I know exactly what you mean by closed. I actually wrote to the professors at University of Oslo who have created a Norwegian-Chinese dictionary. They got millions of kroner from the Norwegian government to do this, and the books cost 1000 NOK (about $180 USD) to buy, and are gigantic… Of course, they’ve only sold a handful (I got one as a gift, but never use it). If I could get the electronic database, I would use it a lot… If I could get the database in an open format, I could do all kinds of amazing useful things with it. I asked them directly if they would be willing to release it, and they declined. Sad. But we have to keep pushing :)

Stian

Having said that, some cynical people will read your research page as an attempt to stake ground and establish precedence. It’s sad, but probably true.

E. Asian studies–speaking broadly– is undergoing a transformation now; the people that you find most hostile to your open attitude will likely be senior scholars, who are used to have several centuries by themselves.

I know a big part of academics don’t subscribe to that paradigm, but openness is here to stay, consider yourself a small part of history in the making.

Please forgive the rather simple comparison but I just had to say that this whole mentality reminds me of a friend I went to high school with who would refuse to tell me where she got her awesome DocMarten like boots. She said she didn’t want me going out and buying the same pair because she wanted to be the only one in school that had them. She was pretty fierce about guarding her misfit persona.

This propels the cultural historians to develop a love for episodes from the past that are shocking and unique. And if you discovered a story that nobody else had unearthed before, you build your entire monograph or career plan on the basis of the novelty of having ‘discovered’ something.

I have a friend in Columbia who reads the same kind of sources as I do. The bulk of our dissertation research surrounds the experience of Koryo intellectuals under Mongol rule. But we ask different questions and place our analysis in different types of framework. We always share our discoveries with each other and will continue to do so.

What I find disturbing is that on several occasions, I was told not to openly share sources that supposedly nobody else looked at. Not only do I find that unethical, it doesn’t make any sense. The South Korean scholars have unearthed just about every textual source we can think of for the medieval period and have written so many studies already. History is about asking meaningful questions, not antiquarian retelling of stories patched together from disjointed sequence of events, and is about pursuing those meaningful questions with rigor.

Okay, enough rant for today. I hope to chat about this more with you after my exam next week!