There were between twenty and thirty people on my car of a Berlin-bound train from Amsterdam. The train was taking a ten minute break in Bad Bentheim, the first stop in Germany after passing out of the Netherlands. As is the case with so many European borders today, the shift from one country to another [...]
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 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 recently submitted two conference paper proposals. One is somewhat connected to one of the chapters of my dissertation, and the other is something of a prequel for a post-dissertation project I hope to work on. If they are accepted, I have a foundation of notes to work off of, but there is some more [...]
The majority of the research is done. The sources have been found. The books and documents have been photographed or photocopied. Some of them have even been read. I’ve got ideas. I’ve got outlines. I’ve got hundreds of pages of notes. I have years of training in the destruction and dismissal of other people’s arguments. [...]
Last week I paid a visit to a wonderful archive in a medium sized city of Shandong province, China. There I looked up various documents from the 1940s for my dissertation research that are a bit more local in scope than those I have been looking at in the Shandong Provincial Archives here in Jinan. [...]
I’ve been outside of Jinan this week, traveling about a bit. Yesterday I caught a ferry from Penglai (蓬莱) to a group of islands known as Changdao (長島) county which I had been told were well known for their scenic beauty. I had a day left of traveling with no specific plans and it seemed [...]
I’m working on my last batch of documents in the provincial archives in Shandong. There are two challenges to doing my historical research here which I often think about. The first is the problem of access to both the archive and much of its contents. I have been very fortunate but I regret that it [...]
In the first and second postings on this topic, I described my approach to a lack of connections between my notes on my sources and my broader dissertation outline. I explained how I organized my material and how I’m trying to use my task management software as way to create a link between the increasingly [...]
Tagged note-taking, softwareIn the first of three postings on this topic I explained that I have become increasingly concerned that there exists a vast and empty middle layer of organization between the various primary sources, notes, and ‘notes on notes’ I have on the one hand, and my dissertation outline. I have felt the need to develop [...]
Tagged dissertation, History, research, writing