It has been a busy two weeks but I have been working a little on my online projects. The East Asia History Forums have been visited by most people I have spread the word to but not much has been posted.
I have started a new project at ChinaJapan.org, a “Scholar Blogs” project. Basically, I am trying to convince a number of scholars doing Sino-Japanese studies or research in related fields to allow me to host web logs for them at ChinaJapan.org…
The first of these scholar blogs to become active is Joshua Fogel, a leading scholar in Sino-Japanese studies and Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You can view his blog here:
There are other blogs set up but he is the only one to start posting. He would love comments on his site.
I also set up one for myself here but I will just use it for postings related to the ChinaJapan.org project and Sino-Japanese relations. I think I have enough sites.
I am a little dissapointed at how few postings there are at the East Asia History Forum site so far. It may be a time issue. However, I suspect it is because everyone who has visited saw how few postings there were and were not really motivated to contribute if there isn’t the appearance of an active community. It is also possible that the strict guidelines I lay down for the site is part of the problem.
I think I will have to bully some of my friends studying in the fields corresponding to the forums into making a few postings to make it more lively. I really want it to become a useful and international online place for students and scholars to exchange research.
I spent the afternoon today with Michael Zock, a friend of mine who is doing research in Japan for a time in his field of computational linguistics. He is also working on the Papillion Project. He is always an inspiring person to talk to and he always helps keep me interested in the area of language learning, and in particular the intersection between it and technology.