Category: Links

Settling In

I have made my move to Cambridge in the Boston area and I’m still getting adjusted. I haven’t met many people, visited my department, or done much else than locating food, various shiny objects for my den (like a spoon for cereal), and doing a bit of random exploring by bike. Classes start on the 20th and I’ll hopefully have more to report by then, but in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Shi Shi poem. I was delighted to find this online, complete with audio versions in Mandarin and Cantonese thanks to No-Sword.

Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy

Over on the EAIA blog I mentioned and summarized an article in International Security on the US-Japan alliance. I brought it up as a kind of controversial Realist article. Sayaka took the bait and bit a chunk out of the essay in a response she wrote in the next posting. She makes several excellent points about the article, which completely dismisses Constructivist approaches to Japanese security policy in favor of a clean “Passing the Buck” Realist interpretation. Sayaka accuses the author of oversimplifying the opposition with a straw man argument.

It is wrong to assume that Constructivists only look at notions and ideas even if Realists only look at power and the structure of international society.

Third, related to the previous point, the attempt to answer the question “Is [Japan’s policy really about] Pacifism?” by looking at the size of the military is off the point. The questions should be, “Why do[es Japan] not exercise normal military power even though it has acquired a huge military capability?”

Columbia: Chinese Connection

There is a conference coming up (Sept 10-11) at Columbia University on its “Chinese Connection” or famous former students of Columbia who went on to become famous people. It is kind of a promotional event for the university so I think it will mostly be warm and fuzzy but may have some very interesting talks. The RSVP page doesn’t say anything about charging money to attend. There is an article on their site on the early history of East Asian studies at Columbia University. I haven’t read the whole thing, but similar celebratory tone. It is written by Professors Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene, two of CU’s giants in the field.

Nature: Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

I have been following the progress of the Open Access movement in academic journals as closely as my time allows. I gave a presentation to a number of professors and students at Waseda University which talked a lot about the OA movement and I could tell that others became interested when they heard about it. This movement, to provide more open access to research articles that are usually only archived in expensive online databases or not online at all. The movement is making most progress and getting most discussion amongst scientists. There is a great blog, I may have mentioned before Open Access News, and there is also a great series of articles in Nature magazine (they also have an RSS feed for the series).

One recent article in this series mentions the fact (often discussed in these articles) that open access journals are cited more often than those only accessible in subscription databases. It also adds more evidence to this from their own research. However, they also add that some of these articles are from subscription only journals but which authors have “self-archived” and put online.

One way to estimate [the access problem] is to compare citation counts for Open Access articles with pay-to-access articles. Lawrence4 found that in computer science citations were three times higher for Open Access articles than for papers only available for payment in print or online. Kurtz et al. have since reported similar estimates in astrophysics, and Odlyzko in mathematics.

We are carrying out a much larger study across all disciplines, using a 10-year sample of 14 million articles from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)’s database; initial results, for the field of physics, show Open Access articles being cited 2.5 to 5 times more than articles that users’ institutions must pay to access online, with this advantage peaking within about 3 years of an article’s publication.

All these articles were published in subscription-based journals, but some were made accessible because authors had ‘self-archived’ copies on the Web-see http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/. Physicists have been self-archiving in growing numbers since 1991 in a central archive called ArXiv. Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own websites, which are then harvested by Citeseer.

They go on to discuss the “green” and “gold” (the latter meaning fully open online access) approaches to Open Access. It is a good read. The original article on Nature is online as is a more extensive article by its authors on their findings.

Cliopatria: Swift Boat Historiography

Jonathan Dresner has a great posting over at Cliopatria on how interesting it would be to think about the Swift Boat issue from the perspective of historiography.

Historiographically, how would we balance contemporary documents against decades-removed oral history, if it were not a partisan issue? When is absolute certainty justified in the face of contradictory sources? What bigger questions does this connect to (i.e., is this really an avenue worth pursuing) or are there analyses that need to precede asking the questions we’re asking?

He concludes by asking how close historians need to get to the “truth” of history.

Do we, as historians, really need to answer these questions, or is it enough to note the “interesting” vagaries of sources and leave it at that?

This kind of question is one that also deeply troubles me, just as I am about to begin a PhD program in history. I hope Dresner will have more words of wisdom on this in his future postings. My feeling right now is that how “vague” we leave contested moments that find their way into our narratives will depend ultimately on the questions we posed in our work. For example, the Swift Boat veterans, and those who seek to reveal their contradictions at least both seem to agree that the questions are “Was Kerry a liar?” Or more broadly, “Is he ‘unfit for command.'”

The shift of public debate to this kind of question marks a significant “historiographical” coup for supporters of the Bush campaign insofar as Kerry’s military record was previously approached with questions like, “How much does his military service make him a better presidential candidate to lead a country at ‘war'” or at worst, “Does Kerry’s activism following his service in Vietnam show a profound disrespect for America’s men and women in uniform?” While I personally find all these questions completely uninteresting, it is easy to see how the latter two allow a historian or commentator of any flavor to leave the vagaries of his months of service alone. Jonathan Dresner really brings up some important issues in postings like this one but to his, “Do we, as historians really need to answer these questions?” I would add one more query, “Do we, as historians really need to ask these questions?”

Kodomo no Kuni Website

I found a link on Blogdex I thought I’d pass on. It is a site dedicated to Artists and Children’s Books in 1920s Japan, and in particular, the journal コドモノクニ (“The Land of Children”). The materials are prepared by the International Library of Children’s Literature which is a beautiful library connected to the National Diet Library found just behind Ueno Park in Tokyo.

I think the Kodomo no Kuni website is a good example of the kind of history project I hope to become very popular in the future: pick something manageable in scope, put a lot of materials not available online into a format easily viewable online with a pleasant and accessible design. Provide some introductory narrative and some primary materials. While this site doesn’t provide it, I think it would also be good to provide: a more extensive index and database of materials not included for display in the main presentation of the site but can be viewed by those who are interested in seeing more (like the Columbia University Ling Lung women’s magazine project which in contrast, lacks the presentation of the Kodomo no Kuni site), links to more information, the ability to easily download materials for offline viewing, a place for users to post comments and new info, and some kind of updates or an RSS feed for newly added material. I have a few of these kind of small projects in mind and will post more when I get something going on them.

East Asian International Affairs Blog

I am starting 4 or 5 new blogs, all with the goal of increasing communication and cooperation between graduate students in places like the US and those in places like Japan, China, etc. The first of these to go online is the East Asian International Affairs Blog (temporary title until we think of a cool one, recommendations welcome). It will focus primarily on East Asian international relations, international security issues, and foreign policy in the region. Starting off our line up of initial authors are Sayaka, Jaehwan, and at least until we get more people, myself. I have invited a number of other people and I hope Sayaka and Jae will be recommending some more people but we will be expanding slowly over time. The other group blogs I will be setting up will be related to modern history in Japan, China, and Korea, and a separate blog idea for studying intellectual history in Japan. More on that later as I get some people together…