To summarize what I wish I had again in terms of a knowledge database:

As I make a note on a source, e.g. recording a single fact, fragment of information, observation, or summary of an idea from a work I want that piece of information to be taggable so that it can be easily found in the future when searching for that tag. I want to be able to add and tag many such notes quickly and efficiently, some of which are “under” others in the form of a hierarchical order, and which then inherit the tags of their parent notes so that I am saved a lot of repetitive tagging. Every single fragment or note must also contain some link, tag, or meta-data which indicates the source it came from (a book, article, archival document, interview, etc.) so that when I use that note in my dissertation or book, I can easily find the source it came from.¹

DEVONthink Pro

I am in the process of shifting my note taking to a powerful knowledge database program called DEVONthink Pro. I was impressed at how quickly and easily I could import all of my nearly one thousand OmniOutliner documents, which I can now preview, search, tag, and group within DEVONthink. I don’t just want to reproduce my existing source-based note structure. I want to experiment with using this application to get just a little closer to my dream knowledge database described above. How am I doing this?

In DEVONthink, I create a group (which is what DEVONthink calls folders) for Sources.

Add a Group for a New Source – Each time I take notes on a new source (a book, movie, archive document, etc.), I create a group for it within this Source folder with the title of the source.

Create and Tag an Overview Document for the Source – In this newly created group I create a new text document with the name of the source in which I give some general information about that source (an overall description or summary) and give it some general tags that well represent the whole source.

Because DEVONthink also creates a gray colored pseudo-tag to every member of a group with the name of the group, any notes that go into this source group will contain a pseudo-tag indicating what source it is from.

Add Notes Using Customized Template Script – After creating and tagging the overview document, every time I want to add a note from this source, I select the overview document and invoke a keyboard shortcut connected to a DEVONthink template I have called “Note On Source” (I’m using Ctrl-Cmd-M) This invokes the creation of a hacked version of an existing template that comes with DEVONthink called “Annotation” written by Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann and modified by Christian Grunenberg. In its modified form the new template script does the following:

a. A new note is created in the source’s group
b. The new note gets a link created by the template script which links to it back to the overview document for the source (assuming it was selected when invoking the script).
c. The new note is then automatically tagged with whatever tags the overview document contained. I can then, of course, add further tags or delete any that may not be relevant to this particular fragment or note.

So what does this method accomplish?

Well, using this method, all my fragments, quotes, and notes from a particular source are together in its own folder, a typical default way of organizing one’s notes. However, every single note can also be found by searching for a particular combination of tags using DEVONthink’s various methods for looking up tagged items. Alternatively, one can create “Smart Groups” that include notes using certain tags. Every note contains a link back to its source, however, both through a direct link in the document, and through its pseudo-tag attached to the originating group. In short, one can find all notes related to certain tags without losing their source (or needing to input it manually in the note), and all notes related to a particular source. The default tagging of new notes on a source saves me a lot of typing, and I can just add any more specific tags relevant for that specific note.

Remaining Issues

Although I’m really impressed with the new 2.x version of the application, there are still a few things that I find less than ideal with DEVONthink to work in, some of which are no fault of the designers, but merely are a result of its developers not having the same specific goals that I have when they created the application.

1. Unlike Yojimbo or Evernote, DEVONthink supports hierarchical groups/folders. This is wonderful, and makes a lot of things possible. However, when selected, parent groups do not list contents of its child groups. Thus if I have a group called “Sources” and a sub-group called “Movies” inside of which I have files or groups related to individual movies, clicking on Sources reveals only an empty folder/group in the standard three pane view (or in icon view, a list of the folders that are in it) instead of all files under it in the hierarchy. Of course, the Finder and other applications often work the same way but it would be fantastic if there was an option to be able to “Go Deep” as one can when viewing folder contents in an application like Leap

2. Although I think someone could further modify the script I hacked to make this work, currently the system as I have it now does not permit no cascading notes: all notes are children of the original source, there aren’t any children notes of notes on a source. Thus the benefits of the kind of hierarchy of bullet points one is used to seeing in a note file is lost.

3. Because almost everything that was originally (in a note taking app like OmniOutliner) fragments that take form as hierarchical bullet points in single document are now fragment files in a hierarchy of folders, much of the power of viewing all of the content of these various fragments together at once is lost. DEVONthink lists all notes as files with single-line names. Ideally my dream note-taking software wouldn’t even need names for the fragments (my hacked version of the script just names them the date plus the name of the source) and would merely directly display the contents of notes so they can be seen juxtaposed with whatever other notes are in the list.

Downloading and Using the “Note on Source” Template

Again, I didn’t write this from scratch, but modified an existing template that comes with DEVONthink Pro. To use it, follow the instructions above. To install it:

1. Download the Script: Note on Source
2. Unzip the script and double click on the _Note on Source___Cmd-Ctrl-M.templatescriptd file inside. DEVONthink Pro will ask you if you want to import or install the template. Choose “Install” and it should now be active with the Cmd-Ctrl-M shortcut or directly in the menu at Data->New from Template->Note on Source

1. My more ambitious and detailed description of this (including the idea of a “smart outline” which would then become possible) can be found in summary form in this posting.

Such is life, people say to me, or else quote me some snotty French equivalent. That is the reality of this harsh academic world we live in. Well, perhaps I’m suffering from an early onset of old-age grumpiness, but I just don’t want to play that game. I don’t care that I’m still a graduate student, that job committees will look over everything they can find by me in search of sub-standard material, or that publishing firms will want me to explain why an earlier version of something I have submitted to them is available for download somewhere online. I don’t care if someone else finds some topic I have done some preliminary work on interesting, runs with it, and ends up publishing something on it. I may feel a momentary pang of regret that I didn’t get my own butt in gear and finish the project myself, but if they did a good job, then I really have no cause for complaint.

I’ve decided to just go ahead and start posting everything I produce academically, including short conference presentations and other research works in progress. You can find this material on a new research page here at Muninn.

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 before¹ 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 terminal², 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.³ 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.

1. 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.
2. I confirmed there is no special information in either Chinese or English posted about the status of the islands when I returned to Penglai
3. 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.

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.¹

1. During our discussions in seminar, the historians of the Annales School were seen as the major exception to this observation

I had always hoped I would have at least one chapter written up by the time I returned from the field, but at this I have failed. My primary excuse has been the fact that I have never had all the materials I have collected in various places in one place. In honesty, however, it is probably more due to the fact that I have never been able to combine the “research mode” and the “writing mode” into a single daily routine. I have deep admiration for graduate students and scholars who can do this effectively: spending their days at the archives and libraries, then shifting to chapter writing in the evenings. I haven’t even done what some professors have suggested: write a few disconnected pages here and there as you get enough material to weave a few tight threads. I confess cowardice, having not overcome the fear of composing such fragile and isolated pages.

Since I’m not, like those model students, immediately converting my daily discoveries into chunks of narrative and analysis, I am increasingly concerned about the fact that the hundreds of note files, outlines, and references to various archive images or PDFs themselves have become a considerable corpus that will require a nontrivial amount of processing and mining to reconstruct the argument and narrative of what will become my PhD dissertation.

To put it another way, I have two rich layers that form the foundation and roof of my research. The former is the dense web of primary source materials, notes taken from these source materials, and other timelines or “notes on notes” which organize some conceptually related materials. This is where the truffle hunter can happily prance about. The latter is the dissertation outline. This is an increasingly detailed macroscopic view of my planned chapters and arguments which has taken concrete form in a dozen different formats and lengths as it gets distributed as a dissertation prospectus, various fellowship application essays, emails to professors, and, in its most detailed form, a hierarchical outline document full of barely intelligible bullet points. This overarching top-down view is born of that creative destruction that is the clash between the starting assumptions that feed the “fire in my belly” which brought me to the study of history and my chosen topic, and my intuitive understanding of what my research in the sources permits me to argue in good faith as a historian. It is, of course, at exactly this point where many of the historiographical crises of our time find their point of entry but this is not the issue I wish to address in these postings.

While in the field, the gradual thickening of the web of notes and sources on the one hand and the increasingly detailed and structured outline on the other might suggest progress, but I can already feel the heavy weight of a void that lies between them. PhD students I have talked to who have returned from their research in the field give me the impression that the greatest frustrations that lie ahead for me are to be found in two areas. One is the challenge of writing itself, of synthesis and analysis on a scope never before attempted in our long career as students. The other, however, seems to be found in bridging the vast and dangerously incomplete “middle zone” between the above described layers: Exactly what evidence and what sources will be deployed for precisely which points we think we can persuasively make? Which book, newspaper or archival document was it that demonstrated this or that phenomenon? For every argument I wish to make, must I be reduced to searching through a large subset of my notes and notes on notes, which now number many hundred pages?

I’m very much open to the advice of graduate students and professors who have developed successful strategies for this but in my next two postings, I’ll share a strategy that I’m attempting now that I hope will help me overcome some of the worst of the middle zone nightmare I have described above. I don’t think it is very original, as I suspect many, if not most PhD students may have attempted or used something similar themselves. In fact, some may accuse me of describing the obvious common sense approach. If, however, it indeed is an effective approach – and this remains to be shown in the coming two years of writing I have ahead of me – then I wish it had been explained to me before I launched into my lonely existence as a student roaming the archives of East Asia.

In the next posting, I’ll explain how I’m using my task planning software (OmniFocus) as a bridge between my notes and my dissertation outline, creating a kind of index that links sections of my notes on specific sources, to certain arguments I think I can and will make in my dissertation chapters. While what I’m doing doesn’t require any kind of specific software, this process has integrated relatively smoothly into my existing methods for organizing tasks on my Mac and my iPod Touch. The third posting will probably only be interesting to a more technical audience who are familiar with various specific software solutions. In that posting, I will suggest how, if my current experimental approach is sound, how I think an even more ideal software-based organizational system might work which I have yet to find fully or satisfactorily implemented in any existing soclution I have seen out there. I’m sure there will be dissenters who believe they have found the perfect solution for their needs, but I will attempt to articulate what I have found lacking in what is out there.

Everyday you could see how much “juice” you had left and could make a guess as to whether you had enough to make it through another day. This was a reasonable system, once you got used to it, although the dormitory had its other issues.

Here in my apartment in China, they opted for another method. You charge your room with electricity, as one does at the Komaba dormitory in Japan, but the only place you can read the meter is hidden deep in the bowels of the pipe room of one’s floor where it is accessible only to a custodian with a flashlight and a hefty collection of keys.

So when I came down with a horrible fever and cold this week, and was drifting in and out of consciousness, I was not happy to discover that, in the middle of the night, my electricity shut off, and therefore my electric heater, because my charge had run out. Stumbling around in the darkness, knocking over a cup of cold tea leaf filled tea, I managed to make my way down to security and they got the poor janitor up to charge my room with another 10RMB (the maximum amount the janitor is allowed to accept from me outside of regular hours), which, it turned out, provided only another 8 hours of continuous heating for my room with my electric heater.

So, as you can imagine, I have been eagerly awaiting that beautiful moment when “the heating” turns on for my building (and my city? I’m not sure, but this is usually a pretty centralized operation in China) and I can stop wasting electricity on my (less efficient) electric heater. The nice steamy water pipe heating I have been waiting for made for a cozy and comfortable winter when I lived in China last time in 1999-2000, as long as one didn’t touch the pipes at their entry point. I’m not exactly sure by what mysterious process it gets decided by the powers that be that it is cold enough to have heating, but, believe, me, it is.

Thus consider my dismay when I get on the elevator in my apartment complex today to see a sign that says,

“53 households said they want heating this winter, while 34 households said they did not want heating this winter. In accordance with the law, since less than 70% of the households in the building want heating this winter, we will not be turning on the heat.”

It looks like, in addition to not getting any of the mail sent to me here in China over the last month despite several confirmations of my address, somebody else might have used my ballot for this crucial election…

Here you can see that it is possible to customize the amount of sugar and the amount of ice which is added to your drink. You can get everything from “full sugar” (100% the normal amount added) to “no sugar” and everything from the normal amount of ice to no ice. You can also order your drink warm or hot.

I like to order lemonade or a mixture of lemonade and mandarin orange with “half sugar” (半糖） and not much ice （少冰).

It is the little things about life here that really just make me smile. To give one little example, for the 3rd time in a row, as I walked home from the NTU library around 21:00, I saw a group of elderly residents of a neighborhood I pass through lounging in one of the many small parks and watching a Kung Fu movie on one of those large projector screens. The event doesn’t look very formal or organized, so I can only imagine that one of the locals dragged out the projector and large screen so the neighborhood could all watch it together.

Muninn.net will be my primary home on the web. There are some pages on the old site that I will upload again when they have been redesigned here, including some old picture pages.

1. The oldest version cached on the Wayback Machine is from 2000 but I had it a few years before that, having transferred the site from my undergraduate web page, which I first created a few years before this earliest cached version found here in 1997.

We ended up not climbing any of the hills on the island, which in any case average around 350 meters. I’m actually glad, the hordes of other climbers, all clad in standard Korean hiking uniforms and equipment reminded me of climbing on Halla-san in Cheju-do where we essentially stood in line to get up the mountain behind hundreds of people (including groups of women sweating through their heavy make-up). Much more enjoyable was the wonderful and quiet stroll along forested country roads we got on Saturday afternoon when a local told us how to get through the hills to the coast the fastest way by an older road not marked on many maps. I recommend these country strolls in Korea as a wonderful alternative to the industrial tourist staircase that is so much hiking in Korea. You can often find yourself behind so many mountaineers you might have guessed you were on a subway stairway at rush hour if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is wielding useless metal poles and carrying plastic mats to keep the rear of their expensive and fashionable hiking pants from getting any dirt on them when they sit down.

A few places that got saved on my GPS from the weekend:

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

In order to enter the “Shandong local materials” room on the fifth floor I had to sign in at the door. I like the fact that people I have met in China over the years are not often surprised to see that I can write Chinese characters, in stark contrast to the amazement this frequently generates if I write in the simple Korean writing system in Korea or the mix of writing systems used in Japan. However, around two thirds of the time, when Chinese people notice that I’m writing with my left hand they will express their surprise by telling me, “You write with your left hand!” I usually just smile, agree, nod, and keep writing instead of adding that, unlike many of my fellow lefties in places like China, I was not subject to abuse throughout my childhood that forced me to use my right hand.

Today however, there was an interesting addition to this common exchange when a cleaning lady who had come over to watch me sign in added her own observation.

Librarian: 你是用左手的！ You use your left hand!
Me: 对. Yup.
Cleaning Lady (with confidence): 对，他们都是用左手的！ Ya, they all use their left hand!

Thus, together with a redesign of the webpage, I am moving it here to Muninn. Now if you go to Muninn.net top level page you will find my personal homepage and this blog can be found linked via the “Projects” page of the new homepage along with other online sites I have created. I will eventually forward konrad.lawson.net to the new home here at Muninn and phase that older site out.

The new site is a work in progress, but so was the last one—which it remained after seven years.

The first five months of the year find me in Cambridge, MA for the Spring semester of the third year of my PhD program in history. I lived in an apartment some fifteen minutes walk from the university campus together with one of my best friends and fellow historians Fabian who, in addition to filling my dinners and evenings with the joys of wonderful and highly educational conversations, introduced me to the wonders that are balsamic vinegar and hummus. Not to be laughed at, these two new additions to my heavily bread-based diet provide me with two possible replacements for cheese when the environment (e.g. the USA and Korea) has little worthy of the name to offer.

The year opens with a bang as my fellow third year PhD students and I desperately assemble that prophetic document: the Dissertation Prospectus. The process of making third year students assemble a dissertation prospectus, as I came to understand it at the time, is designed to measure three important skills of the Academicus Novitius in the three following tasks.

• The first is the bread and butter of the institution: to demonstrate a mastery of the literature and expansive knowledge about a field which one has yet to master and has, as yet, little knowledge about. For this, the process of preparing for one’s oral examinations in the second year has provided ample training.
• Second, to ask an interesting and broad question related to one’s topic and explain in some detail what fascinating answers and claims such a question might lead to. The trick with this second task, apparently, is not to seem to know the answer already – since one has yet to begin one’s research into the question such a presumption would be deeply problematic – but also one must not seem like one has no answer to the question because this leaves open the terrifying dual possibility that either a) the answer is unattainable or at least beyond the reach of a humble graduate student or b) the answer is completely uninteresting.
• Finally, the prospectus is designed to measure the basic oracular proficiency of the graduate student. This is closely linked with the second task. The prospectus is essentially a prophetic document, wherein one predicts which books and archives will be found useful, what methodology will be found effective, and what structure and argument the as yet unwritten and un-researched dissertation will ultimately take. Unfortunately, one is not permitted to present the prospectus in Delphic riddles, which is a shame, since the preparation would probably be much more fun. I believe the entire ritual ought best be concluded with a ceremonial burying of the prospectus in a time capsule, perhaps under the floor of the history department’s lower library, where the prospectus conference is held. This might be combined with the digging up of the prospectuses of PhD candidates who have just submitted their dissertation. Those who wrote a dissertation remotely resembling their prospectus could get an award, perhaps the “Order of Delphi,” and the third year students could all look on in admiration.

The process is actually very helpful. It provides an opportunity for students to attempt to convince their advisor and other professors that it wasn’t such a bad idea to let you into the program to begin with, that you have given serious thought to your proposed project of study before trudging out to the libraries and archives, and that you stand some remote hope of completing the project within the next half decade or so. After a somewhat modified version of the prospectus is presented at a conference attended by fellow students and professors in the department, supporters among the students and professors can deploy the “critique-by-friendly-question” technique or offer more direct advise and criticism. The above skills are also immediately useful and have already been put into practice while applying for research grants in the third year, since all the deadlines for grants fall in the three months or so surrounding the prospectus conference in January.

I think my prospectus presentation, “Treason and the Reconstruction of Nation in East Asia, 1937-1951″ went over well enough, though there were many looks of concern about the breadth of my topic and the nature of some of my comparisons. I got excellent questions and advice from the professors and students present, with more detailed critiques in discussions that followed. Soon after, I put together my dissertation committee consisting of my advisor A. Gordon (a Japan historian), C. Eckert (modern Korea), H. Harrison (modern China), and C. Maier, a historian of 20th century Europe who is well-acquainted with the literature on political retribution and the aftermath of war in Europe. They have all been really wonderful in providing support for my project so far.

As a third year student I didn’t take any classes, but continued my role, begun in the Fall semester, 2006, as a Teaching Assistant. This work provided me with the stipend upon which I lived, as well as a great opportunity to develop the teaching skills I will need as a professor of history in the future. My teaching evaluations in the fall were not bad and I won a teaching award given automatically to TAs who get a certain minimum result. The students left helpful comments and together with a fellow history graduate student working for the Bok center for teaching, I watched an embarrassing but helpful video of me in one of my discussion sections to get feedback on my techniques. Watching the video, I wonder if my students thought I was on speed or some other stimulant, as I tend to get overly excited while teaching.

In the Spring semester, instead of running discussion sections for large history lecture courses offered to undergraduate students from all departments I became a “tutor.” Students who major in history go through a tutorial program that gives them the opportunity to work very closely with graduate student tutors. I was the lone tutor for an intensive sophomore reading tutorial for students interested in “Colonialism and Postcolonialism.” Each week I stayed a mere single step ahead of my students, especially when readings covered the colonial history and theory related to Africa and South Asia. I was also a tutor for the Honors research seminar where the focus is on working on the historical research and writing skills for those history majors who want to write a historical thesis in their senior year. The experience of being a tutor was really rewarding but could also be really challenging. You get to work very closely with the students and it is hard not to become personally invested in their research outcomes. Since the tutor is with the students at every stage, I felt like any disappointment I felt reflected immediately back on me and I often regretted not pushing harder at an earlier stage, of being more detailed and critical on such and such an assignment, etc. This was definitely a learning process that differed from the experience of running discussion sections.

Early February was full of good news. Sayaka heard that she was accepted to Harvard and Columbia PhD programs (she switched from Political Science to history) and the same day I heard my roommate Fabian was offered a position to teach Japanese history at Yale. I didn’t feel left out for long because the very next day I heard that I had been nominated for a Fulbright scholarship to do a year of research in Korea, receipt of which was confirmed later in March.

ChinaJapan.org – In February and March I spent a few weeks working on a project I had been planning for a long time. The wonderful Sino-Japanese studies journal, full of useful articles on the history of interaction between Japan and China, had been discontinued for a few years and I secured the permission of its editor to digitize the entire run of issues and put them all online completely open access. I scanned all the articles, added some OCR so that their contents could be (mostly) searched via google, and put them online. The result can be found at ChinaJapan.org.

The rest of Spring semester I split my time between my teaching duties as a tutor and making trips down to Washington D.C. to visit the National Archives. I wrote about my first visit to the National Archives in March here at Muninn. There I spent many wonderful days looking at State Department archival materials on early postwar Korea (RG59) and mountains of archival material from early postwar North Korea which was captured by the United States during the Korean War (RG242).

As the academic year drew to a close, I spent a lot of time on a project translating an article from Japanese (and some passages from quoted Chinese originals) on the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei. The topic is very close to my own field and I knew the author, who is a professor at Waseda University, from my time as a research student in Japan. I continued to work on the translation in the Bartlesville, OK city library when visiting my parents and in the Birmingham city library while following my father around when he visited relatives in Alabama (I learnt some interesting phrases while I was there with him).

In mid-June I moved to Korea where I still am, as of this posting. During the summer I studied Korean at Yonsei University’s Korean Language Institute with scholarship support. To be honest, I don’t think I made enough progress. I could feel my motivation sapping as I think I’m getting tired of formal classroom language study. I still have serious defects in my Korean, including a lot of basic Korean grammar that I never mastered well enough before moving on to a more advanced level. As a result, I actually attended the same level of Korean (4 out of 6 possible levels) at Yonsei that I did at Seoul National University the summer before, though that is partly explained by the fact that the two programs don’t overlap very much at higher levels.

I was happy to be able to get out quite a bit in the spring and summer. I went hiking with some fellow historians before leaving the New England area, and also went hiking with Sayaka during summer, along with visiting some of the interesting areas and cities on the outskirts of Seoul. In late August, Sayaka, who decided to go to Columbia University for her history PhD, returned to the United States.

I finally moved into the Fulbright building here in Seoul and began my PhD research in earnest in the beginning of September. From September to December my life has become something of a blur. Basically my days so far have alternated between four locations: the Yonsei University library, a researcher’s room in the Yonsei Institute of Korean Studies where I am affiliated and have access to an excellent collection of old Korean newspapers, reading at home, and language exchanges in coffee shops. I have also made some visits to the Korean Film archive which has a wonderful collection of old films.

There are a lot of materials in book and newspaper form that I have been working through and I don’t expect to finish this stage of my research until late January or into February. My reading speed has gradually improved but I can’t claim to have made any huge and startling discoveries. For this my work in the National Archives last spring has so far yielded the most. When I finish going through early postwar newspapers hopefully later this month I will be branching out a bit to visit some of the other archives and libraries where I hope to find some of the less exploited historical materials for the Korean side of my dissertation on the punishment of pro-Japanese collaborators in the early postwar period.

In order to maintain contact with other human beings and hopefully improve my spoken Korean, I do a lot of language exchanges. Meeting in coffee shops and talking about mostly politics, literature, and history, my language partners (who have since all become good friends) include a German literature professor, a journalist, a graduate student studying Korean Confucian classics and a graduate student studying modern Japanese imperial history. I think I have learnt more Korean (and certainly more about Korea) from meeting these four friends every week than I did in four daily hours of language study during the summer. I hope this will continue in the spring. While reading Korean is most important for my research, I really want my spoken Korean to begin to approach my proficiency in Japanese and Chinese so that I will be able to interact effectively with Korean scholars and students in my future career. I have five months left on my Fulbright scholarship to see what progress is made towards this goal, and the more important goal of gathering materials for my dissertation. Next May I move to Taiwan for the summer and next September I move to China to continue my research on the China side of my project. I hope to complete my research tour of East Asia in Japan in the summer of 2009. I wish all my friends a very Happy New Year, and if you are on this side of the Pacific, I hope to see you in the months to come!

2006 – Year in Review
2004 – Year in Review