still too bad at Korean to make my way through at more than a snail’s pace…but some day soon…just you wait…
Answers.com
Maybe this is old news and I just realized it but there is a nifty service called Answers.com which is great for quick definitions. For example, try one of my favorite words, “transubstantiation” It provides definitions from various dictionaries, available translations, and also the Wikipedia entry (I wonder if this is dynamic swipe from wikipedia, or they update it regularly?). You may notice that Google, which used to give a “definition” link for its results linking to dictionary.com is now linking to answers.com instead. More on this at SearchEngineWatch.
I created a little Javascript bookmarklet you can search it directly from your bookmark toolbar, save this “address” into your favorite:
javascript:x=escape
(prompt(‘Enter%20a%20term%20to%20look%20up:’,”));
window.location=’http://answers.com/main/ntquery?s=’+x+’&gwp=8′;
Note: This should all be one line. When you click it, it will ask you what to search for and open up the appropriate page on answers.com.
UPDATE: Answers.com considerably simplified its URL construction, ignore the code above. The correct Javascript should now be:
javascript:x=escape
(prompt(‘Enter%20a%20term%20to%20look%20up:’,”));
window.location=’http://answers.com/main/’+x;
New JSTOR Search
For those blessed with access to JSTOR, there is a new search interface which is much more powerful than before. I would provide a link to their news page about it, but it seems to be beyond their wall. I wish we all could have access to databases like this. I remember what it was like to be left out in the cold between my connection with Columbia U and Waseda (and Waseda only provided access while on campus).