It remains to be seen what Google will actually do in the near future. I am inspired to post something about this unusual moment in order to make two comments. First, I wish to respond to a kind of cynical reaction to Google’s announcement that I find frustrating. Second, I wish to argue that this is an opportunity for anyone who wants to see a China which one day permits the open, free, and competitive exchange of ideas. As such we need to think about how to amplify its potential impact.

The Google announcement has deservedly generated a huge response, even though it coincides roughly with the terrible news of the destruction in Haiti. The reactions are many, and I’m particularly interested in the variety of responses among Chinese which so far seem to range from complete shock, quiet or vocal support for Google, or a misguided anti-imperialist attitude of “good riddance.”

One of the responses I find incredibly unproductive. Two representative examples can be seen in this Techcrunch article and a posting by Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy. Their message is essentially a cynical one: It is foolish for us to pour praise on Google for what deceptively seems like a just moral stance – the corporation is merely acting out of pure calculated greed.

This is, in my opinion, a complete waste of words, an unnecessary attempt to dampen enthusiasm about what is potentially, but by no means guaranteed to be, a historic moment. No one should be surprised to discover that corporations act in the interest of their profits and shareholder benefits. No one should be surprised to learn that Google is doing a cost-benefit calculation with relation to its future in the Chinese market and we still don’t know what its final fate in China will be. These things should merely be accepted as the, “bloody obvious.”

Which brings me to my second point: what are we going to do about? What potential impact, if any, can this have on a cause many of us care about?

Pragmatic Idealism

I couldn’t give a shit about the profits of Google, or what its real motivations are. I do care, however, what the reactions of the Chinese people are to this and what marginal influence this move can have on efforts within China to change the information environment in the near and the long term.

From that perspective, it is not obvious that Google dropping censorship and withdrawing from the Chinese market is in the best interests of freedom of information in China, even if it were followed by all other foreign companies. If the internet environment in China is dominated completely by Chinese companies who are perfectly willing to censor all of its content, this may result in a worse situation than one in which foreign search engines and some international social and media websites have limited, if censored, presence in China, with even a small percentage of the market share there. Coming from someone who studies traitors and treason, this seems to me to be the classic collaborator’s dilemma: will collaboration limit the damage? Will resistance result in a worse outcome?

The answer is not always that resistance is better – sometimes collaboration is better. Sometimes negotiating with evil produces more good. Sometimes subversion hidden behind compliance is the path to take. These things should be carefully evaluated according to circumstances. Clearly, however, in some cases resistance is the better choice and can move things perceivably towards a desired end.

The answer is not obvious, but I think in this case, if Google were to take a stand, it would matter: despite its low market share, Google has made a splash on the Chinese market, and young Chinese engineers and educated people all over the country recognize and respect the company – many of them dream sincerely of one day working at the corporation. Even some Chinese friends who use the competitor Baidu are disgusted with its corrupt history of manipulation of hits to promote advertising revenues, its occasionally substandard results (sometimes even with Chinese search terms!) and lack of innovation.

Having made its mark, having a well known brand, and then suddenly withdrawing in a blaze of glory—and while withdrawing for a short time removing censorship from its search results: at the very least this will likely produce a memorable reaction: some in China will feel shame, and others will embrace a defiance. Those who are defiant will be forced into the ridiculous position of claiming, “Ha! Be gone stupid imperialistic western company – if you refuse to hide things from us like our dictatorship tells you to, then you are just selfishly giving into those superior companies who are willing to be more submissive to our glorious Party and ever more powerful, if castrated, Nation.” Those who feel shame, will be reminded, yet again, of the contrast between what they are permitted to see, what they may see when they climb over the great firewall, and what most of the rest of the wired world can see, with a few notable exceptions.

However, this isn’t and shouldn’t be up to Google. It is up to us to make it matter: not by hailing Google for its courage, or setting up fan clubs for Google co-founder Sergey Brin. We should ask ourselves how we can maximize the impact of the decision, if Google follows through with it, to say no to collaboration with Chinese censors, then let us see if we can amplify the impact of that decision. There is now a brief moment of opportunity, a time when we can make something like this matter. Instead of cynically deriding Google for merely acting in its own interests, we should be debating how we might best amplify the impact of such a decision while minimizing the similar amplification of a Chinese nationalistic backlash that will inevitably accompany it. The goal is simple: to make the contradictions so obvious to many within China just that much clearer, to make the hypocrisies pointed out by activists within China that much easier to identify, and to increase the discomfort felt by Chinese government as well as institutions both foreign and domestic. It may result in only one of a “thousand cuts” in the farce that is Chinese media and internet policies, but that is how change is accomplished.

If they are accepted, I have a foundation of notes to work off of, but there is some more research that needs to be done and I welcome any comments, suggestions, etc.

The ‘Democratic Police’ under US Military Occupation: Torture and Reform in Korea and Japan, 1945-48

The reform ideals of every postwar United States military occupation have faced one of their greatest tests in the question of how to address the pre-occupation institution of the police: Are they to be preserved largely intact in order to carry out the essential duties of preserving public order, and guarding against new insurgent forces? Or are their post-conflict remnants to be completely dismantled or at least thoroughly purged for having been the most efficient tools of state oppression? This paper examines and compares the attempt by US occupation authorities in early postwar Korea and Japan to balance its strategic need to preserve social stability and its desire to eliminate the worst symbols of police brutality and oppression. It focuses on the campaign to bring about an institutional rebirth in the form of the new ‘Democratic Police’ and the responses to it within the Japanese and Korean police establishment. US occupation officials and post-occupation advisors were forced to acknowledge, often with embarrassment, the failure to eradicate torture. However, the United States police forces that supplied advisors and instructors for the occupation were no distant strangers to brutality themselves, with torture, or “third degree” interrogations reported widespread in the 1931 Wickersham Commission’s “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” Despite a genuine disgust with brutal methods, the very willingness of US forces to quickly disassociate themselves from the ‘dirty work’ of occupation security guaranteed the persistence of such methods by Japanese, and in a more politically violent environment, especially the Korean police.

Pan-Asianism or World Federalism? Raja Mahendra Pratap and the Japanese Empire, 1925-1945

A number of Indians opposed to British colonial rule made their way to Japan and found their voices welcome among Japan’s leading pan-Asianist thinkers. The most famous of these figures include Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose, former president of the Indian National Congress and eventual commander of the Japanese supported Indian National Army. The collaboration between these Indian nationalists, sworn to an anti-imperialist cause, and Japan’s own brutal empire has been of great interest to historians. The more eclectic figure Raja Mahendra Pratap, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1932, was also a fervent activist against British colonial rule in India and likewise turned to Japan for support, but Pratap also developed a highly evolved and spiritually charged conception of world federalism. Pratap found some support for his ideas in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, where he raised money and corresponded with intellectuals long before the idea of World Federalism would briefly enjoy widespread interest in Japan and around the world from 1945-1947. This presentation will show how Pratap worked to prevent his conception of a world federation from clashing with Japan’s imperialist conception of pan-Asian union and suggest the ways in which his exploration of the relationship between the regional and the global foreshadowed postwar and contemporary debates of a similar nature.

When I last looked at the software, I didn’t think it had anything striking to offer and seemed like a kind of bizarre combination of clip collection software like Yojimbo (( Evernote, Together, Devon Think, and other examples abound, but Yojimbo is my favorite )) and the writer’s software Copywrite. (( Journler, MacJournal, StoryMill, and WriteRoom are also tools for writers I have looked at which have various strengths)) However, after being prodded to give the software another look by a friend, I now believe there are some features in Scrivener that are worth considering by students or scholars writing longer research papers or one’s dissertation.

Obviously, a simple word processor and citation management software may be best for most dissertation or other academic projects. It may be justly argued that I have hopelessly over-organized my life in the digital medium, with hundreds of note files in OmniOutliner, all my tasks and snippets of ideas stored in OmniFocus, mind maps for my writing ideas in NovaMind, serial numbers, short reference files, and screenshots of webpages stored in Yojimbo, a diary written in MacJournal, thousands of pictures, PDFs, and documents tagged and organized with Leap, various personal data tracked in a Bento database, and flashcards for the various languages I have studied daily reviewed in Anki. And so on. My name is Konrad, and I am an organizational software addict. The irony of this is only truly appreciated by friends of mine who know how disorganized I am.

So why is an application like Scrivener useful for dissertation or research paper writing? Read on for more detail, but if you want the quick and dirty tips on what to look for download the trial and especially consider the following: 1) the corkboard for organizing writing chunks, 2) the “edit scrivenings” for immediately reassembling several writing chunks 3) the multi-level hierarchical writing chunk organization with the possibility for separate synopsis, notes, and tags 4) the “snapshot” feature for document versioning. 5) links for creating internal links between documents or documents and note snippets (not a full personal wiki like the excellent VoodooPad but close) 6) a “Research” dumping ground for various file formats that can serve as a kind of mini-Yojimbo/Evernote 7) A status and label feature for writing chunks. 8) Possibility of two pane viewing for simultaneously editing two chunks or combining a writing chunk with the corkboard view.

It is actually hard to appreciate Scrivener because it is an unusual hybrid. Users of the other applications mentioned above will note many features it has in common with other programs out there.

Most importantly, at its most simple Scrivener is a kind of basic word processor with a beautiful full screen mode that allows you to write without distraction. The full screen mode is highly customizable and a delight to work in.

At the next level, being explicitly designed for writers of larger structured works, it provides an environment in which you may divide and hierarchically organize chunks of writing as one might in outlining software. The “binder” on the left of the screen divides everything into a “Draft” and “Research.” The former contains only text chunks which, at the conclusion of the drafting process may be “compiled” and exported to a word processor. The latter is a place where one may drop snippets and various files such as images and PDFs for you to refer to as you write.

The Binder and Documents – One nice aspect of the files in the binder is that they may be multiple levels deep, like any good outlining software. One’s “draft” may be made up of folders (chapters, for example) which have sections that themselves have sections with sections.

Each section can be viewed as its own document alone or sharing the screen horizontally or vertically with another panel in which you may display another document or, as we shall see an outline or corkboard. These individual documents have a nice word count at the bottom and, via a small target icon, the easy ability to establish a word count target for each section. Also, these individual documents may have their own title, a “synopsis,” as well as “Document Notes,” reference links to other documents, tags (keywords), colored labels, and a customizable status (draft, complete, etc.)

The Outline and the Corkboard – In addition to viewing any document in the binder directly in one of the viewing panes, as one might in a program like Yojimbo, there are two other views. The Outline view displays a list of documents along with their synopsis, labels, and status. I have yet to find this very useful given the appearance of the resulting outline. The corkboard, on the other hand, is one of Scrivener’s best features. Once it has been stripped away, via the preferences, of its silly looking pins, blue lines, and corkboard background appearance (this cheesy look was one of the things that turned me immediately off from Scrivener the first time I downloaded it, but it can be easily removed), this view allows you to view a collection of writing chunks (their title and synopsis) as cards across the screen. Somehow, I find this view much more useful than an outline view. I can order and reorder these large notecards, with their synopsis displayed in one pane, while I read or edit the content of the chunk in question in a second pane below it. The visual juxtaposition of them feels closer to a mind map view and thus stimulates the thinking process in fresh ways (one could always dream of an ultimate application that could seamlessly combine the powers of NovaMind, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, Zotero/Sente and a writing application like Scrivener or at least allowed a smooth drag and drop relations between elements of these various apps but we ask too much).

Edit Scrivenings – This is a brilliant feature that allows you to experiment putting different chunks together or edit them together as a whole. When you have written several separate chunks of text that are displayed by their title in the “draft” section of your “binder” to the left, you may select several chunks from the list arbitrarily or consecutively, and press the “Edit scrivenings.” This temporarily combines the texts in a pane for you to see them together and allows you to edit them each directly (they are visually distinguishable by a slight variation of background color. Note that you may not edit across two chunks, but only within each chunk separately).

Versioning – One of the features I loved about the software Copywrite was that you could work on a chunk of writing, and then at any time easily save a “version” of it. You could then edit the document at will and easily return to any previously saved version of it, as displayed in a list at the right, not entirely unlike software versioning software. The Scrivener equivalent to this is Snapshot. You can create a snapshot of any chunk of writing and restore it at a later time.

Three Simple Suggestions for the Developer:

1. Sometimes I get stuck in a view and find myself a bit lost, trying to get back to the body of text for a document. This usually happens when I click on a text chunk in the binder and find myself with an empty outline view. The trick is to “deselect” the outline view in the toolbar (or press Command 1 again). It would be better if there was an explicit “Text View” which feels more natural than getting back to the text view by deselecting the outline view.

2. The snapshot feature works great, but I don’t think it belongs only in a separate window at the universal level of the application. It should be, as it is in CopyWrite, displayed at the level of the document or writing chunk. In the “inspector” we can choose between “notes,” “references,” and “keywords” panels – why not add a “snapshots” panel here so that we can immediately see, for any document, what previous snapshots there are for each document here.

3. Allow a view of the corkboard with only the titles of the writing chunks displayed (and not the synopsis as well) and which has a “free” mode to allow full and free movement about of the cards or, even better, rudimentary mind mapping features.

One Power Feature Suggestion

Implementing the following would, I believe, instantly quadruple the value of the application for dissertation writers:

Currently, when you create a new “link” in a text document or chunk for the first time, a new folder appears called “notes” which seem to be something separate and distinct from the normal writing chunk documents in the draft.

This is where my theory of medium level organization for dissertation writing could be perfectly applied if Scriviner strived to expand this “notes” feature a little more.

Here is how this could be done, and you will see this follows from the ideas laid out in the third of my series of postings on the topic:

1. Make the “notes” a much more robust feature-packed section of the Scrivener binder separate and distinct from the writing chunks in the ‘draft’ section of the binder. Allow the user to very easily create hundreds, if not thousands of small notecards which may each be tagged using Scriviner’s keyword feature. Allow them to be attached to a “source” (separate from its tag or keyword) such that all cards can potentially belong to a source and notes deeper in a hierarchy can inherit the “source” of cards higher up the chain. As in the case of “Draft” documents – allow multiple levels of hierarchy and folders for further organization. Allow the inheritance of tags to note cards at lower levels.

2. Allow each of these notes to be linked to writing chunks where the writer wants to deploy them. (this can already be done)

3. Allow the notes to have a status – or more simply a check mark to indicate when the idea or content they have has been incorporated into the main writing.

4. Allows the notecards to be viewed in the “corkboard” mode or ideally assembled in a more visually complex form (ie. mind maps)

5. Allow easy creation of “smart outlines” (See my post for an explanation of this)

6. Allow easy access to a list of “sources” – ideally connected in some relational way to an external citation management software.

One Difficult Challenge:

This is a great environment to bang out quick chunks of writing for the dissertation, but despite the fact there is a simple inline footnote feature, many dissertation writers will want to do their footnoting as they write that first draft and, if they use a citation manager such as Zotero, Sente, or Endnote, this will mean that they will want to do even their drafts directly in an application which can interface with these applications (Word for Endnote, Word or OpenOffice for Zotero, or Word, Apple Pages, and Mellel for native support with Sente). For those writers, Scriviner will never be able to sufficiently draw them in.

For the rest of us who don’t mind revisiting this process after getting a good draft going, you can draft up a chapter in Scrivener, making simple notes to yourself with the Scrivener inline footnote feature and then add the real citations with your favorite citation software after you “compile” the draft into a word processor document of the desired format.

I started with this quote, condemning terror polices, taken from a speech of his in parliament, as Secretary of State for War in the aftermath of the Amritsar Massacre in British colonial India:

“There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called ‘frightfulness.’ What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.” (1920)

I skipped his 1940 “and now set Europe ablaze” directive when establishing the British wartime SOE since it is a more complex case and made note of his often quoted 1942 statement:

“All the same, it would be a mistake to cast aside our original thought which, it may be mentioned, is also strong in American minds, namely, that the severe, ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort, including U-boat and aircraft production, but will create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.” (1942)

I then moved on to his famous post-Dresden 1945 statement in a draft letter he wrote:

“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” (1945)

Now, almost every version of this quote I have seen online or in books, places an ellipsis before “The destruction of Dresden” and thus leaves us with the impression that Churchill was shocked at the scale of terror and that this is what lies at the heart of the justification for the “serious query” against terror bombing.

Now, let us fill in that quote with what has been removed:

“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because of some temporary provisions would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” (1945)

I would argue that this radically changes our interpretation of this quote. Churchill here points to the practical difficulties of running an occupation in a “ruined land” and the need to devote much needed provisions for the Germans – not an ounce of sympathy is shown in this full quote for the suffering of civilians or doubt shown for the moral underpinnings of terror bombing.

On a side note: am I missing other important quotes by Churchill for this little collection (related, for example, to 1920s Iraq, India, or during WWII with respect to bombing etc.?).

I felt the acting was mediocre, the “shaky camera” technique used annoying at times, and the background music rather primitive, but there were also many strengths to the movie. It had some excellent scenes that capture the Polish dilemma with remembering this pivotal event of 1940 or—as the Soviets would have them believe until official admission to the crime in 1990— 1941.

One thing that particularly impressed me was the portrayal of the process of the massacre itself. Most of us are familiar, desensitized even, to portrayals of massacre in the many films on the Holocaust or World War II in general. There are certain aspects of these scenes that seem almost required: images of angry shouting soldiers herding a crowd of helpless victims, the evil officer given ample chance to fully personify the diabolical, and so on.

Katyń initially passes the point of the massacre without any depiction of it whatsoever, letting it instead hang over all the scenes to follow and allowing the audience to only imagine what has transpired. We then return to the actual scene of killing at the close of the film.

I thought the depiction of the killing was done wonderfully, if one can use such a word to comment on the cinematography of massacre. With the exception of Soviet officers confirming the identity of some high-ranking officers, the perpetrators hardly speak and are generally without expression. Instead, the soldiers simply carry out their terrible task in a quiet and methodical fashion. The killings proceed smoothly and as part of a highly mechanical procedure. Instead of sacrificing an opportunity to vilify the Soviets who carried out Stalin’s orders, this approach, I believe, adds to the horror felt by the viewer, and reminds us of how this process may have been seen by soldiers for whom executions of reactionary elements were thought a natural and necessary component of the revolution.

One after another, we are shown the Polish officers taken to the killing grounds in a truck, individually unloaded, tied, shot, and finally covered with others in the mass grave. In the case of some officers killed separately, the rapid procession of killings in an abandoned forest house is interrupted only by the splash of a bucket of water upon the blood covered concrete basement floor, the expulsion of the corpse through a shoot into a waiting truck outside, and a newly loaded gun being handed to the executioner.

I’ll close these comments by sharing one of the fragments of dialogue which describes the dilemma of collaboration in the postwar Soviet dominated Poland and in so many other places seen, as it was at the time, as a stark choice between silent acquiescence and open resistance. It takes place in a graveyard between the wife and a sister of the slain. Magdalena has a gravestone for her brother made with the forbidden 1940 death year carved on the stone, while the other, Róża, the wife of a dead general, keeps her mourning to herself, finds work as an art teacher, and tries to plead reason with Magdalena:

Magdalena: You’ve found a place in this new world of yours, whereas I am whole in that where Piotr is. If I must choose, I stay with him.

Róża: You choose the dead, which is morbid.

Magdalena: No. I choose the murdered, not the murderers.

Before sending them, I take pictures of their contents, make a little inventory, and in the case of documents, create an index with each document numbered.

I am very happy about the fact that since 2004, none of the many boxes I have sent back from Japan, Korea, or Taiwan have been missing, or their contents suffered more than the occasional dented book spine.

This year, however, I had a bit of a disaster. I sent two boxes back from Jinan, China. I sent them in official China Post boxes to New York state via sea.

Altogether my boxes contained about 60 books, with padding of a blanket and a few sweaters. Many of the books make up a series on Shandong during Sino-Japanese and civil wars. Perhaps half of them were out of print used books I had spent several days hunting down in various used book sellers in Jinan.

Neither of the original boxes arrived. Instead two new, smaller and very much lighter boxes arrived, containing a collection of about 20 mangled and, in some cases, ripped books. It was stamped “Arrived damaged, New Jersey”

I guess I should be grateful that about 20/60 of my books arrived. I’m also very glad that I hand carried the 20 or so volumes of published but long out of print and restricted distribution (內部) historical documents most important for my dissertation.

While the US postal system is hardly worthy of praise, I have never had more than bruised corners on the many other boxes I have sent back from Asia. Thus, a warning to those of you studying in China: hand carry out the most important stuff.

I now have a Russian aunt. Together with her son, from a previous marriage, she has added a wonderful new multi-cultural dimension to my trips back to my hometown in Stavanger, Norway, where I stay in my mother’s apartment just under my uncle’s house. I have enjoyed my many chances to talk to them both and learn more about Russia and Russian. This was made simple given the fact my aunt speaks fluent English and her son increasingly fluent Norwegian, even though the two of them have lived in Norway less than a year.

This summer, my aunt Lena’s parents, both doctors, visited from Russia. I met them first in my uncle’s garden, which they immediately – and spontaneously – assumed supervision of, and I took a liking to both of them immediately. They were both incredibly active, healthy, full of childish vigor, and curious about the country they were visiting.

Granpa Alex on the ropes, with my aunt Lena and cousin Max outside my uncle’s house in Stavanger, Norway.

Communication was always difficult, however, since I don’t speak Russian yet and neither of them speak any English. When my uncle and my aunt left for a week of vacation, my daily interaction with them mostly consisted of some dozen greeting related phrases of Russian I had learned, quick single word lookups in a Russian-English dictionary I had on my iPod Touch, and a few random German words we hoped the other would be able to understand.

We started with greater ambitions. I spent my first evening with the couple mostly with Alex, the father, and we tried to teach eachother some English and Russian, respectively, with the use of a well-worn phrase book he had brought with him from Russia:

Русско-английский разговорник

(Russian-English phrasebook)

Guessing from the first pages, it looks like it was published originally in 1957 and reprinted as late as 1991.

Most of the phrases were very basic and still good choices for a phrase book of this kind. “How are you,” and “I have a cold,” for example. However, in this small pocket booklet of perhaps 150 pages things quickly got more technical, with some fascinating entries which really have a classic Soviet appeal.

You can view a collection of my favorite pages from the book here, but here are a just few phrases that were included in this beginner’s phrase book:

-We want to see the new types of reinforced concrete (metal) structures)

-Show us the agricultural machinery.

-What is the capacity of the lathe?

-We should like to see designs of apartment houses (industrial buildings).

-What special combine harvesters have you?

-Are you a member of the National Farmer’s Union?

-We should like to meet some members of Parliament.

-What is the membership of the National Union of Railwaymen (the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers, the Amalgamated Engineering Union)?

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. They call it grad school.

Now the time has come when I too must write – and not one of those research papers churned out in the day or two before the deadline arrives. I must write the dissertation. I am to write chapters that connect to each other in some logical fashion. Chapters. Even the word itself sounds like so many heavy links of metal to be hung around the necks of PhD students back from those green pastures they call “the field.”

I have seen them. They wander the campus with a pale look; the clank and rattle of their invisible burden almost audible as they walk. Nearby a third year history grad student might be seen skipping away, “I’m off to the archives!”

I forge my first link this fall. Getting a summer head start on my procrastination, this week I sat down to read a few books on the craft of writing, including a simple but handy book of “writing tools” aimed mostly at journalists and fiction writers. Reading through the short examples of good writing, I realized that I didn’t really know what good writing looked like in history.

Don’t get me wrong. In historiography classes, I have read plenty of “classic” works, from a full range of “schools” of historical inquiry and their most radical theoretical rivals. A year spent mostly reading in preparation for oral examinations brought me in close contact – “reading” wasn’t always the best description of what that contact consisted of – with hundreds of history books, but in all cases my eyes were trained on the content, not the form. The only times I really paid much attention to form was when some theoretically ambitious works were so frustratingly obtuse that one wondered how these historians who claim sensitivity to the subtleties of discourse could have nurtured such talent for linguistic slaughter.

I can think of plenty of works of history that took an approach I liked, had an argument that persuaded me, or simply benefited me in my own research. However, I am embarrassed to admit, I can’t name any history books that I thought were well written. That is to say, I have apparently paid so little attention to the writing of history at the level of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, and so much to the arguments and their support instead, that I now feel particularly naked as I go forward in my own writing.

Of course, I suspect good writing in history resembles good writing everywhere else. Surely many of the lessons of good writing taught in a journalism class, at a college writing center, or in Mrs. Gould’s seventh grade English class back in Aberdeen, Scotland are applicable to the writing of one’s history dissertation. I am also doubtlessly influenced by the rhetorical strategies and sentence structures of at least some of the hundreds of works that I have read in the past few years. Hopefully that influence is partly born of an intuitive recognition of quality. Even if that assumption is flawed, it is too late for me to revisit those blissful days of wide secondary source reading now. But if I get a chance to speak to incoming grad students in my last two years in the program, perhaps in the form of a wailing spirit in the night, I think I will advise them to pay closer attention to the language of historical works; to occasionally wield the eyeglass, and not merely the sword when they confront the works both in their own fields and the broader historiography.

In order to keep things to a reasonable budget, both of my trips to Iceland left me with a choice between paying a few nights in a hostel and renting a bicycle, or renting a car and forgoing a place to stay. On my first trip I chose the former, but this time I decided to rent a car and sleep two nights in the vehicle.

As I suspected, the biggest problem with sleeping two nights in a car in Iceland is that it gets very cold, even in early August. Having recently come from the sweltering heat of Taiwan and Korea, I had no coats and little more than a few t-shirts packed with me and forgot to bring an extra sweater I had put aside to bring from my stash of possessions in my mother’s apartment in Norway. My first attempt at a solution to this problem was to “borrow” a blanket from Iceland Air, slipping one of their nice fleece blankets into my backpack upon boarding the aircraft. Given how cold I got, I should have stolen two of them. Since I’m not really the thieving type, I returned my blanket on my flight out of Iceland, but the experience sparked an idea: Iceland Air ought to consider providing a cheap – or ideally free with deposit – “blanket rental” service for poor backpackers like me who are sleeping in the expensive rental cars to be had in Iceland. Here is how it could work: pick up a blanket or two on disembarkation at Kevlavik airport, leaving a deposit, and return it when boarding your plane out of the country. Who should I contact about this idea?

The first afternoon I headed into Reykjavík and walked around the main street Laugavegur again. The bankruptcy of the country in the current economic crisis is immediately visible. Perhaps the most common word I was to see in Iceland in the two days I was there this time was “Útsala” (sale; clearance sale) plastered on hastily computer printouts on almost half the stores along the main street, a significant contrast from the chic shopping street I saw on my previous trip. At the airport, there is a sign in the duty free section which asks foreign shoppers something along the lines, “Should you feel guilty about taking advantage of the current circumstances? We at Kevlavik airport think you shouldn’t.” (( anyone see this sign? I think this is pretty close to the original. )) To be honest, though, Iceland still didn’t feel like it got a lot cheaper since my last trip. That may be because inflation has stolen some of the best bargains to be had when the currency crisis initially hit.

I spent a few relaxing hours of reading and eating at a great, and apparently famous, coffee shop on Laugavegur called Hljómalind, where I enjoyed a wonderful and reasonably priced vegetarian lasagna and great coffee. It seems to be a regular hangout for foreign travelers, and is also popular among Iceland’s Couchsurfers.

I picked up some groceries and was surprised to find grocery stores open on Sunday, a shock coming from Norway where the only thing open on Sunday’s are Chinese take-out, gas stations, and a few very small stores, mostly run by immigrants in the downtown area. As on my last trip to Iceland I was very underwhelmed by the selection and quality of bread, which I found to be very sub-Scandinavian par. There is more selection than one might expect, however. One cannot noticing a strange mix of Scandinavian and American consumer products. Maarud paprika potato screws and Lucky charms cereal could be seen in the same aisle of a grocery store. At the ubiquitous N1 gas stations small Taco Bell booths are found alongside familiar Scandinavian sites like soft ice cream stands and racks of beautiful woolen sweaters. It was almost as if Iceland were located half way between Scandinavia and the United States. Oh wait…

After feeding myself and picking up some supplies I was eager to hit the road. Although it was late afternoon by the time I got out, I hopped back in the rental and drove north of the city, aiming for the peninsula leading to Ólavsvik. I drove as far as I could towards its western edge until the sun hit the horizon and I turned back to the city.

On this first drive, I immediately discovered how dangerous driving could be in Iceland. Let us call it, “Death by Beauty.” Since the landscape is so unfamiliar and its mountains so breathtaking, it invites close inspection by the traveler. The contrast between the light of a sinking sun and the shadows created by the clouds produce an especially beautiful effect as intermittent patches of orange light illuminate the bare hills. I often saw clouds just barely spilling over distant peaks, as if the valley beyond could not quite consume their volume. There is so much to stop and admire, even along the main highway, but the roads rarely have enough of a shoulder to come slowly to a stop along the edge in order to take in the scenery without blocking fast moving cars that might approach from behind. There are small gravel roads that shoot off the edge here and there, but these are easily missed when one is driving 90kph and not always available at points where one wishes to stop. Over a dozen times during my trip, I found myself glancing off to the right or left in order to take in a view, and then nearly driving off the road into a field of hardened lava, moss covered rocks, or grass plains. My technique improved with time: slowing down, taking shorter glances, and making more frequent stops at nearby gravel turnoffs, but I often found myself envying the exhausted looking travelers who could be seen pedaling overloaded travel bikes through the vast wilderness. For the benefit and safety of both bicyclists and drivers, I suggest Iceland give its construction industry a surely much needed boost by adding a generous shoulder to both sides of the entire stretch of highway 1 around the island, then later label further roads as targets for shoulders based on a cost-benefit analysis of the “Death by Beauty” risk of any given stretch. Who should I contact about this idea?

Perhaps the next most important observation was really the confirmation of a hypothesis I had. I’m a big fan of Sigur Rós and soon began blasting their music on my first drive. I can now say, with some confidence, that their music is such a perfect fit for driving through the Icelandic countryside that rental car companies in Iceland should consider including CDs with the band’s complete works in the glove compartment of every rented car. Who should I contact about this idea? I especially recommend some of their strange but progressively building songs such as Hafsól, Di Do, Saeglópur, Staralfur, and softer but eerie songs like Kafari, O Fridur and Refur.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the landscape of Iceland is simply amazing. As I drove through the countryside, even in the most “populated” – to the extent one can call any part of this massive island anything of the kind – southwestern quarter of Iceland, I kept find myself thinking two similar thoughts:

“You know, I don’t think humans belong here.”

“Umm….I don’t think this island is done yet. Shouldn’t we come back in a few thousand years?”

Yet, somehow, a few hundred thousand people make their home here. Every hour I spent outside of Reykjavík I felt a strange and deep loneliness, but the kind of productive loneliness that is a wellspring of cultural inspiration and cleansing introspection. How else can one explain the amazing wealth of Icelandic contemporary music, photography, literature, and design? They might name their streets after vikings and play up their old sagas to tourists but the people on this island clearly have no need to embrace an illustrious but distant past. The island is itself so visibly alive, that there is no need for its culture to rest on the achievements of the dead.

I particularly like one of the advertisements for 66º North depicting the cool stare of a young pale faced girl holding a fishing pole:

I can’t remember the exact wording but it said something along the lines of, “Somewhere there is a girl in a warm house playing with her barbie dolls. I figure I’m the lucky one.”

Obviously, this bold defiance in the face of harsh nature is a common theme found throughout Nordic nationalisms, and the seemingly endless expanse of stoney plateaus suspended above the lush forested valleys and the dark blue fjords of Norway may also inspire in the traveler a feeling of icy isolation. Yet, in southern Norway especially, it is precisely the promise of embrace in those rainy valley forests, the comforting smell of vegetation and the older more tamed appearance of the southern Norwegian landscape which sets it apart from Iceland. With perhaps the exception of the bare sharp but short peaks and the tundra of Northern Norway, the rest of Scandinavia simply cannot generate the same sense of complete nakedness one is faced with when they confront the mountains of Iceland, or its strange rock and lava fields. Even the bright green of a field of moss surrounding a lake might share the horizon with steam emerging from some mouth the earth has yet to close. And the smell…everywhere in the country a mix of strange and unfamiliar smells, perhaps sulfur? Perhaps some other product of subterranean fires?

The Icelandic language too continues to fascinate me. I am still intrigued by the strange sense of familiarity the language has when spoken. I feel like I should be able to understand what is spoken (given its close connection to the Norwegian idiom) and everytime someone mistakes me for a local and I am able to guess the meaning, I sometimes catch myself responding in Norwegian, as would be the perfectly natural thing to do in Sweden or Denmark. I feel a deep frustration at having to respond in English. I know many Icelanders can speak Danish or some other dialect of what many of them rightly call the “Scandinavian” language but I cannot assume this. The written language, with its prolific use of those beautiful and ancient letters ð and þ, is almost completely unreadable to me but when spoken, it sounds so bizarrely familiar, and occasionally whole phrases come through only to descend into what seems like playful gibberish. Learning a language that only a few hundred thousand living and perhaps a few million dead people can speak seems unpractical, but if I found myself living in the island at some point, I would eagerly take up the challenge.

On my first night I stayed in the city, parking my car in a quiet neighborhood and sleeping in the back of my car. I woke frozen in the morning and decided early August was a great time to buy a nice warm winter fleece and promptly went shopping for one. After this early morning shopping spree, I decided to visit a thermal pool. I avoided the one I was told was most favored by tourists and instead visited a thermal pool deep in a residential area. Already by my second day I was beginning to wonder if there were openings for historian of East Asian history at one of Iceland’s few institutions of higher education that I might apply for and began imagining what life would be like here if I could spend a decade on the island. I loved the thermal pool, which warmed me right up in a quiet and relaxed local environment. It resembled some of the smaller scale sento public baths or hot springs in rural Japan I’ve been to. Old men exchange gossip in the shower room, and local neighborhood residents bathe and swim together in a steaming outdoor pool and collection of other hot pools and steam rooms.

My full day of driving (see the map linked to below for the GPS track of my travels) following my morning bath took me to heavily touristed sites like the rich historical þingvellir, the Geysir, and Gullfoss. As I suspected, however, I far more enjoyed my own slow wandering on the roads (many of them rough gravel) south from these sites towards the southern coast, which was nothing short of spectacular. The glaciers of the south were hidden far above the clouds with only an arm extending into view here and there. The best clue of their presence were the hundreds of waterfalls that descended like so many white ropes descending from the clouds.

By early evening I had reached Vik on the southern tip of Iceland, and spent some time watching the waves crash against the cliffs at nearby Dyrhólaey before driving late into the night all along the southern coast until I reached the lighthouse at Iceland’s southwestern tip, west of Grindavik.

My late night trip on a long and bouncy gravel road through black lava fields was dimly light by the sun, already rising – or was it still setting – at one in the morning. I could just make out the strange shapes of the terrain around me and I hope some day I can make the same drive again by day. I finally parked along the coast and lay down in the back to sleep while strong winds coming up from the coast rocked my car and sang me to sleep.

I awoke at five, freezing, despite my new fleece, and walked out to a nearby cliff beyond the lighthouse for a last moment of reflection before heading to the airport.

Later, on arriving in the US my dear friend Sayaka showed me a Sigur Rós video she thought I might like. The video concludes at the same cliff of that last morning:

Sigur Rós – Glósóli from sigur-ros.co.uk on Vimeo.

More of my pictures from the trip here. GPS track of my trip and map below:

2009.8 Southwest Iceland at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: GPS Trail Maps

My mother’s ship lists contains detailed information on hundreds of Norwegian merchant marine vessels from World War II that played a key role in supplying the allies in Britain and elsewhere during the war. She also contains information on many of the ships in the home fleet under German control.

In addition to reference information about the ships such as the years they were built, tonnage, and their fate during or after the war, she has assembled an incredible collection of anecdotes, crew lists, prisoner of war information, and other valuable information about the ships that are useful not only to historians but also the thousands of descendants of sailors who served and in many cases died on these ships.

The primary task she has dedicated herself over the past months is to organize, process, and upload thousands of images of voyage lists of these vessels taken from the Norwegian national archives and post the images as links from the various ships where they can be viewed directly and compared to similar voyage records compiled and already available online by an Arnold Hague for fact checking purposes.

I have picked a ship completely at random, M/T Dageid, which shows you the kind of pages that have grown out of her years of work. I’m sure she has other ship entries that she is particularly proud of, but this random entry is already impressive. The ships now contain up to a dozen or so links to pages of the voyage records so, for example, descendants can determine where their merchant marine, or at least his ship, was at a given time during the war.

Although the links to these images are small and may go unnoticed, they represent many hundreds of hours of work by my mother. She now returns to her previous task of meticulously assembling and organizing information about the hundreds of convoys these ships sailed in. You can see her considerable progress so far on her convoys page.

The archivists were incredibly friendly, and warned me in advanced that they didn’t think they would have too much from the period I was looking at. After providing the letters of introduction that are required at most archives in China and having the way paved for me thanks to a phone call from a contact I made in Jinan, I was allowed to search for documents using their digital database. They even gave me a free lunch from their cafeteria on the first day and a free copy of a book they had published that I was interested in getting containing documents from the wartime period.

Unlike the provincial archives, this archive found their collection manageable enough to scan and store digitally copies of all the files and make them available for viewing by visitors in place of the originals. Unfortunately, I was not given the option of looking at the originals instead. Also unlike the provincial archives, the online search of their database seems to return results from a much larger proportion of materials that are found by searching for the same on their internal database. (( When I asked one of the archivists at the provincial archives why they did not provide full online access to the database, rather than a very small sampler of the full internal database so that visitors could come prepared with a list of documents to request, I got a bewildered and serious look, “Do you want to put me out of a job?” This answer only makes sense if you realize that one of the primary duties of two of the archivists is to sit at the database search engine and help first time visitors search for documents. Given the fact many of the, especially older, visitors are completely computer illiterate, however, I still believe their services would continue to be required to help elderly comrades who come to search for their records. )) They did not allow me to save any of the digital TIF image collections of individual documents onto a USB drive (( though, as was the case with the Korean national archive, it would have been simple enough for a less scrupulous person to do this given the access to the “Save As…” option in the file menu and apparent lack of any security on the machine I was given access to. In fact, in the case of the Korean national archive at Daejeon, web browser access was restricted but I was able to confirm, at least as of 2008, the DOS command line still gave me FTP access to my server where I could have uploaded hundreds of pages of Korean archive documents they were requiring me to wastefully print and pay for, had I been so inclined to disregard their rules. )) but I was allowed to print documents and, after their contents was checked over by the archivist (( A bizarre and surely unnecessary step, since the documents have been screened once when they were added to the database for classified information. I could easily note down in my notes anything I read in the documents before printing them so not letting me keep the print outs hardly serves to prevent sensitive or privacy violating information from leaking out. If privacy issues are primary there should be a system, like the one at the Korean national archive, which charges the visitor to process accessed documents to redact out the names of people mentioned. At the Pusan branch of the Korean National Archive I paid about $50 and waited three days to get access to some old police logs. It took that much time because they had to go through and erase the names and provide me copies. However, I’m still grateful I got access at all. Although this is an important issue that deserves consideration, I generally feel that the privacy laws of Korea and Japan are far too strict and that they seriously inhibit serious historical work from the 19th through the period I’m working on in the mid-20th century )), to make off with these environmentally less friendly non-digital printouts.

Unfortunately, almost everything that could have been done wrong with this digitization program and its presentation to the visitor did. So let me list of the issues as a warning to other, especially smaller archives, that might consider going the digital route. I have listed them from the least worrisome to most serious:

1) Environment: The computer designated for viewing of documents had a cheap monitor with little screen brightness (even when set to full) which faced a window where sunlight beamed into the room (even when I convinced them to partially lower shades), providing a horrible viewing experience and harm to the eyes. An uncomfortable mini-mouse, horrible chair, and a table with almost no spare room for visitors to put a notebook or their laptop made this a nightmare to spend any length of time looking at documents.

2) Software: The custom built database software had an advanced query system which is useful for advanced users and archivists but requires multiple stages to search and although I quickly got used to it, I think it would confuse users not used to such systems. Also, when it shows images of archive files, a lot of vertical screen space is wasted on software options and interface components, which leads to a great deal of scrolling at any zoom level that makes reading possible.

3) Page Numbers: At the archive in question I requested a lot of documents where essentially local versions of other documents that I had seen before from other districts. Having seen many originals of this kind I know most of them are one small A5ish sized sheets of very thin paper that are held together with string. Despite the age of these documents, surprisingly I have never run into paging issues at the provincial archives, mostly because I’m seeing them still stringed together. By contrast, pages were all over the place in these documents in their digital form. While it is possible they were already unstringed and in messed up order when the contractors got the documents, I suspect that they got messed up through negligence when the originals were unstringed in order to be scanned.

4) Indexing: This is a very serious problem I found with all but two of the 70 or so documents I looked up during the two days I was at the archive. Before coming to the archive, I used the online database I made a list of file names and file numbers for documents I was interested in. I brought these to the archive and looked up the same numbers in the internal database. Each file number, unfortunately, corresponds to a packet of multiple files ranging, at least judging by what I saw, from 15-50 or so in number. I could then easily locate the appropriate document by its file name and open the images directly in the system. To my horror, in all but two of the cases, the documents in the file images did not correspond to the file name. For each document I would have to hunt through the other dozen or several dozen documents in the same general area to find the images for the file I was looking for. Sometimes I was never able to locate the file, suggesting that those images are probably found in other file groups, if at all. Now, what am I supposed to do as a historian when I cite the documents I did find? I’ll record the correct file numbers, found in the database, but any other historian wishing to confirm the information I am citing will look them up and find a completely different document unless the archivists have gone in and fixed all the indexing issues throughout their scanned collection.

I asked two of the archivists about this issue and I essentially got a, “That is funny. Well, just hunt through the rest of them and find your document. It’s probably like that for this whole collection. We paid a contractor to have it done and didn’t have the resources to check all their work.”

5) Quality: The documents I’m looking at are Communist public security bureau reports and Communist party internal reports. Some of them are hand written or are characters carved onto a special surface that allows a sort of reproduction process frequently used in the 1940s (any printing history buffs know what this ancient photocopying method is called?). In either case, they are very difficult to read, faded with time, on surfaces that are themselves often in poor condition, and most importantly, written in tiny sizes. If you are going to digitize these kinds of documents, then, you need to digitize them with a much higher quality. As I mentioned in my posting on triage in the archives, I have had to sometimes completely skip some of the more hopelessly unreadable documents or those for which the pages per hour drops to a rate that makes the investment of time not worth it. I would say that this happens in perhaps 1/10 documents I look at here.

Now, take these same kinds of documents and scan them. If you scan them well, at high resolution and with color, then you can actually make those difficult to read but important sections more readable thanks to the power of zooming in on parts of the image. However, that is not what happened here.

The contractors here decided to take these extremely difficult to read originals and scan them in black and white (not even in greyscale!). Now I know the evidence seems to suggest that if you are going to run a massive scale OCR program on historical newspapers, for example, then black and white is not significantly worse than greyscale. However, OCR is not even worth trying on these hard documents, unless there are some major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. If, however, you are trying to use human eyes to read difficult to read handwritten or carved Chinese characters on poorly preserved mediums, you need to preserve as much of the quality of the originals as possible. The cost benefit analysis done in this case resulted, in the case of many documents, in completely unreadable digital copies.

This really left me depressed. In the case of the completely botched indexing described in number four above, an archivist or the hired contractor can go back and meticulously re-index the documents so that they point to the correct images. Since some of the documents have visible page numbers, messed up page numbers might also be fixed in those cases. However, I suspect it is harder to go back and explain to the budget committee, “Ya, our contractor blew the scanning job and made thousands of once barely readable documents in our collection now completely unreadable to visitors. Can we pay to do the scanning all over again?”

I came back to Jinan yesterday morning and felt incredibly happy to go back to reading similar documents in my own hands. (( Note to super friendly archivists: if you encourage a visiting PhD student to eat while looking at the documents by suddenly (and generously) giving him a handful of juicy baby tomatoes, you might end up with a bit of tomato juice on one of the pages of part two of the 1946 treason elimination report from the Donghai public security bureau of the Jiaodong district. )) Digitization can do amazing things for improving access and preservation. When the Japanese national library set about digitizing all Meiji and now Taisho period publications I found myself complaining mostly about the slower speed at which I could browse or skim through the books. I didn’t find that readability itself suffered too much during the process. In a case like these far more difficult to read wartime Communist documents, however, sloppy digitization of these documents, only gradually opening up to researchers and historians, actually reduces rather than increases access.

I couldn’t help noticing that the locals gave me more than the usual amount of attention with a much higher frequency of gasps, cries of “Laowai!” and in one case a mother in a grocery store giving a short lecture to her child, surely too young to understand, about what this monster in their midst was (“You have never seen one of those before, have you? Don’t be scared. A foreigner is someone from another country and they don’t all look like us…”). This is nothing new, of course, to those who have traveled outside the major cities of Asia and I simply attributed this to the natural curiosity for non-Asians I have experienced throughout the countryside of Japan, Korea, and China.

During that first evening, though, I learn something about Changdao almost by accident. Walking back to my hotel late in the evening I passed by a TV shop where my iPod detected a wireless internet connection. I stopped outside the shop to download some email, and, since I really knew nothing about the place I was visiting, at least downloaded the Chinese and English wikipedia articles for the islands on my little offline Wikipedia client on my iPod. When I read the article later that evening, I found the English page had these two surprising paragraphs:

Changdao Island is closed to non-Chinese nationals. Westerners found on the island are swiftly taken to the passenger ferry terminal and placed on the next ferry back to Penglai by the islands Police service. Islanders promptly report all “outsiders” to the islands police service. (First hand experience) Police explain the reasons for this, due to the high number of military installations on the Island.

The Changdao Islands are now open to non-Chinese nationals, including westerners This was agreed by the local and national governments as of 1st December 2008.

Given the fact that non-Chinese nationals have apparently only been permitted on the island since December, and the tourism season hasn’t really started, the relative isolation of these islands may not have been the only reason there was extra surprise at the sight of a (visibly identifiable) foreigner in their midsts.

The next day, I checked out of the hotel, and made my way back to the ferry terminal. On the way, I walked over to the nearby TV shop to download my morning email (I know, I’m an addict). A middle aged man across the street yelled at me to stop. None of the many townspeople I had come across the day before had stopped me but armed with my new knowledge about the island I nervously complied. He came up to me and asked me if I had registered with the police. I told him I hadn’t. He asked me what I was doing on the islands, where I had stayed, etc. I answered honestly. Although he was polite, he said he wouldn’t let me go until he had called the police to ask if I had registered yet. I explained I hadn’t registered but I had only arrived the night before (( I think foreigners are technically supposed to register with the police everywhere in China within 24 hours of their arrival, and I did register in Jinan soon after my arrival, but almost no tourists traveling in China register in every city they stay in, At any rate, this registration he spoke of is not thus a Changdao specific requirement. Technically though, I hadn’t yet reached the 24th hour and I was off the island before my time ran out. )) and, at any rate, was now on my way to the ferry terminal to return to the mainland. “Ah, he said, but why are you going this way, when the ferry terminal is that way?!” Fortunately, a little more explanation made him understand that I simply wanted to walk a few more meters up the road to steal a wireless connection I had come across to check my email before hopping into a cab and going to the ferry terminal. At any rate, I avoided this concerned citizen’s detention, and the potential time-consuming process of going to the Changdao county police station to register myself.

Two notes to the Changdao authorities:

1. If I hadn’t downloaded that Wikipedia article, I never would have known there was any special status for the islands or any kind of military installations. Only the English wikipedia entry, and this 2005 blog entry from someone who was blocked entry some years ago alerted me to the fact, and only after I had checked into my hotel on the island. If foreigners need to take care to register when visiting the scenic islands or are subject to other restrictions, perhaps a sign anywhere in the ferry terminal (( I confirmed there is no special information in either Chinese or English posted about the status of the islands when I returned to Penglai)), or perhaps somewhere on the nice English language website for Changdao county where I am welcomed to the, “peaceful, sincere, civilized and beautiful Changdao for business investment and holiday!” If there is some kind of required registration procedure, can I recommend that one be able and asked to do this upon arrival at the ferry terminal or when one checks into the hotel (the hotel didn’t even look inside my Norwegian passport when I checked in). Finally, if a potentially military adversary like the United States really wanted to send a spy to reconnoiter your military bases on the islands, do you really think it would be a good idea to send an easily identifiable caucasian instead of one of its many citizens of Asian or similar complexion or even better, a hired local?

2. Is it just me or is it possible you asked to have your islands erased from Google maps? Your large islands are all invisible from medium zoom levels even when much smaller islands like Liugongdao near Weihai are visible at the same zoom levels. (( It is possible however, that this is just a google technical problem: it could be that Google just faded to the blue of the ocean too quickly. These islands are further out in the sea than Liugongdao which is right off the coast before Google maps fades the image to blue. )) If so, I can sort of understand why you might ask Google to completely erase this large group of islands from Google maps, even if they can be found on any regular Chinese map:

The invisible Changdao county on Google Maps.

The Changdao islands on a map found on the Yantai city government website.

However, if you are going to erase the islands from Google, you might want to erase them at all zoom levels. Zoom in a little bit and the islands suddenly appear out of nowhere, at least when I looked up the GPS point I marked at the ferry terminal:

Since this is a somewhat surprising omission, I assume it is a google imaging issue.

Language and Detailed Local Knowledge

I enter the archives here with a topic in mind, a relatively good understanding of the regional and chronological context for my topic of study, and a working knowledge of the terminology often used in the kinds of documents I will be looking at, in part thanks to the existence of a published collection of documents from the same archive (山东革命历史档案资料选编). However, I have two major disadvantages that I feel very acutely every day I come to the archives. One relates to my language ability; the other to the limits of my local knowledge.

Though I can read Chinese, especially when it comes to the materials in my particular field of study, I have two huge linguistic disadvantages compared to any native speaker of Chinese (and, to a lesser degree, native speakers of Japanese): 1) I read Chinese much slower, and more importantly, skim Chinese slower, than native speakers. I still have to occasionally look up words that cannot either be understood by context or safely ignored due to probable irrelevancy. 2) I do not have a lifetime of practice reading handwritten documents using cursive or radically simplified Chinese characters, which compose over half of the materials I’m looking at. This means that some of the many handwritten documents I look at here, where I do not have permission to photocopy or take photographs of the materials I am looking at, are partially or in a few cases completely impossible for me to read.

The second major kind of disadvantage I have relates to the fact that, as one archivist here put it to me sympathetically, “This must be overwhelming, since you have only had time to study Chinese history for a year or two before you came.” This makes it seem like every Chinese historian has studied Chinese history for decades and is thus many years ahead in terms of knowledge of the specifics of Communist party anti-treason campaigns in Shandong province, which is simply not the case. However, all other things being equal, I must come to terms with an obvious fact that lies at the heart of what the archivist was trying to point out to me: It is physically impossible for me to have found time to read more than a subset of the Chinese language secondary works or document collections that are related to my field in the short time I have worked on my dissertation, let alone read, as some graduate students and scholars here undoubtedly have, read the many other peripheral works that help one understand the context surrounding my topic. This is even more true since I am doing a transnational and comparative project that also incorporates Korea.

The only way people in my position can walk into the archive each day with some degree of self-respect is to convince ourselves that we have something unique to offer the study of our historical topic that gives us some kind of advantage relative to other scholars and students who might be working on a similar field here. Whatever this might be, our critical question, our comparative approach, our sensitivity to patterns etc. that might not be apparent to those working in other scholarly contexts, and so on, it gives us the confidence to go in and struggle through the historical materials and accept our weaknesses. In my case, I try to tell myself the contribution I can make is largely to be found in the way I “slice” the range of my inquiry and attempt to use that slice to answer particular questions. I remain open to the idea, however, that the “uniqueness of approach” claim may ultimately be an illusion, and as the quality of academic research here in China improves rapidly (I was really impressed with the breadth of reading and fresh approaches taken by some graduate students I have met here), some of the other advantages that foreign scholars coming to study might once have dared to claim are disappearing.

Even if one does avoid falling into complete despair, it remains an incredibly humbling experience to walk into the archive each day and be faced time and time again with one’s own all-so-apparent inadequacies. Below, let me share some aspects of that experience with some examples and the unfortunate but necessary steps I have to take in order to maximize the number of historical gemstones I can mine in the ocean of archival material available to me, despite my weaknesses.

Archive Triage

A man walked into the provincial archive here a few weeks ago and asked to see proof of his father’s selection as a “model worker” in 1952. He unrolls a crumbling certificate glued onto some old newspapers that he says is the original certificate. An archivist looks through some kind of a list they have for that year and find no mention of the man’s father. The man left dejected, “Everyone told me it was fake, but I still can’t believe it.”

Though this is a sad story, this shows a kind of ideal situation for a historian: to be able to walk into an archive with a detailed question, to find an authoritative source that can answer the question, and walk out with a relatively firm answer.

A policewoman walked into the archive last week and said she wanted to know more about her father’s case. Apparently, sometime during the 1940s (I can’t remember the exact year) he was accused of being a “traitor” and a “reactionary” for being a Nationalist party member in some Communist base area and had various trouble in the many anti-reactionary campaigns that followed in the decades thereafter. The archivists helped her look for information but found nothing that could be of help to her. She was offered several other places that she could go and look into things but still left disappointed.

Here we have a case where someone has a somewhat broader question, anything about her father’s case would have been helpful to her, but the archive was completely silent. This is similar to what many historians face, and I think they often change their topic, their sources, the archive in question, or the way they frame their questions in response.

However, there is another common problem, which I face here along with, surely, many of my fellow PhD cohort now camped out in various dusty reading rooms the world over: The challenge of what to do when the archive offers many hundreds of documents that each have a small possibility of offering a nugget or two that may be of use.

One simple and immediate strategy that a historian can then take is to immediately limit the scope of inquiry. That isn’t always the best first approach, however, and should probably only be attempted after getting a good sample of the whole range. Just because you have a huge potential source base, doesn’t guarantee you that selecting any subsection of it, based on region (limiting my study to treason elimination squads in the Jiaodong district), period (for example, the early formative period 1939-1941), or narrower topic (focusing just on how the squads attempted to get the ‘masses’ involved) will yield enough to be interesting.

It seems like the good results from archival research come in fits and starts. I can go for days without finding anything really useful, but then come across several fantastic finds in the course of a few hours. However, even in these cases, these fantastic finds may still only translate into a single paragraph of text or a footnote within the mammoth that is one’s dissertation. Depending on the kinds of source materials, you often have no idea if the next thing you pick up will be a total waste of time or will yield something wonderful.

Learning not to read. One of the skills that has been quite painful for me to learn is to overcome the urge to read everything. A Weihai police report from late 1945 that I looked at yesterday, for example, was over 80 pages long. Of those 80 pages, perhaps half a dozen distinct paragraphs, often separated by a dozen pages, are remotely useful to me. If I really read the full 80 pages of handwritten text, that document would take a whole day. I would probably have a much better understanding of Weihai in 1945 and could probably have possibly found more or even as much as twice the useful information, but very quickly one has to make a call about whether the potential gains are worth the time. Fortunately, the year long preparation for one’s oral exams in a PhD program, which involves the ‘reading’ of hundreds of books helps teach the lesson of not reading but effective combination of selective skimming and close reading of some sections. Unlike preparing for orals, however, the key here is not to extract the ‘main arguments’ of a report by a treason elimination squad in the Binhai district in 1944 or a Shandong police journal from 1947. The key information is very often in precisely the minute factual details and anecdotes that orals preparation teaches you to give only enough attention that you can evaluate whether they contribute or contradict the argument being made by the author of a work.

So what to do? Well, when the source base is quite large, the most useful strategy I have found is to quickly identify patterns in the structure of texts and calibrate your reading speed to locations most likely to yield results. Reading everything would, of course, yield more, but time is a very scarce resource. Early on, I found that many (but by no means all) treason elimination squad reports are divided roughly into sections, not always clearly identified, and that the kinds of meaty anecdotes I have found useful in the past are usually located in two of these sections as instructive examples. Village petitions to have certain people punished as traitors usually have long introductions and conclusions which are highly formulaic and can be skipped. North Korean trial records have extremely rigid structures that, while also not clearly marked, can be located easily by finding certain key phrases in the first sentence of paragraphs, and so on. One strategy I adopted was to familiarize myself quickly with document structures when looking them over as a whole before skimming them. To facilitate this process, try requesting similar kinds of documents in groups, even when they are separated by region and time, because similarity in the structure of these texts can significantly reduce the time it takes to process them.

This has risks too, however. If I request lots of different kinds of documents from the Tai’an district in 1942, for example, I will quickly come to understand the importance and power of something known as the “Tai’an incident” which ripples across other regions in that year and others that follow. Taking the document group approach, however, the importance and power of that event only becomes apparent when reviewing my notes from several weeks of reading. This teaches another lesson though: despite the extra time it takes, frequently review the notes one takes in order to identify new patterns, new keywords or documents to search for, and deepen one’s understanding of the chronology and institutional or regional context of the material.

The last and most painful thing I have had to do which is the best proof I have of the sad reality of my personal limits as a researcher is the kind of triage which is based purely on a linguistic evaluation: Last week I had at one point a dozen or so documents. One of these were detailed meeting minutes from a public security bureau meeting held in a Communist controlled but nominally Japanese occupied area. Given the fact it was “close to the ground” in terms of being a very “local” text, and clearly not edited before being bound and submitted, there probably would have been some good unfiltered information about what was going on in the area. Thus, the chance of finding “gemstones” of information in the source was relatively high. However, the handwriting was about 90% illegible to me at first glance, and even if I slowly worked through it, I doubt I would be able to determine more than 50% of the content with careful reading. If I was a Chinese native speaker with more experience working in these documents, I could probably do much better. However, since I’m not, and my time is scarce, I decided to use the several hours I would have spent on that document on two or three other documents with a lower chance of yielding good material but which I could read much more easily.

This is the kind of decision that has to be made all the time, and it is sad and frustrating. It is especially frustrating when one is looking directly at the gemstone in question. To take one example of many, I found an anecdote filled with rich detail in one report on an exchange between an accused traitor, some women who attended the mass trial that were yelling from the audience, and a man who got on the stage to confront the accused. I could make out bits and pieces of it, and have a theory about what transpired (I believe the accused was thrown into a well), but several key phrases were illegible to me—not because the text was smudged or the paper burnt, but because the handwriting was too difficult for me to read in a few sentences. Thus, I did not record the anecdote at all in my notes. Of course, native speakers also have a great deal of trouble with some of these texts but, all other things equal, have a huge advantage when trying to decipher things. I will still be able to write my chapters and have found great material to support my arguments, but I often lament the fact that I had to leave so many bright gemstones embedded in the rock because I couldn’t take the risk of having misunderstood a text based on a mere partial reading.

I have tried to shared some the humbling realities of doing research here and some of the triage I have had to perform while in the archive. As a closing comment: I often wish that historical research encouraged something akin to the practice of “pair programming” wherein two researchers work together on the same materials, side by side, checking for accuracy, misinterpretation, poor selection of material, etc. I know there are many good pair translators out there, but I think it is less common for historians to collaborate – especially at the research stage as oppose to the writing stage and it reminds me of the debates we had in seminars over whether history can ever be a discipline that truly encourages collaborative work. (( During our discussions in seminar, the historians of the Annales School were seen as the major exception to this observation ))

In this posting I will describe a kind of outlining software that could largely resolve the organizational problem I have described in my previous two postings without having to navigate between several applications. These could be easily added as a mode or layer of features to existing outlining software out there. In this case I’m thinking of OmniOutliner, which is what I use, but I think the kinds of modifications I am suggesting could be easily added to most other outlining software solutions out there, or serve as a foundation of a new solution based on the organizing principles described here. The result, I hope, will be an environment which will allow researchers to adopt a smooth workflow which can unite the highest level of a research outline and the most tiny fragments of notes on sources or the sources themselves.
My own favorite note taking application, OmniOutliner, like most kinds of outlining software, allows me to hierarchically and in a bullet point fashion record notes on various materials I come across ranging from historical sources to books and articles on any topic. I am always impressed with the great care to detail and flexibility that software created by Omni Group shows so if you are using a Mac, I recommend you give their offerings a look. When we make use of the information we find, we will usually mark the deployment of such information in our academic writing with the use of citations and sometimes direct quotations we have recorded. This means that an important part of historical research, as well as research in many other fields, is keeping careful track of exactly what information comes from what source. Two approaches in note-taking spring to my mind:

1) Somehow keep notes on sources separated by the source, whether in different sections of a single file, or different files. Make note of page numbers as one records notes from different parts of the source.

2) Organize all one’s notes by an arbitrarily determined collection of ideas (or chapters, or chapter sections, or themes, etc.). Each time one reads a new source directly input information worth remembering into the note file or section of a note file dedicated to the given idea, chapter, or theme.

The problem with the first approach, which I presume to be the more common, is that if one has a very large quantity of notes on many different sources, when one shifts into the writing mode, one has to hunt through one’s notes looking for the information relevant to the claims one wishes to make in that particular section of the dissertation. This is the problem of the lack of the “middle layer” of organization that I referred to in my first posting and for which I have presented a temporary and imperfect solution for in the second posting.

For example, I have somewhere between three and four hundred note files on various sources related or potentially useful to my PhD dissertation. Some of them are less than a page long with a few brief points of interest. Others, like my note files on various newspapers and archival collections, are extremely long files of several dozen pages divided into sections by year, issue, or specific document in a collection. Hunting through them all, or more likely, a quickly chosen sub section of these files in search of useful information I have recorded will be highly time consuming and risks missing some great gems that I have since forgotten about.

The second approach seems to provide a much faster transition from research to writing since the researcher can sit down and immediately begin writing a chapter based on the notes collected together under certain idea or chapter headings. The problem with the second approach is twofold: 1) When fragments are completely extracted from their original context you lose the important sense of connection between that information and other fragments or notes you have recorded from the same source. Call this the “problem of context.” 2) Each time you enter a fragment from a source into this chapter/idea/theme based note file you will have to also make note of the exact source and location in that source. This means the time required to record any fragment can potentially double. Call this the “problem of reference.”

Tagging and the Problem of Context

Those familiar with the dramatic rise of “tagging” of information online might have already thought of a way to resolve the problem of context. If information is tagged, you get the best of both worlds: a tagged object can be linked to many different ideas or multiple chapters while still remaining in whatever structure it was found in. There is no need to take the second approach above because we can dynamically create such an idea/theme list of fragments based on particular tags given those fragments within the note file for the original source. When a picture in a Flickr set entitled, say, “trip to the lake” is tagged “bird” then the addition of the tag does not remove it from its initial context, that is to say, the fact that it is a picture posted to the Flickr collection of kmlawson and that I have placed it in set. (( Of course, in the case of such digital resources, we can of course imagine these initial contextual traits as really just being two more special kinds of tags, one exclusive tag to indicate the owner, and a list of tags with each set I have put the picture into. ))

An organizational application which supports tagging, such as Yojimbo, Sente, Evernote, Leap, Yep, etc. allows you to easily tag and display a list of files by tags. iPhoto allows you to tag your images, and I use an applescript to add tags to my songs in iTunes to support my dynamically generated ’smart’ playlists. However, from the perspective of the historian writing a book or a PhD student writing their dissertation, these tagging applications aren’t quite enough. All these applications are tagging at the level of files, which is not really the level of detail we need in creating a rich web of connections for our research.

Tags must go beyond the level of the file and down to the level of a bullet point within one’s notes. We need a way to easily and quickly tag individual fragments of information within the sources we find so can easily deploy them in our academic writing.

Let me give a concrete example. This is a fragment from one of my note files from a local police report from my trip to the archives yesterday. I also list where this fragment is within my system of organization:

In my folder “Dissertation”:
In my subfolder: “Related Notes”
In the file “Shandong Provincial Archives”:
Under the heading for file G042-01-0283-007 全县反奸诉苦大会总结 1946.4.3 日照县公安局
I have the following fragment from a local trial of a traitor:
“12/107 a woman’s father was executed by shooting by the accused traitor during the J occupation. When she 控訴ed the traitor she cried the whole time. She 上台 and using a stone, beat the 犯人. This scene made the masses 感動 and 落淚”

This is a very brief but rich piece of historical detail from a police report showing how a woman mounted the stage and beat an accused pro-Japanese collaborator who had executed her father when the town was under Japanese occupation, and it records the subsequent emotional impact this scene had upon the ‘masses’ in attendance. In a report that deals mostly with generalities and statistics this is a powerful little anecdote that might potentially make an appearance in my dissertation. This fragment might help me in one or two ways: 1) It can help me describe the way the ‘masses’ got directly involved during the local treason trials and carried out acts of direct violence against the accused during the course of the trials without the interference, despite party directives that no violence or beatings should be carried out upon the accused, especially prior to conviction, and any eventual executions only be carried out by a bullet fired by ’special’ public security officers. 2) It can also help me make the argument, which I hope to make, which is that Communist cadres were very interested in recording the way that these treason trials aroused the masses, sparked emotion in them, and helped organize them in the contexts of movements carried out under party control. In this case, and in many others I have found, the reaction of the masses is carefully recorded.

Now, how shall I preserve this fragment for easy access later when I begin writing? I might want to give several tags to this fragment. Perhaps I want to tag it for things like, ‘Treason and Social Reform’ (the chapter this might be used in) ‘local trials’,'reaction of the masses’,'women’,'beatings’, etc. Of course, to reduce the problem of tagging things in slightly different tags, auto-complete should be available to guess tags as I begin typing them.

It would also be nice if there were cascading tags. That is to say, if I could assign certain tags to the entire file, Shandong Provincial Archives with tags like, “China”,”Shandong” which trickled down to every fragment bullet point in the file, and also tag the sub-section of that file for the document G042-01-0283-007 全县反奸诉苦大会总结 1946.4.3 日照县公安局 so that all fragments of notes taken from that file had the tags ‘日照’,'公安局’,'反奸訴苦’,'1946′, etc.

It does me little good to use Leap, or Yojimbo etc. to tag the whole file, now several dozen pages long, with all my notes from the Shandong Provincial Archives, or even a file specifically for G042-01-0283-007 which included other useful information that I might want to tag in other ways (like a table of statistics of how many ‘masses’ were ‘organized’ as a result of carrying out the anti-treason campaign). An ideal outline software solution for academic researchers would allow tagging at the level of the bullet point.

The Problem of Reference and Creating Smart or Dynamic Outlines

Of course, this system would have to work both ways. Let us say I have finished my research in the various archives, libraries, and online databases and completed the taking of all those note files. Let us say my software has allowed me to tag all the more useful bullet points, and allowed these bullet points to receive the cascading tags of their section headers and the note files themselves.

Ideally, I should now be given some kind of clean view of all fragments of information that match certain tags. Besides the fact that these have now been dynamically collected for me and displayed in a list, the most important thing I need to know now is what source they came from. Thus, every fragment listed in this way should be able to display a column or otherwise make apparent the source. This system would ideally account for the fact that the source does not always correspond to the name of the originating file, or the header for the section from which the fragment was taken.

To accommodate the fact that a fragment’s source is not necessarily reflected in the file name or section name of its origin, I suggest the outlining software allow the user to designate certain blocks in a note file, whether it is the whole file (I have many files dedicated to a single book or article), or merely a section of a file (I have a single file for all the documents I viewed from some archives such as Shandong Provincial Archive, Korean National Archive, RG242 of the US National Archives) as belonging to a source. The actual citation for this source might be kept internally within the application. However, since there are many great tools out there for managing academic resources and their citations that a student or academic might already have a preference for (Zotero, Sente, Endnote, etc.) I believe the best solution would be to provide some form of a link to a source entry in these external resources, whether they be within an offline application or an online format.

Finally, viewing a list of fragments by a single tag or combination of tags merely gives you an overview of one idea (or a chapter if you have tags for chapter themes). The application should allow you to create ’smart outline’ files which are essentially dynamically created mega-outlines, ‘notes on notes’ or a kind of complex ’smart playlist’ of points to be made for each argument or chapter. Here is what I am thinking of: The user could create a ’smart’ note file called, say, “Dissertation Outline” and then write out their broad outline divided into chapters and the major arguments they wish to make. Then, they could non-exclusively assign certain tags to chapters or arguments within those chapters in a special way that allowed “and/or/not” constructions to limit the hits. This is similar to the process of tagging fragments within note files described above, with one important exception: in this case, tagging these chapters or arguments allows the user to list all fragments associated with those tags under those sections in this mega outline. Thus, at a glance, the researcher can view a dynamic and self-updating outline of their dissertation outline with the major sections and arguments directly inputted, but with each of these chapters or arguments containing within them a smart list of all fragments that contains certain tags associated with these chapters or arguments.

A few more features I believe this smart outline view ought to support: this view would also include a feature that could show a list of “orphans” which are tagged fragments which have not yet been assigned a location in the smart outline. It is very likely that we have tagged many fragments in ways that at a later date turn out not to be the most obvious when we enter the writing process. This orphan view can rescue important fragments from obscurity.

Also, since such a powerful and probably huge smart lists will probably result in a large number of duplicate or less than useful fragments getting listed, the user should be able to easily hide single or groups of fragments which, despite their promising tags, are irrelevant to a chapter/argument. There might also be check marks given so that a researcher can check off fragments as they include them in the written work.

This view should also account for the very likely possibility that the researcher anticipates using material from a source for which they have no notes for. Just as fragments are associated with sources, in this mega-outline or smart outline view, they should be able to easily drag and drop in references to sources they think will be relevant to specific arguments or chapters but for which they have no notes or fragments at all. Again this can be from an internally managed list of sources within the application but more ideally compatible with various existing solutions like Zotero, Sente, etc.

Let me give an example of the ‘Smart Outline’ feature of the software as I imagine it:

Let us say I’m writing a book just on the Treason Elimination Squads in China (rather than divided between two chapters as I currently plan to). After tagging hundreds or several thousand bullet points in dozens or hundreds of note files managed by my outlining application, I write up a (very boring) book outline using this ’smart outline’ feature:

Introduction
Formation of the Treason Elimination Bureau in Shandong
Early Excesses and the Anti-Trotskyist Movement
Balancing the Three Treasonous Enemies
Reckless Arrests, Reckless Killings, and Attempts at Reform
Turning to the Masses
Liberation and the Anti-Treason Campaign
Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Civil War

While I won’t list them here, let us say I also add some sections for each of those chapters with major arguments I want to make in the book under the headings for each chapter. Now, I set about attaching relevant tags for each chapter or argument/section within a chapter (and some of these tags might be tags I have created specifically for chapters):

Introduction
Formation of the Treason Elimination Bureau in Shandong
-([not 1940 or 1941 or ... 1949],’Treason Elimination Bureau’,Shandong)
Early Excesses and the Anti-Trotskyist Movement
-(托匪,’Treason Elimination Bureau’,torture,executions,excesses,湖西錯誤,[泰山 and 1942],[濱海 and 1942])
Balancing the Three Treasonous Enemies
-(托匪,國特，敵偽，’Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Reckless Arrests, Reckless Killings, and Attempts at Reform
-(亂捕亂殺,’Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Turning to the Masses
-(群眾化, ‘Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Liberation and the Anti-Treason Campaign
-(反奸訴苦, 1946, etc.)
Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Civil War
-(反奸防匪，[Shandong and [1947 or 1948 or 1949]]

Having thus assigned certain tags (in some cases the same tags are listed in multiple chapters) I should, in the software I am imagining, be able to view a dynamic list of all fragments with those tags (or in some cases, complex combinations of tags like Taishan and 1942 so I get only fragments that are likely to refer to the Taishan killings of that year) under the relevant headings. I should be able to independently re-order the displayed fragments and hide those that I determine are irrelevant in preparation for writing. These smart lists should be ‘live’ so if I go back to the library or archive and add more fragments in some of my note files with the relevant tags, they should appear in the ’smart outline’ which lists these tags.

I believe that what I have described above can serve as a rough blueprint for a very powerful application that will allow researchers to have a fully integrated web of information between different levels of organization – at the highest outline level and the lowest level of note taking on sources.

Putting it All Together

So, putting it together, here is what I am imagining as a powerful note taking and organizational solution for academic research:

A powerful and flexible hierarchical bullet point outlining application, such as OmniOutliner

In the ’smart outline’ the user should be able to drop in references to specific sources under certain sections to account for useful sources for which there are no note files and fragments.

In short, this application is an outline or note-taking application which supports sub-file level tagging of bullet points along with and a powerful ’smart outline’ view that allows users to create powerful high-level and dynamic outlines that list all possibly useful fragments of supporting evidence, what sources they come from, or simply references to sources for which there are no notes. It should ideally interface with existing mature citation software solutions either on or offline which already has wide adoption within the academic world.

I’d be very interested in hearing about how other graduate students have sought to resolve the problem of connecting the large quantity of notes, outlines, and unprocessed raw sources with the grand outline of a huge writing project like a dissertation. Below I describe briefly how I have essentially integrated this process into my own task management routine.

First, let me describe how I have been organizing the historical materials I have been collecting in the field and while back at university. Read on for the details.The primary historical sources I have been working on can be divided into four kinds:

1) Sources I have read but of which I have no hard or digital copy. These are represented on my computer only in the form of the OmniOutliner notes I have taken on these files, along with the appropriate information necessary for citations.

2) Sources which I have only a photocopy hard copy of. Usually I write any important citation information directly on the first page of the document. Then, to each of these sources (which may be primary materials or photocopied books, articles, etc.) I have given an index number composed of a letter (I have used the language the text is in, which in retrospect was not the best way to do things) and an incrementally increasing number so that I can easily refer to my documents in various other files and relocate them in my boxes of files. I have a single OmniOutliner ‘document index’ which lists the name or description of the document, its index number, and the date I found the document. This index number is also noted under the entry for the appropriate day in a separate chronological dissertation log I keep which describes what work I have been doing on my dissertation and the context in which I came across the material). Two examples from my document index (description | index number | date found):

汪偽政府所屬各機關部隊學校團體重要人員名錄 C1010 2008.7.22

BA0155460 사법경찰지도교양재료송부의건 K1003 2008.5.16

3) Sources which I have taken a photographic image of. Some archives and libraries in China, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States allow me to (or at least don’t stop me from) bringing my own camera and taking pictures of the sources I’m looking at. For each source, I usually create a separate OmniOutliner document. In it I take notes on the content of the source, noting any useful information I find in the source. For each photograph of a page of material I take, I record the photograph’s ID number (there is a different numbering scheme for every camera). Sometimes, the notes are very simple, especially if I don’t know if a piece of material will ever be of any value. However, hard disk space is cheap so I take photos of a lot of material I may never look at in any great detail. When I import my photographs, I keep them separated, by source, in folders within my ‘Images’ folder in my ‘Dissertation’ folder. The file name of imported images is the ID number. That way, if I ever need to look at the original image, I can see the ID number in the notes for a source and then search for that number.

For example. In my notes from my reading of the newspaper 青島公報, which is divided into microfilm reels and years, I have an like this in my note file:

青島公報 Reel 1 From 1946.3 to 1946.10

9.1:3 three 漢奸, including a woman ‘cultural hanjian’ 焦墨筠 who gets 3 years and 6 months with other two geting 10 and 15 years each #0508

In this case, this is a short note summarizing an article on page 3 of the September 1st issue of 青島公報 on the sentencing of three Chinese traitors. I will probably never use this information in my dissertation but if I decide at some point to talk more about female traitors or ‘cultural traitors’ then I know I have this short newspaper article on the sentencing of one such woman at the conclusion of her treason trial. In my dissertation log, I find that I was reading through this reel on the afternoon of 2008.12.2 at Shandong Provincial library microfilm room where they let me take somewhat readable photographs of the screen of the microfilm machine. The numeric portion of “#0508″ can be searched for on my hard drive that search will yield an image in the 青島公報 subfolder of my images folder named DSCF0508.JPG that contains the full text of the original article. I use the prefix ‘#’ because I have already taken over 10,000 pictures during the course of my dissertation research and the camera has begun to recycle the numbers. I used to use ‘$’ but to keep these numbers unique in my notes, I now use ‘#’ for the second 9,999 pictures. When I search for 0508 I now get two pictures, but this is hasn’t been too much of a hassle to sort out.

4) Sources which I have a PDF or other digital document for. Many secondary sources or scanned materials I have are available in PDF format, which I have stored among my dissertation files. When I have read these, I record notes for them in an OmniOutliner file. Sometimes, when I have read several articles on a particular topic, I will have a separate OmniOutliner file summarizing the points and arguments from a collection of articles. For example, I have read a series of articles and book chapters on the history of the Shandong column of the 8th route army during wartime China and have compiled notes on this into a separate file I have for historical background on wartime Shandong province. I also have a note file compiling various notes on my notes related to Korea’s treason trials in 1949.

Making the Connections

So the challenge remains, how do I link all these notes, notes on notes, to the actual dissertation without constantly going on a long hunt through all my files?

The way I have approached this problem is to simply use my existing task management software, or ‘to-do’ software or ‘GTD’ (‘Getting Things Done’) software.

I use a program called OmniFocus both on my MacBook Pro laptop computer and on my iPod Touch to manage my tasks (they synch their content with each other). Like many other ‘GTD’ programs out there like Things or iGTD in the case of Mac software, OmniFocus allows you to organize your tasks by projects and contexts. You might first drop tasks into a general ‘inbox’ of unprocessed tasks and then add a project and context for later review if you don’t have time to perform a given task when reviewing the inbox. The former allows you to easy find tasks related to specific projects you are working on while the latter allows you to find tasks that can be done in certain ‘contexts’ of your life. So, for example, I have a ‘web’ and ‘email’ context which are sub contexts under ‘comp’ for when I’m working on my computer but also a ‘harvard-yenching’ and ’shandong provincial library’ and ‘taiwan national library’ context all three which are sub-contexts under the ‘library’ context.

The key efficiency move in this process of connection creation is, however, the combination of project organization and really simple adding of items to that project in the task management software. Many applications like OmniFocus allow you to very quickly and painlessly add tasks to your inbox or specific projects through a ‘quick entry window’ that is accessible in response to a keyboard shortcut. It is with this feature that I have found a simple and easy way to connect my notes with my final chapter writing: In OmniFocus I have created a folder of projects for my dissertation and created separate projects for each of my planned chapters.

Then, as I am taking notes on my sources, each time I finish looking through a source, I reread my notes and try to estimate what chapter the various information I have found can potentially contribute to. I then copy either the name of the source, its file number, etc. (if the notes are relatively few) or a unique phrase or date+phrase from the relevant bullet point in my notes and activate the ‘quick entry window’ of OmniFocus. I assign it the context of ‘writing’ for when I actually get to writing my dissertation, briefly describe what I think the source contributes, and then assign the item the project corresponding to the chapter I believe I will likely have use for the information. If I don’t really know what chapter some material will useful for, I might add it to some other more general topic projects I have added to the dissertation folder of OmniFocus projects, or, for the time being, drop it into the inbox for later consideration.

After adding many such items, not all which will necessarily make it into the dissertation, I return to OmniFocus and review the various items I have added, eliminating those I don’t think will actually be useful when I begin writing, and grouping the various items into hierarchical categories within the chapter projects corresponding to sections of my chapter as I currently imagine it.

What I hope will result from this is a smoother writing process. As I write the various portions of each chapter I can find exact references to individual note files or parts of files where I can find the relevant source material and notes on that source material that will help me make the arguments I am planning to make in the final project. All I have to do is look at the OmniFocus project for a given chapter and I will see a full list of references, grouped by the various points or arguments I hope to make, ready for incorporation into the writing.

As I said in my first posting, I don’t really think this is really all that original a method, and is probably just a variation of some kind of similar process (though perhaps without using software) that many graduate students might use when preparing for a large writing process. What I think is particularly useful with this approach is that I can very quickly add these little references – or pointers to sources, whenever I finish typing up notes on a given source without ever actually leaving the outlining software. It is very fast and simple and hardly interrupts the note taking process.

In a shorter final posting on this topic, I want to suggest how I think this process could be made even more fast and well integrated, if the more powerful outlining applications, such as OmniOutliner for Mac (or competing outlining applications on Windows or Linux), specifically targeted this kind of workflow.