Reading | Muninn

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.

Economist: The Olympics and the Global Labor Market

My primary offline source of news is The Economist, a favorite I picked up in high school as a member of my school’s Model United Nations team. The consistently libertarian magazine is great for a number of reasons. Its articles tend to be really global in their news coverage, a little less sensitive to the whims of the news cycle, and there is a great deal of general reference information in each article. It has a very simple pattern that almost every article follows: 1) Headline, usually with stupid pun attached 2) Sub-headline which states the main point of the article or the magazine’s position 3) 1/3 to 1/2 of the main body of the article’s text states the issue’s background and argument against the magazine’s position and 4) the article then disagrees with the position stated in (3) and argues its super libertarian position.

This makes it very easy to get lots of basic background info as well as something on the various positions in the issue at stake. If you are pro-welfare, culturally conservative, nationalistic, protectionist, or in any way deeply distrustful of capitalistic market forces, you will probably find yourself agreeing with every article’s first third. The rest of the article will give you most of what you need to “know the enemy” as it were. The magazine has its downsides such as a lack of really cutting edge up to date info from the field and a deep arrogance about its own positions (the magazine often talks to political leaders as if its every issue were in direct conversation with them), but I haven’t found anything better for the amount of detail and analysis it provides.

Now it just so happens that, given my particular political persuasion, I find myself in agreement with The Economist about one half of the time. So what exactly is this “persuasion” in conventional (and thus often misleading) terms? On most social issues, I’m usually somewhere well off the edges of society’s peripheral vision to the left flank. On economic issues related to education and health, I’m something of a moderate “liberal” but when it comes to issues related to global labor markets and globalization in general, I’m kind of irrationally free market. I only say irrational because despite not being that well read on the details of the arguments involved, I will tend to support globalization and the most radically free market positions on the free movement of migrants and labor across borders. In this respect I feel the same kind of frustration Matthew Haughey expresses in his recent posting on Globalism or Nationalism.

I was delighted when The Economist has an article like it did this week (p47 of the print issue) on the Olympics.

…When the games were revived…modern nationalism was on the rise in Europe. Poeple thought history was made, and states were built, by well-defined, hermetically sealed ‘nations’ with a supreme claim on their subjects’ loyalty. No wonder, then, that the modern games became a contest not among athletes [as in ancient Greece] but between countries. Over the course of the 20th century, as the whole world caught nation-state fever, having a fine Olympic team became as important a symbol for newly formed countries as a flag, an anthem, an airline and a big embassy in a leafy district of Washington, D.C.

…[The article goes on to note how the global labor market has led to states buying athletes for their national teams and offering them citizenship]…

But in a world where multinational corporations sponsor the games, why shouldn’t there be multinational athletes? Probably because cheering one’s flag is still one of the event’s main selling points, and a free market in athletes would endanger the national pride that still underlies the event’s commercial success. ‘The money depends on the audience, and the audience depends on symbolisms, which often include nationalism,’ says Laurence Chalip…
Kevin Wamsley…says…’It might be better for sport if people stopped cheering for nations and cheered for individuals, but that’s not what the Olympics have been built on.”

Japan Review: The 47th Ronin

I took a great seminar on the history of the Chûshingura (忠臣蔵 or the story of the 赤穂浪人: the famous Japanese saga of the revenge of the 47 ronin) with Henry D. Smith at Columbia 2 years ago. We focused mostly on the imaginative potential of a historical event and the many fascinating ways that this event has moved through Japanese culture since the early 18th century. We all covered one aspect of this, my own being the changes in the portrayal of Chûshingura in prewar and wartime Japanese elementary school textbooks (some passages of which I translated if anyone is interested in reading more).

In his article “The Trouble with Terasaka” in the 2004 (No. 16) of the Nichibunken Japan Review Professor Smith writes about Chushingura and the controversary surrounding the mysterious samurai number 47, Terasaka Kichiemon. Not everyone who knows the famous story (google Chushingura, no time for links right now) knows that only 46 were sentenced to death by seppuku suicide and Terasaka lived a quiet life in the aftermath. Smith’s fascinating article explores not only the difficult question of what happened to Terasaka, but like our seminar did, tracks his changing face through the Chûshingura “imagination” in Japan in the centuries that followed. He ultimately concludes that Terasaka was not allowed to join the others because he the only one of the low ranking ashigaru (足軽) status.

As seen by the bushi elite, he was reduced to an expendable menial, but from the vantage point of the chônin audiences who were the most ardent consumers of the Chûshingura legend, he could be a heroic striver, living proof that even the lowest could become an honorable hero through dedication and skill. Terasaka functioned as a literally pivotal character in both the history and legend…since Terasaka could cut in different directions, he was thus a “troubling” figure who was often claimed and contested by rival audiences…The foot soldier Terasaka Kichiemon…occupied a…marginal place within the overall story, but one that by its very marginality sheds much light on the changing structure of Chûshingura over three centuries. (4)

Professor Smith has previously written on the common myths of Japanese history, such as the famous 4 level class system of early modern Japan, and in this article he expands on this to talk about the interesting marginal status of Terasaka and also the “in between” class of the 足軽 samurai.

Foreign Affairs: Sanctions Were Working

The assumption has always been that sanctions just don’t work. Additionally, in an argument more persuasive with those of us with soft spots for the humanitarian side of the equation, the feeling is that sanctions often end up causing massive amounts of suffering amongst those outside a country’s ruling circle.

George A. Lopez and David Cortright argue in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in their article “Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked” that only in the aftermath of the Iraq war have we discovered, but largely ignored the fact that the sanctions were in fact working. They had contained Iraq, kept it from recovering its military capabilities, as well as its unconventional weapons programs, especially the development of a nuclear program.

“…The sanctions worked remarkably well in Iraq—far better than any past sanctions effort—and only a fraction of total oil revenue ever reached the Iraqi government. The funds that Baghdad obtained illicitely were grossly insufficient to finance a large-scale military development program. The government had no other major source of income, in part thanks to the economic impact of sanctions. Revenues from smuggling and kickbacks went mostly toward maintaining Saddam’s massive army and internal security apparatus (as well as to building palaces and paying bribes to political loyalists)…”

Essentially, the article argues in support of Hans Blix’s statement, in his recent book that, “the UN and the world had suceeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it.” I won’t go into more detail about their argument here but regardless of your position on this issue, the article gives a good overview of the history of Iraqi sanctions and is worth a read. It briefly addresses the recent UN kickbacks issues in its sections on how to improve sanctions, but does not say too much on the issue of the effect of sanctions on civilian populations. I don’t know enough about sanctions (either their effectiveness or humanitarian impact) to take a strong position but the article was educational.

The Nation and Time

Prasenjit Duara is a scholar whose writing which I find nothing short of inspirational. That is no small feat for academic history writing, I assure you. Reading his work is difficult and sometimes confusing, but there are moments when he writes with an eloquence and lucidity which I can only hope to reproduce in my own future writing on history. Look below at his description of the relationship between nations and time,

“History is not only about linear evolution; it is also about timelessness. To be recognizable as the subject of history, the core of the nation has to be unaffected by the passage of time. This core often refers to the unity of a people and its territory. In the nation’s evolution there are historical vicissitudes during which a people may be driven out of its territory or enslaved or become separated and lose consciousness of its original unity. But the historical destiny of the nation lies in the fulfillment or restoration of this unity and sovereignty of a people. National history is fully teleological in that its ends are to be found in its beginnings.” from “The Regime of Authenticity: Timelessness, Gender, and National History in Modern China” in Chow, Kai-wing et al. ed. Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 360

Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy school who writes a lot on human rights issues, wrote an interesting article on the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the April 29th issue of the New York Review of Books. Arendt’s famous work The Origins of Totalitarianism has been resting unread on my shelf for a couple of years and the only other time I have really seen much on her was in reading about Heidegger or in a couple movies on the wartime Jewish escape from Europe. I hope to get around to looking at her work more closely.

The Power article is timely and proceeds from an overview and critique of Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, the use of her work by others, and finally (as one might predict) a consideration of how her work is relevant today.

“The reality is that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves.’…the nightmare is that they have shown, have proven beyond doubt what man is capable of.”

While totalitarianism, and the specter of Nazi and Stalinist rule that is associated with it, lends itself to harsh denunciation, one of the main claims of the article is that Arendt was careful, realistic, and self-critical in her analysis. Quoting Yeats, Arendt is said to be able to, “to hold in a single thought reality and justice.” Power’s article is very moderate, and uses Arendt’s own words of caution against any radical claims about the present or future based on an analysis of the past. She “warns readers against any attempt at ‘deducing the unprecedented from precedents'” in history and adds that, “To view a subsequent happening as predictable bordered on seeing it as inevitable, which a believer in human agency and political action could never do.”

Arendt was also apparently cautious in addressing the claims of optimistic idealists who want to further human rights, “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inaliable’ those human rights which are enjoyed only by the citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves.” However, Power doesn’t lose the opportunity in this article to take a critical stance towards the current war on terrorism, “While Arendt valued what today is termed, ‘hard power,’ she also knew firsthand the danger of state overreaching in the name of self-defense, and the prospect that a merciless ‘counter-ideology’ could emerge. Today, in the name of fighting a war of infinite duration, it has again proven far too tempting for our liberal democracy to give security absolute priority over liberty.”
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Inner Eyes

Ok, I’m stupid. I thought that the classic Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was a science fiction book. I’m hanging out with Lars at his apartment late on a Saturday night when he says, “Here, read these two paragraphs.” They are the opening from the Prologue to the Invisible Man, a book about black lives in 1940s America. I can’t believe I haven’t read this book. The opening is fantastic:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, it is as though I am surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorted glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.

Imagining other worlds

I’m close to finishing up Baudolino by Umberto Eco. The book is fantastic and the fourth I have enjoyed by him. Some people find it hard to get through anything he writes but I savor every page, often forgetting that I am reading him in translation. He plays with words, he plays with our minds, and he conjures up such amazing images, characters, and historical gems that not only are all his works re-readable but almost beg a second round to reassemble the pieces he throws at you. When I read Eco, I feel like he is giving the reader equal doses of revelation and deception. It is like he is playing a game, but unlike most authors who play the game with their book’s story and characters, Eco seems to love playing directly with the reader’s sanity.

Anyways, more on that some other time. Two quotes from Baudolino which I added to the quote database for this site. In isolation they may seem puzzling, but each one reminds me of one of the long moments of introspection his book instigated,

“I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true – which is a virtuous act because it compensates for the lack of proof of something that certainly exists or happened.” p56

“I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds…There is nothing better than imagining other worlds, to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I had not yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.” p99

From the Qiang Barbarians to the Qiang Nationality

I recently enjoyed reading an essay by Ming-ke Wang of Academia Sinica in a collection of essays called Imagining China: Regional Division and National Unity on the development of the ethnic identity of the Qiang 羌 people. In the essay, “From the Qiang Barbarians to the Qiang Nationality: The Making of a New Chinese Boundary” Wang “shows how the Qiang people developed into an ethnic identity but also how the geographical and ethnic concept of Qiang changed in the eyes of the Han peoples as a part of their changing ethnic boundaries throughout their history.” This may sound rather dull but Wang’s makes a fascinating move in showing how these two processes overlapped. The Qiang, which are now one of 55 recognized “nationalities” in China, with a population of about 220,000, have connected themselves historically to the much broader Han historical category which until very recently referred to a broad range of ethnic groups classified as barbarians on China’s periphery. While I can think of a few other potential examples, this is a nice twist on a common theme in the formation of national identity. Instead of linking itself to an empire, a language, an island, etc. that could help the newborn Qiang nationality to distinguish itself from some Other, the Qiang nationality was born out Han China’s own “Other.” The fact that there was no linguistically, culturally, or even geographically consistent historical community which corresponded to what the Han called the Qiang is, like all formations of national identity from Norwegians to Japanese, pretty much irrelevant.

According to Wang, from the late Han to the Ming periods, the concept of the Qiang was something close to “those people in the west who are not one of us” and included a huge range of people along eastern edges of Tibetan Plateau. Over time, the Chinese empires would come to classify these peoples into smaller and smaller distinct groups and those who were called the Qiang by the the Han shifted (linguistically, not physically) further and further to the West until this bumped into Tibetan cultural communities that the Chinese categorized as the Fan 番. Ultimately, the Qiang ended up being the small group of mountain dwellers in the small geographic area they occupy today (the upper Min River Valley).

While the group of people who ended up being called the Qiang mostly speak (or now identify with) a language in the Tibeto-Burman language family, like Chinese, their dialects are very varied (Wang notes their proverb, “our language cannot go far.”) Until very recently, this group of people, which in Chinese terms stabilized linguistically in the late-Qing, mostly didn’t know they had been classified as the Qiang. Apparently, before the 1950s they only knew that people down-river called them Manzi 蛮子 (barbarians). Wang also notes that while many of these communities had almost identical “ways of subsistence, daily life, religion, and language. (Chinese of Sichuan dialect)” before the 1970s they would classify themselves as Han and people upstream as Manzi.

Meanwhile, however, the Chinese and foreign visiting anthropologists of the 20th century were busy searching for the essence of the Qiang people. Some Reverend named Thomas Torrance thought the Qiang were monotheists and descendants of the Israelites. (60) Chinese scholars later joined in but, “Even though they failed to find a normative Qiang culture, their attempts to do so, and the data they recorded in these quests, have reinforced the concept of the Qiang nationality both for the Han and the natives.” In more recent times, especially into the 1980s, the benefits of being one of China’s declared minority nationalities meant that many would jump at the opportunity to identify themselves as Qiang while they earlier would have whipped out genealogical records to prove their Han ancestry. With government approval, they designed a writing system, compiled a dictionary, and embroidery, which they probably picked up from the Han or Tibetans, was proclaimed their national hallmark. (69) A linear history of their people, based on the Han definition of the Qiang as it shifted over time was adopted, and “Qiang literati built up their self-image as the strongest opponents of the Han….a historical role as the Han’s brother and savior has also been constructed.” (71)

Wang says, “In the study of history of nations, explanations for the formation of a nation usually take one of two forms: “how did the past create the present?” or “how did the present create the past?” (73) to which his own interesting story of the Qiang shows how the two can overlap. “My own opinion falls in between because the meaning of the history of the Qiang is twofold: it is a history of a minority nationality, and also a history of the Chinese in respect to boundary formation and changes….if we consider the history of the Qiang as a process of formation, expansion and change of Chinese boundaries…this chapter illustrates how the past created the present, and underlines the continuity of this history. However, the most important past that created the present Han-Qiang relations is obviously not what really happened on the Qiang side, but how Chinese thought about their ethnic boundaries through the concept of the Qiang.”

Celebrating the 1911 Revolution in China

Once or twice a week I work part time at the Oriental Library (東洋文庫), mostly doing English editing and occasional small bits of translation from Chinese or Japanese. I spend most of my time helping edit a collection of previously published English essays by the author Etô Shinkichi, who was my own Professor Hirano’s mentor. In one of his essays I was working on today, on the Chinese revolution of 1911, Professor Etô discusses the historiography related to the period and contrasts the “modern detached positivists” who “try to minimize overt political assessment in their research” to the deeply political Marxist historiography of the revolution after 1949.
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