Author: Muninn

Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat

Cat
I watched an episode of the cartoon “Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat” today on PBS while eating lunch (shǎguā 傻瓜, meaning “fool”). Aimed at kids aged 5-8 years old, it is perfectly targeted to keep me entertained. When watching anything these days, I always feel my critical knife want to go into attack mode but I must say I thought the cartoon was very cute and it prompted me to visit the PBS homepage for the show.

The cartoon follows the adventures of the mischievous cat 傻瓜 and other characters. The show is deeply engaged in ethical education and multiculturalism, and according to their site each episode is dedicated to: 1) Modeling strategies for dealing with the personal and social issues children face as they grow into a variety of new roles. 2) Exposing children to elements of cultures other than their own and showing that children all over share many of the same interests and emotions. In other words there is a clear universalistic Enlightenment approach here combined with an appreciation for cultural diversity.

WishbearI’m not sure how much influence they have on children, but I certainly remember all sorts of warm and fuzzy lessons that learned from watching the Smurfs and Care Bears as a kid. Ok, so one of the Care Bear artists (writers?), Kathy Bostrom, is also author of “Little Blessings: God Loves You” and is perhaps the same Kathy Bostrom which was a previous president of the Presbyterian Writers Guild. However, I’m happy to see one author find that, “The occult images found in the Care Bear series are extremely subtle. On the surface, the Care Bears teach the children to express their feelings, especially those of love, to others. At first, these sound like very good ideas, but, they are Humanistic principles, which are in contradiction to God’s teachings. Magic and Eastern religious ideals also are prevalent in this series.” (Cited here from Phillips, Phil: Turmoil in the Toybox).

What I liked most about the Shagua/Sagwa cartoon, which is apparently based on a story by the bestselling author Amy Tan, was that unlike many cartoons that show aspects of cultures that are unfamiliar to many of its viewers, this cartoon actually tried to slip in a variety of cultural material which goes beyond the regular standard images. Sure, it had really stereotyped images in some scenes, but I liked how simple Chinese words constantly slipped into the dialogue (kinship terms, greetings like zaijian, food items like baozi, instrument names, and other daily words). Of course, many of the characters act in strangely Western ways, and promote entirely anachronistic values, but a child watching this will be exposed to a host of new cultural images, and vocabulary. After a word, for example is introduced, it is often simply referred thereafter by its Chinese name. I would love see more multi-lingual cartoons out there, even if this just means that we call baozi a baozi, and not a “steamed bun”!

As for the moral education aspects of the cartoon, looking over the list of “messages” in each episode, I liked how we start with an episode which mocks slavish obedience to authority! The question the site suggests parents ask children, “Ask your child to think of a rule that he or she believes is unfair. What could be done to change the rule?”

Tsunami

The only news that I have heard while here in OK is of the terrible disaster unfolding in the Indian Ocean. Wikipedia is collecting information about it on their article. There is a blog where you can track relief operations, casualties, and most importantly, various entries updating the many ways that you can to contribute to the various organizations that are trying to face the disaster’s aftermath.

Without seeing enough of the images of the aftermath and movie clips, this is one of those events which are just hard to fathom by reading online news articles. We see the numbers, and I can compare it to previous events and see how large these numbers are, but it is much harder to get a grip on the huge suffering involved and how huge the impact this will be on thousands of whole communities on the Indian ocean rim. There a note here on the historical perspective, but this is completely regional disaster of a huge scale.

Tsunami Animation

Year in Review

My family Christmas celebrations have concluded. I spent a warm and happy time together with my parents, my sister Carleen and my brother-in-law Mike. Since I don’t really send out Christmas cards or even 年賀状 (new year’s cards) I’ve decided to try to compile a sort of “year in review” on my blog. It will be somewhat longwinded but I’ll bold the more major event markers.

This is actually quite a challenge, since I suffer from a mild case of the “memento syndrome” combined with a more regular long term amnesia. However, using the techniques of a historian and detective I have been able to reconstruct the only true and, of course completely accurate narrative of my past year with the use of three important archives: My calendar application, my email, and my blog entries.

Continue reading Year in Review

Rory Litwin: Critique of the Google Library Project

My sister just passed on to me a scathing critique of the new project to digitize some or all of the contents of several major research libraries by Google (my own posting on this here). Rory Litwin‘s article, entitled “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries” has almost nothing positive to say about the project and fears that this will spell doom for librarians and the enterprise of truth and knowledge. I found the article completely unconvincing, even if it seems to be motivated by a healthy progressive librarian’s skepticism for mammoth corporations like Google and the darker side of capitalist markets. I address some of his specific points in this entry, but the article’s biggest weakness comes from an assumption that the libraries have sold their books and souls to Google and that this demonic internet giant can now proceed with the destruction of mankind’s common quest for truth.

I believe he is wrong on almost every count, although a final verdict on my own response will have to await more details about the specific agreements between the major research libraries involved and Google. He fails to fully recognize the fact that Google has not muscled its way into the stacks of Harvard, U Michigan, and others to rob them of their treasures – even if, as he says, Google’s “back-room deal” was “not worked out in cooperation with the [broader] library community”. It wasn’t, but it was worked out with a select number of huge libraries who are extremely protective of their holdings. These libraries are powerful agents in this discussion, and at least in Harvard’s case, hardly paragons of democratic virtue. Their key future role in this project are not sufficiently addressed by Litwin.

Overall, I think the article represents the last gasp of a bitter and dying breed of specialists who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to both the technological changes of our time, and on the theoretical level, the problematization of the Enlightenment project of progress and knowledge production. I’m sure that many others in the library community, or more broadly information and knowledge specialists, are more willing to recognize their own failure to enlist the massive public support and financial resources needed to digitize their holdings and confront the significant changes to their profession that a digital information world entails.

What gets lost in Litwin’s article, in which the shadow of a deeply commercialized and inequitable world of knowledge hangs over the pursuit of “truth”, is the fact that we already have a deeply inequitable world of knowledge. As a student at Harvard, but a former student of Columbia, Western Washington University and frequent visitor to Stavanger and Bartlesville libraries I can personally attest to the huge gap in access to resources, both digital and traditional. Harvard’s libraries have exceeded all of my expectations but I am only a very temporary guest at the table of its highly restricted library system. I feel a deep sadness that these resources are not available to everyone. I am delighted that Harvard and other similar institutions are opening up, and if it takes a massive corporation to help them take the first step, then I welcome it with open arms.

I seriously doubt that Harvard and the other libraries have signed away control to the eventual digital collections that result, and that we will likely see competition between commercial companies to provide access under some sort of licensing agreement, and potentially, a non-commercial public-supported alternative once the extremely expensive process of digitizing is complete. I believe that hosting such resources is less expensive than the massive investment of digitizing them, and it will be easier for the library community to mobilize behind a more modest public solution to the former (for public domain materials), than the latter. There will then continue to be room for commercial services which add additional features, for-pay access to copyrighted materials, and so on, as well as room for libraries to continue providing free access to those copyrighted materials they cannot legally host online.

As a side note, my own radical opposition to the current regime of intellectual property law also gives me hope that this will advance the revolutionary cause of copyright reform or, should that fail, at least the rise of a massive underground P2P market for huge databases of books and archives.

The appropriate response to the Google project is not a luddite call to arms, but reflection on why the library community could not launch a huge project like this themselves, followed by serious debate about how librarians can ensure that their considerable skills and knowledge will help guide the future use of these new digital resources, in whatever form they take.

Librarians have won incredibly important legal battles to protect equal and public access to (public library and archive) collections. Though some may not see it in these terms, they are in fact the guardians of a deeply socialist conception of knowledge as a public good. The sooner we get all of them on board for the next generation’s war to implant these values in the digital world and establish the legal foundations to protect them, the less likely that the commercialization of most human knowledge will become a real threat.

Since this posting has already grown a bit long, I’ll address specific points by Litwin in a future update to this posting.

Oasis: Kim Kyung Hyun Talk

I attended Kim Kyung Hyun’s talk today on the Korean movie Oasis. Kim has written The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. His talk, “Between Greenfinches and Sparrows: Interpreting Signs in Oasis” (He actually changed the title but I didn’t catch the new one) focused on Fantasy, Language, and Naturalism in director Lee Chang-dong’s movies, especially Oasis. I was a bit disappointed at what I felt to an excess of fluff in his talk (fluff: a precise technical term which I use to refer to slightly incoherent theoretical babble which constructs impossible and unfinished sentences that can only give the listener a sort of approximate idea of what the speaker is trying to say). He also had a tendency to spend several minutes explaining what questions he wants to grapple with but then giving us a single sentence answer which is then repeated for us in many eloquent but ultimately redundant ways. However, this is not at all uncommon in literary or cinema related talks.
Continue reading Oasis: Kim Kyung Hyun Talk

Just Watched Oasis

I just finished watching Oasis, a Korean movie directed by Lee Chang-dong. It is perhaps the most emotionally challenging movie I have ever seen. It is a tragic love story but also a merciless social critique. I’ll be attending a talk on the movie tomorrow given by Kim Kyung Hyun from UC Irvine and I’ll write more then.

Harvard Pilot Project with Google

I just got a university-wide email regarding a pilot project that Harvard is starting with Google. It looks like Google will also be joining with other universities in this project, which will begin the work of digitizing, and in the case of public domain works providing public access to, the contents of the Harvard library system. The email included a short summary of the initial pilot and didn’t ask me to keep this confidential so I will reproduce the description of the project below:

Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google’s search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. As of 9 am on December 14, an FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program with Google will be available at http://hul.harvard.edu.

The Harvard pilot will provide the information and experience on which the University can base a decision to launch a large-scale digitization program. Any such decision will reflect the fact that Harvard’s library holdings are among the University’s core assets, that the magnitude of those holdings is unique among university libraries anywhere in the world, and that the stewardship of these holdings is of paramount importance. If the pilot is deemed successful, Harvard will explore a long-term program with Google through which the vast majority of the University’s library books would be digitized and included in Google’s searchable database. Google will bear the direct costs of digitization in the pilot project.

By combining the skills and library collections of Harvard University with the innovative search skills and capacity of Google, a long-term program has the potential to create an important public good. According to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, “Harvard has the greatest university library in the world. If this experiment is successful, we have the potential to provide the world’s greatest system for dissemination as well.”

In addition, there would be special benefits to the Harvard community. Plans call for the eventual development of a link allowing Google users at Harvard to connect directly to the online HOLLIS (Harvard Online Library Information System) catalog (http://holliscatalog.harvard.edu) for information on the location and availability at Harvard of works identified through a Google search. This would merge the search capacity of the Internet with the deep research collections at Harvard into one seamless resource-a development especially important for undergraduates who often see the library and the Internet as alternative and perhaps rival sources of information.

Eventually, Harvard users would benefit from far better access to the 5 million books located at the Harvard Depository (HD). If the University undertakes the long-term program, Harvard users would gain online access to the full text of out-of-copyright books stored at HD. For books still in copyright, Harvard users could gain the ability to search for small snippets of text and, possibly, to view tables of contents. In short, the Harvard student or faculty member would gain some of the advantages of browsing that remote storage of books at HD cannot currently provide.

According to Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, “The possibility of a large-scale digitization of Harvard’s library books does not in any way diminish the University’s commitment to the collection and preservation of books as physical objects. The digital copy will not be a substitute for the books themselves. We will continue actively to acquire materials in all formats and we will continue to conserve them. In fact, as part of the pilot we are developing criteria for identifying books that are too fragile for digitizing and for selecting them out of the project.

“It is clear,” Verba continued, “that the new century presents unparalleled challenges and opportunities to Harvard’s libraries. Our pilot program with Google can prove to be a vital and revealing first step in a lengthy and rewarding process that will benefit generations of scholars and others.”

When Harvard or Google make their official announcement, I’ll link to whatever I can find. I personally think this is really big news. I hope that after other major universities join this movement the Library of Congress will follow. Of course, I’m not happy about Google having a monopoly on this sort of thing but I suspect that these universities will not consent to any kind of exclusive licensing and we will see competing services emerge soon. This is a great day for scholarship and, in my opinion, for democratizing access to knowledge.

UPDATES: 21:00 – The first hit for this on Google News is a KOTV article about this here which just got posted. I’m guessing this will be big news tomorrow. In the article Harvard comes out as one of the least cooperative of the libraries involved in the project. 22:00 – The New York times has just now posted an article on this. Notice the article is dated December 14th so it is probably in tomorrow’s print edition. The article also had this to add:

Last night the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

It looks like Harvard is only allowing some 40,000 volumes to start and is being very protective about its collection. I don’t believe for a second Harvard President Summer’s quote in the NYT article saying that Harvard has always held its library to be a “global resource” especially when, judging only from these initial articles, it seems like they are one of the least enthusiastic participants in this new project. Michigan and Stanford are leading the way by committing millions of books in their collection. I’m really excited about this, I really hope the movement will spread quickly to Japan’s National Diet Library, and countless of libraries around the world. This is truly an exciting time!

Introductions

I haven’t experienced this with people in my department (history) but based on my experiences so far, this is a very common first conversation with other Harvard graduate students (especially law school students):

A: What is your name?
B: Konrad
A: Where did you go to undergrad?
B: Western Washington University
A: Oh

Besides the fact that my undergraduate institution, which I’m very fond of, is not an elite ivy league school, it also fits into the ridiculed category of what my recent PhD graduate friend calls, “East Jesus Tech” or any schools where are “directional colleges”, religious/denominational, or technical colleges.

Hanja Dictionary

There are lots of Chinese character dictionaries online (for example 中文.com or Jim Breen’s online dictionary) but I wanted to post a link to a Korean Chinese character (Hanja) site which I like. They have a number of reference tools there, and the site is definitely geared towards Korean native speakers but I find it useful as I learn Korean. One nice little extra feature they have is that when you search for a single character, it shows you the “five forms” or common variations of writing the character.