Thoughts | Muninn

Organizing Information for Dissertation Writing – Part 1 of 3

I’m coming into the home stretch of my two academic years of field work for my dissertation on treason and political retribution against accused collaborators with Japan in Korea and China from 1937-1951. I spent the first academic year in Korea, a summer in Taiwan, and I’ve just begun my last month of research in Jinan, China. I’ll try to wrap up some unfinished research in Korea and Taiwan this spring and then begin the actual writing of my dissertation this coming summer back in my hometown in Norway and while staying with family in the US. My goal is to wrap things up and hopefully complete my history PhD program by the spring of 2011.

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.

Quotational Quarantines

As historians, we often engage in the liberal use of quotations to sanitize and quarantine distasteful terms or phrases that lend legitimacy to a category or a way of referring to an institution or other body. The use of these quotes, which I confess to frequently using, presumably robs such terms of their nomenclatural power and further serves to establish distance between us and the ideas and terms we enlist to talk about the past.

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?

Fool’s Flashcard Review

A long time ago, in the last millennium, I designed a flashcard application for Mac OS that implemented something I called interval study (known elsewhere as spaced repetition or the Leitner method). I sold and later gave away the software at a website I created for my software tinkering called the Fool’s Workshop. I used the software every day for my own Chinese language study and I acquired a few fans before I abandoned development of the software when OS X came out. I also listed some of the other applications for Macintosh that I found online and reviewed some of them on the website and was surprised to find that this page is still riding high in the Google rankings for a number of different search terms.

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.

Watching US Online Media Outside the US

I logged on to see if I could watch part of the debate in Texas between Clinton and Obama. The debate, I believe, was partly sponsored by CNN. I tried to view the live feed on CNN but was given a message that is all too familiar to those of us outside of the United States.

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.

Travel Language Notes

Some notes from my recent trip to the United States for Christmas from Seoul:

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.

Of Knols, Trolls, and Goblins

Google recently announced its new Knol Project. Quite a number of news articles and many more blog postings have appeared to comment on the launch of the new project.

I’m rather puzzled by a lot of concerns shown by some whose writing on similar issues I usually admire. Further down in this posting, I will respond to some of the critiques of Crooked Timber‘s John Quiggin made in his posting Knols, wikis and reality and if:book‘s Ben Vershbow rough notes on knols.

This new Google project in some ways reminds me of that other competitor of Wikipedia that rarely seems to get mentioned, Everything2. Like the new Knol project, articles at Everything2 are written by single authors and can be rated by community members. There are even Google ads. Like the Knol project, there can be many articles on a given topic, which vary widely in content, length, quality, and often offer completely different kinds of material on similar topics.

It also reminds me of a software project I started designing a few years ago but never got around to writing up (funny how a PhD program can get in the way of one’s amateur programming projects). My plan was to create a history knowledge-base which contained contributed articles, all under a Creative Commons or other similar license, which were rated by the community of readers and which competed directly with other contributed articles on similar topics. The number of points any reader could give was a function of their own “value” in the community as judged by the aggregate point value of their own contributions (in the form of articles and comments). This was not to be pure democracy but a tyranny of meritocracy – a huge difference with Wikipedia but similar in some ways to Everything2. In my own system, the currently “winning” article would be the most prominently listed or displayed article on a topic but might always be replaced with a new better article. The most important feature was this: since all future writers on a topic were free to copy/steal any amount of any previous article new articles could, like Wikipedia articles are supposed to, be small incremental improvements of any previous article. However, unlike Wikipedia but like Everything2, I also wanted to design the system so it encouraged “new narratives” and completely fresh approaches to old topics.

By contrast, in Wikipedia if you decide to completely rewrite a popular and controversial entry on the Nanjing Massacre, which you certainly have the power to do and I have been tempted to do, the chances are your efforts will be completely wasted as you newly written article is completely reverted to whatever chaotic and inconsistent mess prevailed before your arrival. Thus, hidden in the long list of revisions on any popular wikipedia article might lurk alternative narratives that can still be viewed, but only if they are looked for by patient visitors to the site.

Wikipedia is at its core an Enlightenment project.

Its god, NPOV (Neutral Point of View), the very core of its being, is a myth. The policy requires “that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly” and that views be presented “without bias.” NPOV is a useful myth, and not one that we should spend too much time mocking (especially those of us aspiring to professionalism in academic life), but we should always be conscious of its limits. I think every 6th grade elementary school student of the future should be given an exercise wherein they are given the opportunity to discover how any controversial Wikipedia article one might pick, no matter how well written, not only completely violates NPOV but can never hope to achieve anything remotely close to NPOV. NPOV is impossible. The greatest theoretical challenge of the post-Enlightment world is, “How do we deal with that?”

I think that we must have a strong competitor to Wikipedia which is based on the fundamental idea that we need competing narratives, we need them juxtaposed, we need them competing with each-other, and we need the ability to monitor their changes and popularity across time so that we don’t completely become slaves of the present. This doesn’t mean we have to completely abandon the incremental approach and the amazing power of building upon the work of others, but also allow for easy access to competing approaches to a problem in a single tidy, convenient, and familiar interface. Despite some key innovations, projects like Everything2 have failed to challenge Wikipedia. My own abandoned ideas for a project were half-baked and I have no time to spend in the kitchen.

So what about Google Knol? All we have seen of what it might become is in this single screenshot. It is surely a little early to judge.

John Quiggin of the wonderful group weblog Crooked Timber has looked at the sample article from the screenshot and is not happy with its author centered approach:

As regards simple factual statements anyone is likely to care about, I’d rather go with Wikipedia than with an individually written article, even one by an expert. Wikipedia will usually have a citation, and, if there are conflicting claims, report them. With an individual author, it’s much harder to tell if a given statistic is generally agreed to be accurate and representative of the situation.

I find this really hard to understand. A friend of mine, now a professor in his field, used to help edit dozens of articles related to pre-modern Chinese history before he abandoned it in exhaustion. I really want to like Wikipedia – there is a kind of “storm the Bastille” kind of excitement in its democratic vision. Yet, in the end, having read through dozens of Wikipedia talk pages where my friend battled desperately against irrational and, unfortunately, completely ignorant voices, I see that quite often it is completely mistaken “simple factual statements,” of the kind Quiggin is speaking of, including those which get a citation, which get inserted by contributors that have little or no access to good materials, no training in judging their sources, and no knowledge of context. The sad reality is that for many topics, the rational, knowledgeable, and in many simple cases the accurate contributions get drowned out in talk pages by voices that are either more numerous or which have more idle time to dedicate to the “edit wars” that can result. I really can’t understand why a mass edited Wikipedia article with citations will win by default over an article written by an expert. Will either have a monopoly on good research? Certainly no. Will the latter always use the best data or come to the correct conclusion? Of course not. But an author based approach does not have any inherent weaknesses that outweigh similar inherent weaknesses of the average Wikipedia article.

if:book is one of my favorite weblogs that discusses the future of reading, writing, narration, and the technologies that go with them. Ben Vershbow has posted some of his notes on the Knol project.

Vershbow has a lot of concerns, beginning with the term “knol” which he says is “possibly the worst Internet neologism in recent memory.” I am actually quite fond of it, it reminds me of similar wards like “node” and other single syllable words familiar to programmers that are used to represent single atomic units of something. It can hardly qualify as the worst, a position which I believe is still safely held by the word “blog.”

Vershbow points out some of the features of the knol project which I think are commendable and which resemble some of the best ideas out there: 1) Anyone can write 2) Multiple knols can compete on a single topic 2) Readers can rate the articles 3) a “Darwinian writers’ market where the fittest knols rise to the top.

This sounds a lot like what I had imagined for a CMS but I think the key would be a license that would allow any future or competing writers to use any or all of previous knols to build better articles.

One of Vershbow’s main concerns, which he shares with Anil Dash of Six Apart, is that Google is suffering from a kind of lack of “theory of mind” – an inability to understand the contradiction between what it is: a large profit-run corporation whose profits are intricately connected to the kind of content its searches produce, and its altruistic dreams.

While I share with Vershbow and other Google critics a whole host of complaints about Google projects such as Google books, which I have on occasion gone into some length here at Muninn, I am a bit surprised at critiques like this which seem to attack Google’s new projects almost on principle. He also has deep worries for the future when knol articles might come to displace untainted non-Google articles in the search results.

It is not so much that I disagree with Vershbow’s deep suspicions about Google or pessimism about the role of mammoths like Google in both being a host of content (Youtube, Google Books, Knol) and the most popular manager and ranker of metadata about such content, since I’m sure I can be persuaded with good arguments.

It is the complete lack of confidence in the contributors of content, in the authors, experts, and web users of the future. I think Google’s hegemony is limited and requires our continued complicity. The knol project doesn’t lock content in, as far as I understand it, especially if users can choose their own licenses.

Finally, Vershbow, like Quiggin, has doubts about the author-centric nature of the project.

The basic unit of authorial action in Wikipedia is the edit. Edits by multiple contributors are combined, through a complicated consensus process, into a single amalgamated product. On Google’s encyclopedia the basic unit is the knol. For each knol (god, it’s hard to keep writing that word) there is a one to one correspondence with an individual, identifiable voice. There may be multiple competing knols, and by extension competing voices (you have this on Wikipedia too, but it’s relegated to the discussion pages).

Vershbow intelligently withholds final judgment on whether this author based approach, similar to Larry Sanger’s Citizendium, will work out but raises many doubts:

I wonder… whether this system will really produce quality. Whether there are enough checks and balances. Whether the community rating mechanisms will be meaningful and confidence-inspiring. Whether self-appointed experts will seem authoritative in this context or shabby, second-rate and opportunistic. Whether this will have the feeling of an enlightened knowledge project or of sleezy intellectual link farming (or something perfectly useful in between).

I think he is right to have such doubts, but could we not raise a whole host of similar questions about Wikipedia, the tool which know even its most hostile detractors around me use on a daily basis? Ultimately, Vershbow is inclined to trust Wikipedia, which “wears its flaws on its sleeve” and works for a “higher aim.” Google’s project, after all, is born in sin, tainted as it is by its capitalist origins.

My own feeling is that as long as the content is not locked in, signed away to Google, we shouldn’t conflate the sinner with the products of her collaborating contributors. This is a great time to test a (at least in some ways) new model for knowledge sharing.

I still believe this new approach would stand the best chance of making an improvement over existing alternatives if it was more dictatorial in one respect: that all contributions should be released with some license which requires a minimum level of permission for sharing – so that future competing writers of knols can either provide fresh competing articles, or, at some or all sections, quickly and easily lift and modify chunks of earlier knols, perhaps with due attribution accessible somewhere from the Knol’s page. That would allow it to combine the best of Wikipedia’s collaborative approach, with the benefits of author-based control.

Making Choices in Research

I have recently switched to almost full-time reading of early postwar Korean newspapers. I’m avoiding those newspapers (조선일보, 동아일보, 서울신문) from this period that I have easy access to back in my library in the US or through online databases. There are two bound and published collections with copies of early postwar newspapers easily available to me in Yonsei’s central library and in the 국학연구원 that I am affiliated with. I’m sure microfilm or other versions of these newspapers exist in other libraries, including the national library, but these bound volumes serve well for now.

I launched right in without much thought, as I usually do with an exciting new source, beginning somewhat arbitrarily with one of the newspapers I have often seen cited in secondary works from the period which was only around for a few years, 自由新聞. The series with this collections of newspapers is a “mere” two dozen volumes or so with about 550 pages of newspapers (usually 2 pages per issue) in each volume stretching from 1945-1950.

I’ll just cruise through them all, I must have been thinking—you know—get a feel for the lay of the “media” land and the period. I scan through each issue of the newspaper, take pictures of articles directly relevant to my topic for later use noting down their titles, dates and topics, and read some of the more important articles immediately, all while taking a notes on what issues dominate in the newspaper at the time. After just a few days of this I forced myself to make a reality check. At the pace I was going, I calculated, it would take me 23 weeks to go through just the single collection of newspapers I am looking at and this is only one of many kinds of sources I want to look at while I’m Korea. Doubling my daily pace would still take about 11 weeks, which is still too long. While it is very likely my pace will increase naturally as I become more familiar with the materials and improve my reading/scanning skills this will just not do. Clearly I have to change strategies.

This is really a classic research problem, one that all of us face in doing research for even high school or undergraduate history papers (and in many related fields) and as a teaching assistant I have had to advise my own students on this problem in the past. Somehow though, the much larger scale of the project and time available to complete it has a way of making us forget the scarcity of time available.

More experienced historians surely know better than I, but it seems to me that there are a number of approaches one can take to surveying a large quantity of potentially useful primary materials such as this collection of Korean newspapers from 1945-50.

I have an issue, a problem, and certain historical questions I want to answer. I believe that, if approached with care, this particular collection of sources can help me get answers to some of those questions, or at the very least, help point me towards specific places, people, or events that I can explore in other sources that will help me answer some of those questions. Here are a few approaches that come to mind that might be used for a newspaper collection like this:

The lazy scholar approach: Read all the academic work related to your problem, note down all citations from the primary source you are interested in, look up those citations, read the originals, and use them in your own work.

Seal off a perimeter approach: Make a list of events or key periods of time when things happened or when you think things might have happened which are relevant to your issue. Then, depending on the quantity of primary materials and your time available, read or scan through issues within a fixed range around that period of time.

Headline lightning scan: Make a very small list of keywords, and blaze through the entire collection in the time period you are working for, stopping only to photo articles with your keywords in the headlines.

Section focus approach: Look through a few issues of each newspaper from across the span of your period of interest in order to get a good understanding of the way the newspaper is organized, what articles appear where, where articles which may be of interest to you are likely to appear in the paper, and take note of specific regular columns or editorial sections which may be relevant to your research. Then look only at only these sections or columns for the whole span of time.

Locked in the tower approach: Go through it all, starting with the most important works and then just keep going until you suddenly run out of time.
Continue reading Making Choices in Research

The Harry Potter Index and International News

I opened up my copy of the newspaper this morning and very quickly realized it was a slow news day. Or at least an editor at 조선일보(朝鮮日報) made that call.

Today the top right quarter of the front page of the newspaper was dedicated to introducing a series of new articles on prices in Korea, entitled “해리포터 책값, 서울>도쿄>뉴욕” (“The Price of Harry Potter Books: Seoul > Tokyo > New York”). This was accompanied by a chart comparing the price of Harry Potter books 6 and 7 in five major cities.

If there is any phenomenon or fact worth reporting about Korea in the media, there is a very good chance that we will also learn how a quantification of that phenomenon compares with other OECD countries somewhere early in the report or article. Price index comparisons are, of course, something more commonly presented with such comparisons, but I had to chuckle when I saw this above the fold. When I lived in Japan, headlines like these would always prompt a, “日本は平和だな〜” (“Japan is such a peaceful place…”) I realized Korea was fairly peaceful too earlier this past summer when 20 minutes of the first half of an hour’s worth of the daily news (I can’t remember which channel) was dedicated to how citizens of Seoul are mobilizing to address the dangerous irregularities found occasionally in the metal hand bars found on a path in a city park (along the Han river? Can’t remember exactly) which had given rollerbladers cuts on their hands. They have apparently been putting some tape over the offending areas. I remember this was around the same time that huge floods in China had left thousands homeless and many dead. The floods didn’t make the news at all.

During my last two trips back to Norway, I noticed that the evening news on NRK (Dagsrevyen) had relatively heavy domestic coverage in terms of a straight minute calculation, and I guess I assume that this is the case with most countries. The middle east and large humanitarian crises, however, did seem to get considerable attention. Some national TV channels such as the news on BBC in the UK, and NHK in Japan have excellent international coverage but I’m not sure if that is because they both have had sprawling empires. Of course, the more internationally active cable channels also have a far larger proportion of international news. I’m truly amazed, however, at the the small proportion given to it on the various evening news programs I have seen here on TV in Seoul. There is better coverage in the major Korean newspapers, which always have pages reserved for international news (in addition to the front page), but I wonder what readership is like compared to broadcast news. Online reading of news, which is widespread in Korea, of course complicates the issue.

This all does raise an interesting normative question, however. Does the discomfort that wandering nomads like myself feel when we travel places and think we find a relative lack of consciousness about problems elsewhere in the world translate into anything more than a reflection of our own insufficient lack of investment into the interests of a specific community?

Planes, Airports, and the Military

My parents live in Oklahoma. When I was getting ready to begin my final year of high school at the International School of Stavanger my family moved to the United States and I expressed my great reluctance to join them. I stayed behind in Norway and finished high school while, ironically, doing a home-stay with an American family there. Since then I have frequently visited my parents in Oklahoma, especially at Christmas time. I arrived last night in Tulsa, Oklohama after my cheap Expedia travel arrangements took me through Milwaukee (which is a city in Wisconsin, apparently) and Dallas.

I have often flown through Dallas before, but this time I was struck by the huge number of military personnel traveling through both the E and C terminals of that airport yesterday, especially when compared to Boston and Milwaukee. I have a few theories about why this might be the case: 1) Dallas is a large hub and since it is getting close to Christmas many military personnel are going on leave to visit their families. 2) Dallas happens to act as a hub which connects somehow to whatever transportation network that the military has set up for its forces going on leave. 3) Perhaps American Airlines, which uses Dallas as a hub (especially C gates), is especially good at providing for military personnel through various services and discounts. 2) Dallas is in the South and connects to many cities in the south. Perhaps there is a larger percentage of military from the South than other areas of the United States. If this is true then the stereotype that the South is more nationalistic or militaristic or, more likely, the fact that there are a lot of the poorest states in the United States located in the south combined with the fact that the military has a disproportionately larger percentage of recruits from poorer classes can help explain this.

A few further things that struck me. First, I made a rough count of the soldiers I came across, and while this is perhaps not a good sample, I was really surprised to see that a full 1/3 of the soldiers I counted were female. I wonder how female recruiting has changed and what percentage they have come to occupy in the overall makeup of the United States military. I wonder if the struggles to meet recruiting targets in the current wartime circumstances of the US has lead to any changes or special efforts to make further inroads in recruiting women?

I don’t know if it is the only one, but American Airlines opens all its “Admiral Clubs,” which are usually for first class passengers, to military personnel when they show their military ID. They advertise this on a large sign in front of the club’s entrance. I didn’t find this too remarkable. American Airlines can benefit from promoting its nationalist image and its support for the troops, many of which are returning from a wartime theater or going to one.

I was also struck by the strong support for the troops among American travellers. As I walked from about gate C20 to my gate C37 I walked behind a young soldier. In that short 5-10 minute walk I saw two different adults and one child randomly approach the soldier, slap him on the back or shake hands, and give him various words of thanks and support for his efforts. The child that ran up to him gave him some kind of a gift but I couldn’t make out what it was.

As I started thinking about this I realized I had really mixed feelings about all this. Last Christmas when I arrived in Tulsa I saw a couple sit down next to a soldier returning from Iraq near the baggage claim and ask him sympathetically about the challenges of his military duty there. I remembered how difficult it seemed to be for him to put his experiences into simple sentences to share with these inquisitive strangers.

The collection of mixed feelings this all gave me really came to a head when I arrived in Tulsa last night. When the flight landed in Tulsa, there was an extra message issued at landing. The American Airlines stewardess announced that, “I have a favor to ask everyone. In seat 23C we have one of our military boys who has just come back to Oklahoma to visit his wife and family. When the seat belt sign turns off I would like to ask everyone to remain seated and let him get his bag and get off the plane first so he can get to see his wife who is waiting for him outside.” When the seat belt light went off the whole plane erupted into applause and loud hurrays. These continued as the young man in 23C, who was not wearing his military uniform, removed his baggage from the overhead compartment and ran triumphantly off the plane. As far as I could see I alone refrain from shouting and applauding, but instead sat quietly in complete shock and disgust. I felt suddenly and strangely nauseous, even as I tried to reflect on the reasons for own reaction while watching the man and the passengers around me.

This experience was made all the more bizarre because in the seat behind me was sitting another, this time female soldier, still dressed in her fatigues and heavy boots, who told her boyfriend (I learnt later that she was engaged) on her cellphone that she had arrived and would be disembarking soon. She waited patiently as the 23C military man was drowned in shouts of support and ran off the plane, propelled all the more quickly by the back slaps of other passengers.

I heard an older woman sitting next to the female soldier say sympathetically, “I think it should be standard policy to always let all the army people get off planes first.”

I walked just ahead of the female soldier as we approached the baggage claim area and left the secure area. There was a whole crowd waiting for her with signs of support and welcome. Her fiance, who had a military style hair cut, was waiting for her in a wheelchair and held a sign, “So, J. are you ready to sign your life away AGAIN?” He read out the sign he was holding as she approached him. After she answered in the affirmative everyone went wild and crowded around her with congratulations.

To be honest, my thoughts and feelings on all of this are just too unprocessed and complicated for me to feel comfortable discussing them here. To cap off an evening of complex emotions, it just so happened that the Netflix movie waiting for me to watch last night when I got to my parent’s home in Bartlesville was “The Best Years of Our Lives” This award winning 1946 movie about three soldiers returning from World War II includes the story of a disabled veteran (apparently he was disabled in the war) who is worried his fiance back home will only stay with him out of pity and cannot possibly love him as he is.

甘口カレーという問題 (Or, on the problem of the so-called “sweet” curry)

I love curry. I love curry from many countries and in many colors and consistencies. However, I am a firm believer in the basic principle that curry must be spicy. I know that the Oxford English Dictionary describes curry as:

curry, n.2 A preparation of meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, and used as a relish or flavouring, esp. for dishes composed of or served with rice.

but seriously, I think it is time for us to take a stand and reserve the use of the word for the spicy curries that truly deserve the name. One of the first to go should be what the Japanese call 甘口カレー, or sweet curry. It is simply shocking that this can decorate the shelves of grocery stores in Japan along side “moderately spicy” and “very spicy” curry blocks. “Not very spicy at all,” this I can accept, but “sweet” curry does violence to the word it modifies. Curry has to be more manly, more aggressive, it has to have bite! If anything it has to mean something slightly closer to another, now obsolete, use of the word curry also listed in the Oxford English Dictionary:

curry, currie, n.3 The portions of an animal slain in the chase that were given to the hounds; the cutting up and disembowelling of the game; transf. any prey thrown to the hounds to be torn in pieces, or seized and torn in pieces by wild beasts: see QUARRY.

You see, at least that has much more punch than “a quantity of bruised spices”!

Today I was reading in the Harvard-Yenching library with Sayaka. She abandoned studying for a time and with her headphones on watched Youtube movie clips of Downtown, her favorite pair of Osaka comedians. The silence of the library was disturbed by the occasional muffled chuckle emerging from her side of the table. After we left the library I asked her what was so funny. The Downtown clip she showed me was brilliant: Matsumoto Hitoshi basically laid down the law on this ridiculous concept of 甘口カレー. For those of you who understand Japanese, you can view the clip here: 甘口カレー Downtown Clip.

Tragically, however, like so much other extremely rare and otherwise completely unobtainable video content now or until recently available on Youtube, I doubt the link above will last long.