Two police officers boarded the train and walked through my car looking at the people in each seat. Only later did I realize that this is was what counts for border control within the Schengen Area these days.

Of all the over two dozen people in my car, the two officers spoke to only one person. They asked only one passenger where he was going, where he was coming from, how long he intended to stay there, and where his luggage was. They asked only one passenger to produce his passport and then subjected each and every one of its pages, most of them blank, to close inspection. They were polite, respectful, and spoke excellent English. When they found nothing wrong with his Italian passport, they handed it backed, wished him a good journey, and moved on to the next car.

Though the man sitting in front of me didn’t seem annoyed by the encounter, I couldn’t help feeling a shiver run down my back and an anger swell within me. I was reminded that this happens every day, all over the world, in all sorts of context, and that however rational it might seem to the one asking for the documents, racial profiling is unjust, pure and simple.

I am excited to have the opportunity to join THATCamp New England this November and look forward to learning from everyone I meet there. I was asked to post an entry here about the issues that I hope will be discussed at the event. I have no doubt many of the main themes I’m interested in will receive plentiful attention but I would like to bring up two issues that I find of particular importance: 1) the continued need for the appreciation of and promotion of what I’ll call the “little dh” of the digital humanities and 2) an action oriented discussion about the need to plant seeds within each and every department that promotes the cultivation of both real skills and the requisite appreciation for a spirit of experimentation with technology in the humanities not merely among the faculty but even more importantly as a part of the graduate curriculum.

Little dh

I have been unable to keep up with the ever-growing body of scholarship on the digital humanities but what I have read suggests that much of the work that has been done focuses upon the development of new techniques and new tools that assist us in conducting research and teaching in the humanities in roughly four areas: the organization of sources and data (for example Zotero, metadata practices), the analysis of data (e.g. using GIS, statistical text analysis), the delivery and representation of sources and research results (e.g. Omeka) and effective means for promoting student learning (e.g. teaching with clickers, promoting diverse online interactions).

I’m confident that these areas should and will remain the core of Digital Humanities for the foreseeable future. I do hope, however, that there continues to be an appreciation for digital humanities with a small “d” or little dh, if you will, that has a much longer history and I believe will continue to remain important as we go forward. So what do I mean by little dh? I mean the creation of limited, often unscalable, and usually quickly assembled ad hoc solutions tailored to the problems of individual academics or specific projects. In other words, hacks. These solutions might consist of helping a professor, student, or specific research project effectively use a particular combination of software applications, the writing of short scripts to process data or assist in creating workflows to move information smoothly from one application to another, the creation of customized web sites for highly specialized tasks, and so on. These tasks might be very simple such as helping a classics professor develop a particular keyboard layout for a group of students or particular project. It might be more complex, for example, involve helping a Chinese literature professor create a workflow to extract passages from an old and outdated database, perform certain repetitive tasks on the resulting text using regular expressions, and then transform that text into a clean website with automatic annotations in particular places.

The skill set needed to perform “little dh” tasks is such that it is impossible to train all graduate students or academics for them, especially if they have little interest or time to tinker with technology. “Little dh” is usually performed by an inside amateur, for example, the departmental geek, or with the assistance of technology services at an educational institution that are willing to go beyond the normal bounds of “technical support” defined as “fixing things that go wrong.” Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that sometimes the creation of specialized institutes that focus on innovation and technology in education has actually reduced accessibility for scholars to resources that can provide little dh instead of increased it because it is far more sexy to produce larger tools that can be widely distributed than it is to provide simple customized solutions for the problems of individual scholars or projects. One such center to promote innovative uses of technology in education I have seen in action, for example, started out providing very open-ended help to scholars but very quickly shifted to creating and customizing a very small set of tools that may or may not have been useful for the specific needs of the diverse kinds of scholarship being carried out in humanities. There is a genuine need for both, even though one is far less glamorous.

I hope that we can discuss how it is possible to continue to provide and expand the availability of technical competence that can provide help with little dh solutions within our departments and recognize the wide diversity of needs within the academic community, even as we celebrate and increasingly adopt more generalized tools and techniques for our research and teaching.

Planting Seeds

I have been impressed with progress in the digital humanities amongst more stubborn professors that I’ve come across in three areas: 1) an increasing awareness of open access and its benefits to the academic community, 2) an appreciation for the importance of utilizing online resources and online sites of interaction, and 3) the spread of use of bibliographic software amongst the older generation of scholars. This is, to be honest, the only areas of digital humanities that I have really seen begin to widely penetrate the departments I’ve interacted with both as a graduate student and earlier as a technology consultant within a university. I’m now convinced the biggest challenge we face is not in teaching the skills needed to use the software and techniques themselves to the professors and scholars of our academic community, but the pressing need for us to, as it were, “poison the young,” and infect them with a curiosity for the opportunities that the digital humanities offer to change our field in the three key areas of research, teaching, and most threateningly for the status quo, publishing.

There are a growing number of centers dedicated to the digital humanities but I wonder if we might discuss the opening of an additional front, (and perhaps such a front has already been opened and I would love to learn more of it) that attempts to plant a seed of digital humanities within every university humanities department, by asking graduate students to take, or at least offering them the opportunity to take, courses or extended workshops on the digital humanities that focus on: some basic training in self-chosen areas of digital humanities techniques and tools, the cultivation of a spirit of experimentation among students, and finally a more theoretical discussion on the implications of the use of digital humanities for the humanities in general (particularly on professional practices such as publishing, peer review, and the interaction of academics with the broader community of the the intellectually curious public). Promoting the incorporation of such an element into the graduate curriculum will, of course, be a department by department battle, but there are surely preparations that can be made by us as a community, that can help arm sympathetic scholars with the arguments and pedagogical tools needed to bring that struggle into committee meetings at the university and department level.

It is true Routledge is worse than many publishers, but this is beyond ridiculous. I’m fortunate enough to have access to Harvard libraries until I graduate (fingers crossed) next year, but the chances are very good that whatever libraries I can find nearby throughout the rest of my career are the kind who cringe at these prices. I don’t really blame the publishers, though. They are just trying to make a buck in a tough industry with books that have very low chances of selling more than a few copies here and there.

However, I do blame academia for making book publishing such a central part of career advancement. I really wish they would support a wider range of formats and a completely digital open access but peer reviewed world of scholarly interaction, given the increased potential it offers that informed readers outside our small academic world to participate more actively in the process.

Perhaps my expectations are too high, but even if monograph-length publications of the traditional variety are here to stay, can someone tell me why we can’t do something like this:

1. Scholar gets an annual personal publication fund from department, its size based on multiple variables, including perhaps, evaluation of past publications, a department’s commitment to support research in a tough field that is poorly funded by grants and professional associations.

2. Scholar writes a manuscript (a book, an article, but also other multi-media or film projects etc. ought to be included).

3. Scholar submits manuscript to a professional association along with small administration fee for free distribution of work to readers (or viewers, etc.).

4. Professional association finds some qualified unpaid anonymous readers for the work to evaluate its quality and distributes copies to them (the way publishers do now).

5. Readers return an evaluation that concludes refuse, revise, or publish with some indication of what relative importance the work has in terms of its contribution to the field from their perspective.

6. If it passes peer review, the professional association gives the scholar back the evaluation reports, an official endorsement (which can be used to promote the work, once “published”), and if funding is available, makes an offer of some amount of money towards publication of the work, in relation to the relative importance of the work attributed to it by its readers, its own further evaluation, and its budget for the year.

7. If the work passes peer review and the money offered by the professional association is sufficient for publication, proceed to step (9). Otherwise,

8. If the offered money is insufficient for publication costs or the professional association refuses to endorse it, and the scholar does not wish to make up the difference from her/his personal publication fund, they then repeat steps (3) to (6) seeking help from other professional associations whose evaluation of quality will add to the prestige and funding of the work, or other funding sources (departmental, university, other institutions) until they get enough money in offers or they revise or abandon the research project.

Once the scholar has decided that they have enough support from professional associations, grants, further departmental support, or contribution from their annual personal publication fund they proceed with publication and spend their funds in the following manner:

9. (Optional) Pay lump sum to a publisher-consultant who handles the administrative tasks and payment in below steps (10) to (13) if the scholar doesn’t want to deal with it personally or through someone at their own institution hired specifically for this task. There is to be no transferral of copyright away from the scholar either way and this publisher-consultant does not have any role in determining whether or not something gets published. In this model the publisher is an administrator who has contacts for managing the below steps.

10. Pay for X hours of labor to hire an editor-consultant to help improve the language and writing of the manuscript beyond the quality of its academic content.

11. Pay for Y hours of labor to hire a designer-consultant to create the print and digital presentation for the work (for desktop/mobile web browsers and e-reader applications).

12. Pay $Z for the fees to have the metadata for the work permanently indexed and its files hosted in multiple online depositories, including important information on its peer-reviewed endorsements and positive/negative evaluation reports.

13. (If you really want to make a paper version) submit the print formatted version of the work to all the major online print-on-demand services where anyone can order a cheap paper copy, including both libraries and average readers.

Here are the some of the strengths of a system like this:

-It leaves the copyright in the hands of the author, who will hopefully release the text with a Creative Commons license for maximum distribution and use.

-It imagines a new and powerful role for professional associations, or at least a transformation of traditional journal editorial boards/networks into more broadly defined associations who continue to have, among their primary duties, the evaluation of scholarly work in their field.

-It recognizes that publishing, even digital or print-on-demand works, can be costly process involving many hours of labor beyond that of the author and the anonymous readers.

-It leaves peer review intact, but shifts it from publishers to professional associations which should themselves proliferate in number and each will naturally develop differing perceived standards of quality and funding sources. With the decline of traditional academic publishing, these organizations should receive funding from universities and outside grant institutions or at least provide them with recommendations of where their funding should go.

-It allows for multiple sources of funding both from professional associations that participate in the peer review process but also allows scholars to use their own annual publishing funds, and further grants from university or other institutions.

-Since personal or departmental funds may end up partly or completely funding the publication of works that were poorly evaluated in the peer-review process and couldn’t get financial support from sources based on its quality, it does little to stop bad research from getting published. It does, however, prevent them from creating a burden on the traditional publisher who currently pass that cost onto the consumers of information – since now publishers play no part in the selection process or have any stake in the success of its publication – the publisher, editor, designer, and digital index/content hosts are all paid for their work regardless. Also, since such poor quality publications will not be able to promote themselves by showing that they have the endorsements of, and positive evaluations of reputable professional associations, they will simply get cited less and can get filtered out in various ways during the source search process. However, even bad works or ones on extremely obscure topics can sometimes be useful, if but for a footnote or two that turns us on to a good source.

In this system what is the role for traditional academic publishing companies as they exist now?

None. Universities who support many of them should eventually dissolve them but support them long enough to allow a relatively smooth transition for its employees to find niches in the businesses that should grow from providing services in step (9) to step (12). Book paper printing should be all done through print-on-demand services as the print medium slowly declines. Marketing/promotion of the traditional kind will ideally become a minimal part of the equation as association endorsements and evaluations become the dominant stamp of quality and citation networking power comes to rule the day. Of course, you can add a “marketing” budget for promotion and advertising between steps (11) and (12) above if such funds are available but hopefully this will be seen as a practice resorted to mostly by those who failed to receive strong endorsement from professional associations. No one promotes our journal articles, why should we treat our academic books and other projects differently? If it gets cited, read, and referenced, is that not enough to ensure its spread, especially if the works are openly available and thus offer no barrier to access.

Now, tell me why can’t this work? Why won’t something similar to this emerge from the ridiculous state of academic publishing today when it really wakes up? Let me know what you think.

If they are accepted, I have a foundation of notes to work off of, but there is some more research that needs to be done and I welcome any comments, suggestions, etc.

The ‘Democratic Police’ under US Military Occupation: Torture and Reform in Korea and Japan, 1945-48

The reform ideals of every postwar United States military occupation have faced one of their greatest tests in the question of how to address the pre-occupation institution of the police: Are they to be preserved largely intact in order to carry out the essential duties of preserving public order, and guarding against new insurgent forces? Or are their post-conflict remnants to be completely dismantled or at least thoroughly purged for having been the most efficient tools of state oppression? This paper examines and compares the attempt by US occupation authorities in early postwar Korea and Japan to balance its strategic need to preserve social stability and its desire to eliminate the worst symbols of police brutality and oppression. It focuses on the campaign to bring about an institutional rebirth in the form of the new ‘Democratic Police’ and the responses to it within the Japanese and Korean police establishment. US occupation officials and post-occupation advisors were forced to acknowledge, often with embarrassment, the failure to eradicate torture. However, the United States police forces that supplied advisors and instructors for the occupation were no distant strangers to brutality themselves, with torture, or “third degree” interrogations reported widespread in the 1931 Wickersham Commission’s “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” Despite a genuine disgust with brutal methods, the very willingness of US forces to quickly disassociate themselves from the ‘dirty work’ of occupation security guaranteed the persistence of such methods by Japanese, and in a more politically violent environment, especially the Korean police.

Pan-Asianism or World Federalism? Raja Mahendra Pratap and the Japanese Empire, 1925-1945

A number of Indians opposed to British colonial rule made their way to Japan and found their voices welcome among Japan’s leading pan-Asianist thinkers. The most famous of these figures include Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose, former president of the Indian National Congress and eventual commander of the Japanese supported Indian National Army. The collaboration between these Indian nationalists, sworn to an anti-imperialist cause, and Japan’s own brutal empire has been of great interest to historians. The more eclectic figure Raja Mahendra Pratap, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1932, was also a fervent activist against British colonial rule in India and likewise turned to Japan for support, but Pratap also developed a highly evolved and spiritually charged conception of world federalism. Pratap found some support for his ideas in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, where he raised money and corresponded with intellectuals long before the idea of World Federalism would briefly enjoy widespread interest in Japan and around the world from 1945-1947. This presentation will show how Pratap worked to prevent his conception of a world federation from clashing with Japan’s imperialist conception of pan-Asian union and suggest the ways in which his exploration of the relationship between the regional and the global foreshadowed postwar and contemporary debates of a similar nature.

Update: The first proposal was rejected and I delivered the second presentation at Columbia University. I’ll try again with the first proposal for another conference in the fall.

I’ve got ideas. I’ve got outlines. I’ve got hundreds of pages of notes.

I have years of training in the destruction and dismissal of other people’s arguments. They call it grad school.

Now the time has come when I too must write – and not one of those research papers churned out in the day or two before the deadline arrives. I must write the dissertation. I am to write chapters that connect to each other in some logical fashion. Chapters. Even the word itself sounds like so many heavy links of metal to be hung around the necks of PhD students back from those green pastures they call “the field.”

I have seen them. They wander the campus with a pale look; the clank and rattle of their invisible burden almost audible as they walk. Nearby a third year history grad student might be seen skipping away, “I’m off to the archives!”

I forge my first link this fall. Getting a summer head start on my procrastination, this week I sat down to read a few books on the craft of writing, including a simple but handy book of “writing tools” aimed mostly at journalists and fiction writers. Reading through the short examples of good writing, I realized that I didn’t really know what good writing looked like in history.

Don’t get me wrong. In historiography classes, I have read plenty of “classic” works, from a full range of “schools” of historical inquiry and their most radical theoretical rivals. A year spent mostly reading in preparation for oral examinations brought me in close contact – “reading” wasn’t always the best description of what that contact consisted of – with hundreds of history books, but in all cases my eyes were trained on the content, not the form. The only times I really paid much attention to form was when some theoretically ambitious works were so frustratingly obtuse that one wondered how these historians who claim sensitivity to the subtleties of discourse could have nurtured such talent for linguistic slaughter.

I can think of plenty of works of history that took an approach I liked, had an argument that persuaded me, or simply benefited me in my own research. However, I am embarrassed to admit, I can’t name any history books that I thought were well written. That is to say, I have apparently paid so little attention to the writing of history at the level of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, and so much to the arguments and their support instead, that I now feel particularly naked as I go forward in my own writing.

Of course, I suspect good writing in history resembles good writing everywhere else. Surely many of the lessons of good writing taught in a journalism class, at a college writing center, or in Mrs. Gould’s seventh grade English class back in Aberdeen, Scotland are applicable to the writing of one’s history dissertation. I am also doubtlessly influenced by the rhetorical strategies and sentence structures of at least some of the hundreds of works that I have read in the past few years. Hopefully that influence is partly born of an intuitive recognition of quality. Even if that assumption is flawed, it is too late for me to revisit those blissful days of wide secondary source reading now. But if I get a chance to speak to incoming grad students in my last two years in the program, perhaps in the form of a wailing spirit in the night, I think I will advise them to pay closer attention to the language of historical works; to occasionally wield the eyeglass, and not merely the sword when they confront the works both in their own fields and the broader historiography.

The archivists were incredibly friendly, and warned me in advanced that they didn’t think they would have too much from the period I was looking at. After providing the letters of introduction that are required at most archives in China and having the way paved for me thanks to a phone call from a contact I made in Jinan, I was allowed to search for documents using their digital database. They even gave me a free lunch from their cafeteria on the first day and a free copy of a book they had published that I was interested in getting containing documents from the wartime period.

Unlike the provincial archives, this archive found their collection manageable enough to scan and store digitally copies of all the files and make them available for viewing by visitors in place of the originals. Unfortunately, I was not given the option of looking at the originals instead. Also unlike the provincial archives, the online search of their database seems to return results from a much larger proportion of materials that are found by searching for the same on their internal database.¹ They did not allow me to save any of the digital TIF image collections of individual documents onto a USB drive² but I was allowed to print documents and, after their contents was checked over by the archivist³, to make off with these environmentally less friendly non-digital printouts.

Unfortunately, almost everything that could have been done wrong with this digitization program and its presentation to the visitor did. So let me list of the issues as a warning to other, especially smaller archives, that might consider going the digital route. I have listed them from the least worrisome to most serious:

1) Environment: The computer designated for viewing of documents had a cheap monitor with little screen brightness (even when set to full) which faced a window where sunlight beamed into the room (even when I convinced them to partially lower shades), providing a horrible viewing experience and harm to the eyes. An uncomfortable mini-mouse, horrible chair, and a table with almost no spare room for visitors to put a notebook or their laptop made this a nightmare to spend any length of time looking at documents.

2) Software: The custom built database software had an advanced query system which is useful for advanced users and archivists but requires multiple stages to search and although I quickly got used to it, I think it would confuse users not used to such systems. Also, when it shows images of archive files, a lot of vertical screen space is wasted on software options and interface components, which leads to a great deal of scrolling at any zoom level that makes reading possible.

3) Page Numbers: At the archive in question I requested a lot of documents where essentially local versions of other documents that I had seen before from other districts. Having seen many originals of this kind I know most of them are one small A5ish sized sheets of very thin paper that are held together with string. Despite the age of these documents, surprisingly I have never run into paging issues at the provincial archives, mostly because I’m seeing them still stringed together. By contrast, pages were all over the place in these documents in their digital form. While it is possible they were already unstringed and in messed up order when the contractors got the documents, I suspect that they got messed up through negligence when the originals were unstringed in order to be scanned.

4) Indexing: This is a very serious problem I found with all but two of the 70 or so documents I looked up during the two days I was at the archive. Before coming to the archive, I used the online database I made a list of file names and file numbers for documents I was interested in. I brought these to the archive and looked up the same numbers in the internal database. Each file number, unfortunately, corresponds to a packet of multiple files ranging, at least judging by what I saw, from 15-50 or so in number. I could then easily locate the appropriate document by its file name and open the images directly in the system. To my horror, in all but two of the cases, the documents in the file images did not correspond to the file name. For each document I would have to hunt through the other dozen or several dozen documents in the same general area to find the images for the file I was looking for. Sometimes I was never able to locate the file, suggesting that those images are probably found in other file groups, if at all. Now, what am I supposed to do as a historian when I cite the documents I did find? I’ll record the correct file numbers, found in the database, but any other historian wishing to confirm the information I am citing will look them up and find a completely different document unless the archivists have gone in and fixed all the indexing issues throughout their scanned collection.

I asked two of the archivists about this issue and I essentially got a, “That is funny. Well, just hunt through the rest of them and find your document. It’s probably like that for this whole collection. We paid a contractor to have it done and didn’t have the resources to check all their work.”

5) Quality: The documents I’m looking at are Communist public security bureau reports and Communist party internal reports. Some of them are hand written or are characters carved onto a special surface that allows a sort of reproduction process frequently used in the 1940s (any printing history buffs know what this ancient photocopying method is called?). In either case, they are very difficult to read, faded with time, on surfaces that are themselves often in poor condition, and most importantly, written in tiny sizes. If you are going to digitize these kinds of documents, then, you need to digitize them with a much higher quality. As I mentioned in my posting on triage in the archives, I have had to sometimes completely skip some of the more hopelessly unreadable documents or those for which the pages per hour drops to a rate that makes the investment of time not worth it. I would say that this happens in perhaps 1/10 documents I look at here.

Now, take these same kinds of documents and scan them. If you scan them well, at high resolution and with color, then you can actually make those difficult to read but important sections more readable thanks to the power of zooming in on parts of the image. However, that is not what happened here.

The contractors here decided to take these extremely difficult to read originals and scan them in black and white (not even in greyscale!). Now I know the evidence seems to suggest that if you are going to run a massive scale OCR program on historical newspapers, for example, then black and white is not significantly worse than greyscale. However, OCR is not even worth trying on these hard documents, unless there are some major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. If, however, you are trying to use human eyes to read difficult to read handwritten or carved Chinese characters on poorly preserved mediums, you need to preserve as much of the quality of the originals as possible. The cost benefit analysis done in this case resulted, in the case of many documents, in completely unreadable digital copies.

This really left me depressed. In the case of the completely botched indexing described in number four above, an archivist or the hired contractor can go back and meticulously re-index the documents so that they point to the correct images. Since some of the documents have visible page numbers, messed up page numbers might also be fixed in those cases. However, I suspect it is harder to go back and explain to the budget committee, “Ya, our contractor blew the scanning job and made thousands of once barely readable documents in our collection now completely unreadable to visitors. Can we pay to do the scanning all over again?”

I came back to Jinan yesterday morning and felt incredibly happy to go back to reading similar documents in my own hands.⁴ Digitization can do amazing things for improving access and preservation. When the Japanese national library set about digitizing all Meiji and now Taisho period publications I found myself complaining mostly about the slower speed at which I could browse or skim through the books. I didn’t find that readability itself suffered too much during the process. In a case like these far more difficult to read wartime Communist documents, however, sloppy digitization of these documents, only gradually opening up to researchers and historians, actually reduces rather than increases access.

1. When I asked one of the archivists at the provincial archives why they did not provide full online access to the database, rather than a very small sampler of the full internal database so that visitors could come prepared with a list of documents to request, I got a bewildered and serious look, “Do you want to put me out of a job?” This answer only makes sense if you realize that one of the primary duties of two of the archivists is to sit at the database search engine and help first time visitors search for documents. Given the fact many of the, especially older, visitors are completely computer illiterate, however, I still believe their services would continue to be required to help elderly comrades who come to search for their records.
2. though, as was the case with the Korean national archive, it would have been simple enough for a less scrupulous person to do this given the access to the “Save As…” option in the file menu and apparent lack of any security on the machine I was given access to. In fact, in the case of the Korean national archive at Daejeon, web browser access was restricted but I was able to confirm, at least as of 2008, the DOS command line still gave me FTP access to my server where I could have uploaded hundreds of pages of Korean archive documents they were requiring me to wastefully print and pay for, had I been so inclined to disregard their rules.
3. A bizarre and surely unnecessary step, since the documents have been screened once when they were added to the database for classified information. I could easily note down in my notes anything I read in the documents before printing them so not letting me keep the print outs hardly serves to prevent sensitive or privacy violating information from leaking out. If privacy issues are primary there should be a system, like the one at the Korean national archive, which charges the visitor to process accessed documents to redact out the names of people mentioned. At the Pusan branch of the Korean National Archive I paid about $50 and waited three days to get access to some old police logs. It took that much time because they had to go through and erase the names and provide me copies. However, I’m still grateful I got access at all. Although this is an important issue that deserves consideration, I generally feel that the privacy laws of Korea and Japan are far too strict and that they seriously inhibit serious historical work from the 19th through the period I’m working on in the mid-20th century
4. Note to super friendly archivists: if you encourage a visiting PhD student to eat while looking at the documents by suddenly (and generously) giving him a handful of juicy baby tomatoes, you might end up with a bit of tomato juice on one of the pages of part two of the 1946 treason elimination report from the Donghai public security bureau of the Jiaodong district.

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

In this posting I will describe a kind of outlining software that could largely resolve the organizational problem I have described in my previous two postings without having to navigate between several applications. These could be easily added as a mode or layer of features to existing outlining software out there. In this case I’m thinking of OmniOutliner, which is what I use, but I think the kinds of modifications I am suggesting could be easily added to most other outlining software solutions out there, or serve as a foundation of a new solution based on the organizing principles described here. The result, I hope, will be an environment which will allow researchers to adopt a smooth workflow which can unite the highest level of a research outline and the most tiny fragments of notes on sources or the sources themselves.
My own favorite note taking application, OmniOutliner, like most kinds of outlining software, allows me to hierarchically and in a bullet point fashion record notes on various materials I come across ranging from historical sources to books and articles on any topic. I am always impressed with the great care to detail and flexibility that software created by Omni Group shows so if you are using a Mac, I recommend you give their offerings a look. When we make use of the information we find, we will usually mark the deployment of such information in our academic writing with the use of citations and sometimes direct quotations we have recorded. This means that an important part of historical research, as well as research in many other fields, is keeping careful track of exactly what information comes from what source. Two approaches in note-taking spring to my mind:

1) Somehow keep notes on sources separated by the source, whether in different sections of a single file, or different files. Make note of page numbers as one records notes from different parts of the source.

2) Organize all one’s notes by an arbitrarily determined collection of ideas (or chapters, or chapter sections, or themes, etc.). Each time one reads a new source directly input information worth remembering into the note file or section of a note file dedicated to the given idea, chapter, or theme.

The problem with the first approach, which I presume to be the more common, is that if one has a very large quantity of notes on many different sources, when one shifts into the writing mode, one has to hunt through one’s notes looking for the information relevant to the claims one wishes to make in that particular section of the dissertation. This is the problem of the lack of the “middle layer” of organization that I referred to in my first posting and for which I have presented a temporary and imperfect solution for in the second posting.

For example, I have somewhere between three and four hundred note files on various sources related or potentially useful to my PhD dissertation. Some of them are less than a page long with a few brief points of interest. Others, like my note files on various newspapers and archival collections, are extremely long files of several dozen pages divided into sections by year, issue, or specific document in a collection. Hunting through them all, or more likely, a quickly chosen sub section of these files in search of useful information I have recorded will be highly time consuming and risks missing some great gems that I have since forgotten about.

The second approach seems to provide a much faster transition from research to writing since the researcher can sit down and immediately begin writing a chapter based on the notes collected together under certain idea or chapter headings. The problem with the second approach is twofold: 1) When fragments are completely extracted from their original context you lose the important sense of connection between that information and other fragments or notes you have recorded from the same source. Call this the “problem of context.” 2) Each time you enter a fragment from a source into this chapter/idea/theme based note file you will have to also make note of the exact source and location in that source. This means the time required to record any fragment can potentially double. Call this the “problem of reference.”

Tagging and the Problem of Context

Those familiar with the dramatic rise of “tagging” of information online might have already thought of a way to resolve the problem of context. If information is tagged, you get the best of both worlds: a tagged object can be linked to many different ideas or multiple chapters while still remaining in whatever structure it was found in. There is no need to take the second approach above because we can dynamically create such an idea/theme list of fragments based on particular tags given those fragments within the note file for the original source. When a picture in a Flickr set entitled, say, “trip to the lake” is tagged “bird” then the addition of the tag does not remove it from its initial context, that is to say, the fact that it is a picture posted to the Flickr collection of kmlawson and that I have placed it in set.¹

An organizational application which supports tagging, such as Yojimbo, Sente, Evernote, Leap, Yep, etc. allows you to easily tag and display a list of files by tags. iPhoto allows you to tag your images, and I use an applescript to add tags to my songs in iTunes to support my dynamically generated ‘smart’ playlists. However, from the perspective of the historian writing a book or a PhD student writing their dissertation, these tagging applications aren’t quite enough. All these applications are tagging at the level of files, which is not really the level of detail we need in creating a rich web of connections for our research.

Tags must go beyond the level of the file and down to the level of a bullet point within one’s notes. We need a way to easily and quickly tag individual fragments of information within the sources we find so can easily deploy them in our academic writing.

Let me give a concrete example. This is a fragment from one of my note files from a local police report from my trip to the archives yesterday. I also list where this fragment is within my system of organization:

In my folder “Dissertation”:
In my subfolder: “Related Notes”
In the file “Shandong Provincial Archives”:
Under the heading for file G042-01-0283-007 全县反奸诉苦大会总结 1946.4.3 日照县公安局
I have the following fragment from a local trial of a traitor:
“12/107 a woman’s father was executed by shooting by the accused traitor during the J occupation. When she 控訴ed the traitor she cried the whole time. She 上台 and using a stone, beat the 犯人. This scene made the masses 感動 and 落淚”

This is a very brief but rich piece of historical detail from a police report showing how a woman mounted the stage and beat an accused pro-Japanese collaborator who had executed her father when the town was under Japanese occupation, and it records the subsequent emotional impact this scene had upon the ‘masses’ in attendance. In a report that deals mostly with generalities and statistics this is a powerful little anecdote that might potentially make an appearance in my dissertation. This fragment might help me in one or two ways: 1) It can help me describe the way the ‘masses’ got directly involved during the local treason trials and carried out acts of direct violence against the accused during the course of the trials without the interference, despite party directives that no violence or beatings should be carried out upon the accused, especially prior to conviction, and any eventual executions only be carried out by a bullet fired by ‘special’ public security officers. 2) It can also help me make the argument, which I hope to make, which is that Communist cadres were very interested in recording the way that these treason trials aroused the masses, sparked emotion in them, and helped organize them in the contexts of movements carried out under party control. In this case, and in many others I have found, the reaction of the masses is carefully recorded.

Now, how shall I preserve this fragment for easy access later when I begin writing? I might want to give several tags to this fragment. Perhaps I want to tag it for things like, ‘Treason and Social Reform’ (the chapter this might be used in) ‘local trials’,’reaction of the masses’,’women’,’beatings’, etc. Of course, to reduce the problem of tagging things in slightly different tags, auto-complete should be available to guess tags as I begin typing them.

It would also be nice if there were cascading tags. That is to say, if I could assign certain tags to the entire file, Shandong Provincial Archives with tags like, “China”,”Shandong” which trickled down to every fragment bullet point in the file, and also tag the sub-section of that file for the document G042-01-0283-007 全县反奸诉苦大会总结 1946.4.3 日照县公安局 so that all fragments of notes taken from that file had the tags ‘日照’,’公安局’,’反奸訴苦’,’1946′, etc.

It does me little good to use Leap, or Yojimbo etc. to tag the whole file, now several dozen pages long, with all my notes from the Shandong Provincial Archives, or even a file specifically for G042-01-0283-007 which included other useful information that I might want to tag in other ways (like a table of statistics of how many ‘masses’ were ‘organized’ as a result of carrying out the anti-treason campaign). An ideal outline software solution for academic researchers would allow tagging at the level of the bullet point.

The Problem of Reference and Creating Smart or Dynamic Outlines

Of course, this system would have to work both ways. Let us say I have finished my research in the various archives, libraries, and online databases and completed the taking of all those note files. Let us say my software has allowed me to tag all the more useful bullet points, and allowed these bullet points to receive the cascading tags of their section headers and the note files themselves.

Ideally, I should now be given some kind of clean view of all fragments of information that match certain tags. Besides the fact that these have now been dynamically collected for me and displayed in a list, the most important thing I need to know now is what source they came from. Thus, every fragment listed in this way should be able to display a column or otherwise make apparent the source. This system would ideally account for the fact that the source does not always correspond to the name of the originating file, or the header for the section from which the fragment was taken.

To accommodate the fact that a fragment’s source is not necessarily reflected in the file name or section name of its origin, I suggest the outlining software allow the user to designate certain blocks in a note file, whether it is the whole file (I have many files dedicated to a single book or article), or merely a section of a file (I have a single file for all the documents I viewed from some archives such as Shandong Provincial Archive, Korean National Archive, RG242 of the US National Archives) as belonging to a source. The actual citation for this source might be kept internally within the application. However, since there are many great tools out there for managing academic resources and their citations that a student or academic might already have a preference for (Zotero, Sente, Endnote, etc.) I believe the best solution would be to provide some form of a link to a source entry in these external resources, whether they be within an offline application or an online format.

Finally, viewing a list of fragments by a single tag or combination of tags merely gives you an overview of one idea (or a chapter if you have tags for chapter themes). The application should allow you to create ‘smart outline’ files which are essentially dynamically created mega-outlines, ‘notes on notes’ or a kind of complex ‘smart playlist’ of points to be made for each argument or chapter. Here is what I am thinking of: The user could create a ‘smart’ note file called, say, “Dissertation Outline” and then write out their broad outline divided into chapters and the major arguments they wish to make. Then, they could non-exclusively assign certain tags to chapters or arguments within those chapters in a special way that allowed “and/or/not” constructions to limit the hits. This is similar to the process of tagging fragments within note files described above, with one important exception: in this case, tagging these chapters or arguments allows the user to list all fragments associated with those tags under those sections in this mega outline. Thus, at a glance, the researcher can view a dynamic and self-updating outline of their dissertation outline with the major sections and arguments directly inputted, but with each of these chapters or arguments containing within them a smart list of all fragments that contains certain tags associated with these chapters or arguments.

A few more features I believe this smart outline view ought to support: this view would also include a feature that could show a list of “orphans” which are tagged fragments which have not yet been assigned a location in the smart outline. It is very likely that we have tagged many fragments in ways that at a later date turn out not to be the most obvious when we enter the writing process. This orphan view can rescue important fragments from obscurity.

Also, since such a powerful and probably huge smart lists will probably result in a large number of duplicate or less than useful fragments getting listed, the user should be able to easily hide single or groups of fragments which, despite their promising tags, are irrelevant to a chapter/argument. There might also be check marks given so that a researcher can check off fragments as they include them in the written work.

This view should also account for the very likely possibility that the researcher anticipates using material from a source for which they have no notes for. Just as fragments are associated with sources, in this mega-outline or smart outline view, they should be able to easily drag and drop in references to sources they think will be relevant to specific arguments or chapters but for which they have no notes or fragments at all. Again this can be from an internally managed list of sources within the application but more ideally compatible with various existing solutions like Zotero, Sente, etc.

Let me give an example of the ‘Smart Outline’ feature of the software as I imagine it:

Let us say I’m writing a book just on the Treason Elimination Squads in China (rather than divided between two chapters as I currently plan to). After tagging hundreds or several thousand bullet points in dozens or hundreds of note files managed by my outlining application, I write up a (very boring) book outline using this ‘smart outline’ feature:

Introduction
Formation of the Treason Elimination Bureau in Shandong
Early Excesses and the Anti-Trotskyist Movement
Balancing the Three Treasonous Enemies
Reckless Arrests, Reckless Killings, and Attempts at Reform
Turning to the Masses
Liberation and the Anti-Treason Campaign
Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Civil War

While I won’t list them here, let us say I also add some sections for each of those chapters with major arguments I want to make in the book under the headings for each chapter. Now, I set about attaching relevant tags for each chapter or argument/section within a chapter (and some of these tags might be tags I have created specifically for chapters):

Introduction
Formation of the Treason Elimination Bureau in Shandong
-([not 1940 or 1941 or … 1949],’Treason Elimination Bureau’,Shandong)
Early Excesses and the Anti-Trotskyist Movement
-(托匪,’Treason Elimination Bureau’,torture,executions,excesses,湖西錯誤,[泰山 and 1942],[濱海 and 1942])
Balancing the Three Treasonous Enemies
-(托匪,國特，敵偽，’Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Reckless Arrests, Reckless Killings, and Attempts at Reform
-(亂捕亂殺,’Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Turning to the Masses
-(群眾化, ‘Treason Elimination Bureau’ etc.)
Liberation and the Anti-Treason Campaign
-(反奸訴苦, 1946, etc.)
Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Civil War
-(反奸防匪，[Shandong and [1947 or 1948 or 1949]]

Having thus assigned certain tags (in some cases the same tags are listed in multiple chapters) I should, in the software I am imagining, be able to view a dynamic list of all fragments with those tags (or in some cases, complex combinations of tags like Taishan and 1942 so I get only fragments that are likely to refer to the Taishan killings of that year) under the relevant headings. I should be able to independently re-order the displayed fragments and hide those that I determine are irrelevant in preparation for writing. These smart lists should be ‘live’ so if I go back to the library or archive and add more fragments in some of my note files with the relevant tags, they should appear in the ‘smart outline’ which lists these tags.

I believe that what I have described above can serve as a rough blueprint for a very powerful application that will allow researchers to have a fully integrated web of information between different levels of organization – at the highest outline level and the lowest level of note taking on sources.

Putting it All Together

So, putting it together, here is what I am imagining as a powerful note taking and organizational solution for academic research:

A powerful and flexible hierarchical bullet point outlining application, such as OmniOutliner

In the ‘smart outline’ the user should be able to drop in references to specific sources under certain sections to account for useful sources for which there are no note files and fragments.

In short, this application is an outline or note-taking application which supports sub-file level tagging of bullet points along with and a powerful ‘smart outline’ view that allows users to create powerful high-level and dynamic outlines that list all possibly useful fragments of supporting evidence, what sources they come from, or simply references to sources for which there are no notes. It should ideally interface with existing mature citation software solutions either on or offline which already has wide adoption within the academic world.

1. Of course, in the case of such digital resources, we can of course imagine these initial contextual traits as really just being two more special kinds of tags, one exclusive tag to indicate the owner, and a list of tags with each set I have put the picture into.

I’d be very interested in hearing about how other graduate students have sought to resolve the problem of connecting the large quantity of notes, outlines, and unprocessed raw sources with the grand outline of a huge writing project like a dissertation. Below I describe briefly how I have essentially integrated this process into my own task management routine.

First, let me describe how I have been organizing the historical materials I have been collecting in the field and while back at university. Read on for the details.The primary historical sources I have been working on can be divided into four kinds:

1) Sources I have read but of which I have no hard or digital copy. These are represented on my computer only in the form of the OmniOutliner notes I have taken on these files, along with the appropriate information necessary for citations.

2) Sources which I have only a photocopy hard copy of. Usually I write any important citation information directly on the first page of the document. Then, to each of these sources (which may be primary materials or photocopied books, articles, etc.) I have given an index number composed of a letter (I have used the language the text is in, which in retrospect was not the best way to do things) and an incrementally increasing number so that I can easily refer to my documents in various other files and relocate them in my boxes of files. I have a single OmniOutliner ‘document index’ which lists the name or description of the document, its index number, and the date I found the document. This index number is also noted under the entry for the appropriate day in a separate chronological dissertation log I keep which describes what work I have been doing on my dissertation and the context in which I came across the material). Two examples from my document index (description | index number | date found):

汪偽政府所屬各機關部隊學校團體重要人員名錄 C1010 2008.7.22

BA0155460 사법경찰지도교양재료송부의건 K1003 2008.5.16

3) Sources which I have taken a photographic image of. Some archives and libraries in China, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States allow me to (or at least don’t stop me from) bringing my own camera and taking pictures of the sources I’m looking at. For each source, I usually create a separate OmniOutliner document. In it I take notes on the content of the source, noting any useful information I find in the source. For each photograph of a page of material I take, I record the photograph’s ID number (there is a different numbering scheme for every camera). Sometimes, the notes are very simple, especially if I don’t know if a piece of material will ever be of any value. However, hard disk space is cheap so I take photos of a lot of material I may never look at in any great detail. When I import my photographs, I keep them separated, by source, in folders within my ‘Images’ folder in my ‘Dissertation’ folder. The file name of imported images is the ID number. That way, if I ever need to look at the original image, I can see the ID number in the notes for a source and then search for that number.

For example. In my notes from my reading of the newspaper 青島公報, which is divided into microfilm reels and years, I have an like this in my note file:

青島公報 Reel 1 From 1946.3 to 1946.10

9.1:3 three 漢奸, including a woman ‘cultural hanjian’ 焦墨筠 who gets 3 years and 6 months with other two geting 10 and 15 years each #0508

In this case, this is a short note summarizing an article on page 3 of the September 1st issue of 青島公報 on the sentencing of three Chinese traitors. I will probably never use this information in my dissertation but if I decide at some point to talk more about female traitors or ‘cultural traitors’ then I know I have this short newspaper article on the sentencing of one such woman at the conclusion of her treason trial. In my dissertation log, I find that I was reading through this reel on the afternoon of 2008.12.2 at Shandong Provincial library microfilm room where they let me take somewhat readable photographs of the screen of the microfilm machine. The numeric portion of “#0508″ can be searched for on my hard drive that search will yield an image in the 青島公報 subfolder of my images folder named DSCF0508.JPG that contains the full text of the original article. I use the prefix ‘#’ because I have already taken over 10,000 pictures during the course of my dissertation research and the camera has begun to recycle the numbers. I used to use ‘$’ but to keep these numbers unique in my notes, I now use ‘#’ for the second 9,999 pictures. When I search for 0508 I now get two pictures, but this is hasn’t been too much of a hassle to sort out.

4) Sources which I have a PDF or other digital document for. Many secondary sources or scanned materials I have are available in PDF format, which I have stored among my dissertation files. When I have read these, I record notes for them in an OmniOutliner file. Sometimes, when I have read several articles on a particular topic, I will have a separate OmniOutliner file summarizing the points and arguments from a collection of articles. For example, I have read a series of articles and book chapters on the history of the Shandong column of the 8th route army during wartime China and have compiled notes on this into a separate file I have for historical background on wartime Shandong province. I also have a note file compiling various notes on my notes related to Korea’s treason trials in 1949.

Making the Connections

So the challenge remains, how do I link all these notes, notes on notes, to the actual dissertation without constantly going on a long hunt through all my files?

The way I have approached this problem is to simply use my existing task management software, or ‘to-do’ software or ‘GTD’ (‘Getting Things Done’) software.

I use a program called OmniFocus both on my MacBook Pro laptop computer and on my iPod Touch to manage my tasks (they synch their content with each other). Like many other ‘GTD’ programs out there like Things or iGTD in the case of Mac software, OmniFocus allows you to organize your tasks by projects and contexts. You might first drop tasks into a general ‘inbox’ of unprocessed tasks and then add a project and context for later review if you don’t have time to perform a given task when reviewing the inbox. The former allows you to easy find tasks related to specific projects you are working on while the latter allows you to find tasks that can be done in certain ‘contexts’ of your life. So, for example, I have a ‘web’ and ’email’ context which are sub contexts under ‘comp’ for when I’m working on my computer but also a ‘harvard-yenching’ and ‘shandong provincial library’ and ‘taiwan national library’ context all three which are sub-contexts under the ‘library’ context.

The key efficiency move in this process of connection creation is, however, the combination of project organization and really simple adding of items to that project in the task management software. Many applications like OmniFocus allow you to very quickly and painlessly add tasks to your inbox or specific projects through a ‘quick entry window’ that is accessible in response to a keyboard shortcut. It is with this feature that I have found a simple and easy way to connect my notes with my final chapter writing: In OmniFocus I have created a folder of projects for my dissertation and created separate projects for each of my planned chapters.

Then, as I am taking notes on my sources, each time I finish looking through a source, I reread my notes and try to estimate what chapter the various information I have found can potentially contribute to. I then copy either the name of the source, its file number, etc. (if the notes are relatively few) or a unique phrase or date+phrase from the relevant bullet point in my notes and activate the ‘quick entry window’ of OmniFocus. I assign it the context of ‘writing’ for when I actually get to writing my dissertation, briefly describe what I think the source contributes, and then assign the item the project corresponding to the chapter I believe I will likely have use for the information. If I don’t really know what chapter some material will useful for, I might add it to some other more general topic projects I have added to the dissertation folder of OmniFocus projects, or, for the time being, drop it into the inbox for later consideration.

After adding many such items, not all which will necessarily make it into the dissertation, I return to OmniFocus and review the various items I have added, eliminating those I don’t think will actually be useful when I begin writing, and grouping the various items into hierarchical categories within the chapter projects corresponding to sections of my chapter as I currently imagine it.

What I hope will result from this is a smoother writing process. As I write the various portions of each chapter I can find exact references to individual note files or parts of files where I can find the relevant source material and notes on that source material that will help me make the arguments I am planning to make in the final project. All I have to do is look at the OmniFocus project for a given chapter and I will see a full list of references, grouped by the various points or arguments I hope to make, ready for incorporation into the writing.

As I said in my first posting, I don’t really think this is really all that original a method, and is probably just a variation of some kind of similar process (though perhaps without using software) that many graduate students might use when preparing for a large writing process. What I think is particularly useful with this approach is that I can very quickly add these little references – or pointers to sources, whenever I finish typing up notes on a given source without ever actually leaving the outlining software. It is very fast and simple and hardly interrupts the note taking process.

In a shorter final posting on this topic, I want to suggest how I think this process could be made even more fast and well integrated, if the more powerful outlining applications, such as OmniOutliner for Mac (or competing outlining applications on Windows or Linux), specifically targeted this kind of workflow.

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.

Finally, use of these quotation marks excuses us from having to spend time analyzing the terms themselves, putting them aside as if to say, “Yes, yes, this is a very inappropriate term that needs careful and sensitive discussion, but since I’ve a lot to do in this essay, I just can’t be bothered at the moment to deal with it.”

Some people seem to feel that the aesthetic impact on one’s work is such that the frequent use of quotations is just not worth it, or perhaps feel that we simply aren’t accomplishing anything useful by using them for direct translations or referrals to terms as they were used decades or centuries ago. However, not using quotations or confronting problematic terms can earn the ire of book reviewers, as I discussed in a response to a review of the book Collaboration by Timothy Brooks. Brooks was criticized for used the term “pacification teams” to refer to the units the Japanese called “pacification teams” in occupied China during the war even if he is anything but sympathetic to the Japanese in his book.

One strategy is to use quotations once, and then announce that you won’t be using them anymore. I came across this tactic today when reading a Chinese translation of an essay by Matsuda Toshihiko, called 日本帝國在殖民地的憲兵警察制度：從朝鮮，關東州致滿洲國的統治樣式遷移 (English title was listed as “The ‘Gendarme-oriented’ Police System in the Japanese Colonial Empire: The Transfer of Models of Rule Used in Colonial Korea to Kwantung Province and Manchukuo”) After putting Japan’s 內地 (the interior of Japan = Japan proper excluding its colonies) and terms like 滿洲 (Manchuria, 滿洲國 Manchukuo, the largely Japanese controlled Manchurian state from 1932-1945, often called 僞滿州 or the “puppet Manchukuo”) in quotations, he follows each with “一下省略括號” (“Brackets left out below”).

Another strategy that can sometimes be used, which is one I follow for some words like “traitors,” is to embrace a word and use it quite shamelessly in order to deliberately provoke the reader. In English, the word traitor has lost much of its punch of late – a good thing in my opinion – but still holds great power in many other places and languages. The discomfort generated by the word and the way it forces readers to think about what it really means is part of what I aim to achieve when I use the term. Far from wanting to contribute to the term’s legitimacy, my deliberate use of it is partly out of a kind of mockery, but more importantly out of a desire to help set the scene of the politically charged context in which it was used.

Though I can’t speak for them, I suspect something similar is being done in some other famous cases of this. Some scholars of Korean history have been strongly criticized for using words like “terrorist” to describe Korea’s national tragic hero Kim Koo. I suspect these same critics would have much less opposition to him be referred to by his popular nickname, “the assassin.” I really don’t have strong feelings on this issue and I don’t think it is as straightforward as my own case, but it raises some interesting questions. What if these scholars are also engaging in a dual process of linguistic mockery and deliberate attempt at reviving a historical scene? Should the word be off limits entirely, should it necessarily be accompanied with quotations, or are there alternatives? What I think escapes some critics of such scholars is that I believe at least some of them are using the word terrorist not as a way to conjure images of Kim Koo as a suicide bomber in a crowded market but, on the contrary, to show how the word terrorist has itself a history and potentially embraces a wide range of figures we might be less willing to unconditionally condemn. In doing so, they potentially open a space in which to critique the way the word has come to be used and what it now narrowly represents, as well as the wide range of activities and contexts it covered both in the past and now. Can we only engage in such a rhetorical technique through the use of quotations?

I’d be interested in hearing from other students and scholars about this. What strategies do others take when they are faced with the need or potential need to establish quotational quarantines? What conventions do you follow?

I currently use iFlash for my vocabulary review. I’m particularly partial to iFlash because its developer was one of two who implemented interval study in a way that is almost identical to my old Flashcard Wizard application. I am always interested in the development going on around the web of similar kinds of software, and like an old timer telling war stories on his porch when he wasn’t really ever much of a soldier to start with, I again feel like sharing my thoughts on some of these applications.

To this end, I have created a new weblog over at the old Fool’s Workshop website:

Fool’s Flashcard Review

Here I will occasionally post reviews of flashcard software, to begin with mostly for Mac OS X, and I will especially focus those applications which attempt to implement some kind of interval study. My goal is to give language learners a resource to compare what is out there but even more importantly, to hopefully reach some of the developers who are working on this kind of software and convince them that these applications need to have certain basic features to be useful to those of us using their software to learn and maintain the languages we have studied, especially when we are away from the native language environment.

Various online media providers sniff out your location from your IP address and block your access to online media. This is how Netflix prevents me from watching movies online through my membership when overseas, how various programs now online through the websites of various US television channels cannot be viewed outside the US, how BBC blocks access to their regular programs usually accessible online to visitors outside the UK, and CNN blocks live streaming of the US presidential primary debate in Texas.

Thanks to the technological art of IP location sniffing, traditional and new media have found another powerful way of rebuilding national borders online. I guess I will have to wait until someone uploads clips of the debate onto youtube and try to view them before they get taken down for violating the copyright on this US presidential debate held by CNN and others.

In Korea, the media have taken a different approach: Just ask everyone for their citizen registration number. Since I am here on an A-3 US government visa, I cannot even get a foreigner registration number in Korea. That means, when I am living in Korea on a one year visa, in addition to not being able reserve train tickets and use the vast majority of the thousands of online retailers and websites, I can’t view any (that I know of) of the Korean television media streamed or archived online.

In short, in Korea I cannot use the internet to see Korean online commercial media and I cannot use it to see major sources of online media in the United States. Fortunately, there is a reason I have never used my TV since beginning my current fellowship (and it isn’t the fact that I recently discovered that the TV in the furnished apartment may never have been working in the first place): this helps reduce the distractions to my studies to that last minor source: the rest of the internet.

UPDATE: CNN blocks the video feed to everyone outside the US but an audio feed is available here. HT dailykos.com.

Transitions – When going to and from East Asia, I love passing through airports like San Francisco and LA (one gets a similar experience passing through London when I visit Norway). On the way back to the US I transferred in San Francisco. After spending 6 months in Korea, the most immediately striking thing was the amazing diversity. From the time I disembarked to the time I got on to the second leg of my journey I counted 6 languages. “So what?” you might ask, it is an international airport, after all. Yes, but I counted 6 language among the airport staff, not among the traveling passengers.

On the way back to Seoul, I passed through LA. The process is reversed. Going from a place like Oklahoma, with only slightly more diversity than Korea, the transfer in LA has the effect of easing me back into Asia. Announcements at the airport are given in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, as if to reacquaint me with the languages of the region.

Asian food can be found everywhere, except strangely, passed security in the international terminal. All they have is a hot dog stand which also offers sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. A Chinese couple in front of me with the strong southern “s”es in their accent had the following exchange: Woman:”Chicken noodle是什麽樣的noodle?” Man:”是一種soup.” They decided to order six small Chicken noodle soups and three sandwiches for the family. I hope they weren’t disappointed.

TSA Language Skills – On my way back to Seoul, I had to change to the international terminal at the airport in LA, going through security again. The lines were hectic and full of people, a scene which, in my experience, is often made worse by stressed out and yelling TSA officials. As if to confirm my stereotypes of TSA, I heard one TSA official get frustrated with a passenger and then yell from somewhere closer to the X-ray machines, “Make sure you have all signed your passport!”

Another young blonde TSA official, hair shaved in short military fashion checked boarding passes and passports nearby. A family of Malaysians were ahead of me. As the woman in the family, who seemed to be the one responsible, handed the young man her passport I heard him speak to her in what sounded like Arabic (it didn’t sound like Malaysian). The woman seemed to understand and replied in the same language. They continued with a short exchange, including something found humorous by both of them, and the young man, who looked barely old enough be out of college, let her and her family through the barrier strap and into a line which had just become shorter than our own.

This was the most pleasant encounter I have ever had with TSA. I had never seen any TSA official speak to anyone in anything but English and the occasional Spanish and was impressed not only at his language skills (which I can hardly judge, since I’m not even sure what language he was speaking – but he seemed to be communicating successfully) but even more the young man’s friendly approach to the woman and her impatient children.

Asiana English – I went through lots of horrible cancellations and rescheduling on my way back to Seoul because of weather problems in Denver, putting me back in Korea 2 days later than I had originally planned. I got put on an Asiana flight to Seoul which is my first time with the airline. I had heard good things and overall the service and food was indeed good. However, I couldn’t help noticing how incredibly bad their English was. Everyone, including the pilot and all the airline stewards and stewardesses who I heard interacting with passengers spoke phenomenally bad English. This was not limited to the Korean employees, because this was also the case with their two Japanese and Chinese staff members.

I sympathize with the fact that the incredible range of nationalities among their passengers (I sat next to passengers from the Philippines, and was otherwise surrounded by Chinese voices) but was amazed that even the standard announcements that get read out in English were sometimes unintelligible due to horrendous pronunciation and their utterances sometimes barely constituted sentences, let alone grammatically correct ones. While I can pick up what I need from announcements in other languages, many of those on the plane will not understand the Korean. Aren’t they reading from a pre-translated card or something? If so, they need to go back and work on it. Whatever the reason is, and I really shouldn’t generalize from a single flight, this trip gave me the distinct impression that Asiana’s hiring practices put far more weight on the physical appearance of their staff than on language skills.