The majority of the research is done. The sources have been found. The books and documents have been photographed or photocopied. Some of them have even been read.
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.
I have just completed two years of research in Korea, Taiwan, and in Shandong, China. This summer I returned to my hometown Stavanger for a few weeks and then made my way to the US with a cheap ticket from Iceland Air. Just as I did once before, I made a two day stop in Iceland in order to explore that magical place a little more. I wrote a little about my previous stay here, but this time I managed to get out of Reykjavík and explore the southwest quarter of Iceland by car.
In order to keep things to a reasonable budget, both of my trips to Iceland left me with a choice between paying a few nights in a hostel and renting a bicycle, or renting a car and forgoing a place to stay. On my first trip I chose the former, but this time I decided to rent a car and sleep two nights in the vehicle.
As I suspected, the biggest problem with sleeping two nights in a car in Iceland is that it gets very cold, even in early August. Having recently come from the sweltering heat of Taiwan and Korea, I had no coats and little more than a few t-shirts packed with me and forgot to bring an extra sweater I had put aside to bring from my stash of possessions in my mother’s apartment in Norway. My first attempt at a solution to this problem was to “borrow” a blanket from Iceland Air, slipping one of their nice fleece blankets into my backpack upon boarding the aircraft. Given how cold I got, I should have stolen two of them. Since I’m not really the thieving type, I returned my blanket on my flight out of Iceland, but the experience sparked an idea: Iceland Air ought to consider providing a cheap – or ideally free with deposit – “blanket rental” service for poor backpackers like me who are sleeping in the expensive rental cars to be had in Iceland. Here is how it could work: pick up a blanket or two on disembarkation at Kevlavik airport, leaving a deposit, and return it when boarding your plane out of the country. Who should I contact about this idea?
The first afternoon I headed into Reykjavík and walked around the main street Laugavegur again. The bankruptcy of the country in the current economic crisis is immediately visible. Perhaps the most common word I was to see in Iceland in the two days I was there this time was “Útsala” (sale; clearance sale) plastered on hastily computer printouts on almost half the stores along the main street, a significant contrast from the chic shopping street I saw on my previous trip. At the airport, there is a sign in the duty free section which asks foreign shoppers something along the lines, “Should you feel guilty about taking advantage of the current circumstances? We at Kevlavik airport think you shouldn’t.”1 To be honest, though, Iceland still didn’t feel like it got a lot cheaper since my last trip. That may be because inflation has stolen some of the best bargains to be had when the currency crisis initially hit.
I spent a few relaxing hours of reading and eating at a great, and apparently famous, coffee shop on Laugavegur called Hljómalind, where I enjoyed a wonderful and reasonably priced vegetarian lasagna and great coffee. It seems to be a regular hangout for foreign travelers, and is also popular among Iceland’s Couchsurfers.
I picked up some groceries and was surprised to find grocery stores open on Sunday, a shock coming from Norway where the only thing open on Sunday’s are Chinese take-out, gas stations, and a few very small stores, mostly run by immigrants in the downtown area. As on my last trip to Iceland I was very underwhelmed by the selection and quality of bread, which I found to be very sub-Scandinavian par. There is more selection than one might expect, however. One cannot noticing a strange mix of Scandinavian and American consumer products. Maarud paprika potato screws and Lucky charms cereal could be seen in the same aisle of a grocery store. At the ubiquitous N1 gas stations small Taco Bell booths are found alongside familiar Scandinavian sites like soft ice cream stands and racks of beautiful woolen sweaters. It was almost as if Iceland were located half way between Scandinavia and the United States. Oh wait…
After feeding myself and picking up some supplies I was eager to hit the road. Although it was late afternoon by the time I got out, I hopped back in the rental and drove north of the city, aiming for the peninsula leading to Ólavsvik. I drove as far as I could towards its western edge until the sun hit the horizon and I turned back to the city.
On this first drive, I immediately discovered how dangerous driving could be in Iceland. Let us call it, “Death by Beauty.” Since the landscape is so unfamiliar and its mountains so breathtaking, it invites close inspection by the traveler. The contrast between the light of a sinking sun and the shadows created by the clouds produce an especially beautiful effect as intermittent patches of orange light illuminate the bare hills. I often saw clouds just barely spilling over distant peaks, as if the valley beyond could not quite consume their volume. There is so much to stop and admire, even along the main highway, but the roads rarely have enough of a shoulder to come slowly to a stop along the edge in order to take in the scenery without blocking fast moving cars that might approach from behind. There are small gravel roads that shoot off the edge here and there, but these are easily missed when one is driving 90kph and not always available at points where one wishes to stop. Over a dozen times during my trip, I found myself glancing off to the right or left in order to take in a view, and then nearly driving off the road into a field of hardened lava, moss covered rocks, or grass plains. My technique improved with time: slowing down, taking shorter glances, and making more frequent stops at nearby gravel turnoffs, but I often found myself envying the exhausted looking travelers who could be seen pedaling overloaded travel bikes through the vast wilderness. For the benefit and safety of both bicyclists and drivers, I suggest Iceland give its construction industry a surely much needed boost by adding a generous shoulder to both sides of the entire stretch of highway 1 around the island, then later label further roads as targets for shoulders based on a cost-benefit analysis of the “Death by Beauty” risk of any given stretch. Who should I contact about this idea?
Perhaps the next most important observation was really the confirmation of a hypothesis I had. I’m a big fan of Sigur Rós and soon began blasting their music on my first drive. I can now say, with some confidence, that their music is such a perfect fit for driving through the Icelandic countryside that rental car companies in Iceland should consider including CDs with the band’s complete works in the glove compartment of every rented car. Who should I contact about this idea? I especially recommend some of their strange but progressively building songs such as Hafsól, Di Do, Saeglópur, Staralfur, and softer but eerie songs like Kafari, O Fridur and Refur.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the landscape of Iceland is simply amazing. As I drove through the countryside, even in the most “populated” – to the extent one can call any part of this massive island anything of the kind – southwestern quarter of Iceland, I kept find myself thinking two similar thoughts:
“You know, I don’t think humans belong here.”
“Umm….I don’t think this island is done yet. Shouldn’t we come back in a few thousand years?”
Yet, somehow, a few hundred thousand people make their home here. Every hour I spent outside of Reykjavík I felt a strange and deep loneliness, but the kind of productive loneliness that is a wellspring of cultural inspiration and cleansing introspection. How else can one explain the amazing wealth of Icelandic contemporary music, photography, literature, and design? They might name their streets after vikings and play up their old sagas to tourists but the people on this island clearly have no need to embrace an illustrious but distant past. The island is itself so visibly alive, that there is no need for its culture to rest on the achievements of the dead.
I particularly like one of the advertisements for 66º North depicting the cool stare of a young pale faced girl holding a fishing pole:
I can’t remember the exact wording but it said something along the lines of, “Somewhere there is a girl in a warm house playing with her barbie dolls. I figure I’m the lucky one.”
Obviously, this bold defiance in the face of harsh nature is a common theme found throughout Nordic nationalisms, and the seemingly endless expanse of stoney plateaus suspended above the lush forested valleys and the dark blue fjords of Norway may also inspire in the traveler a feeling of icy isolation. Yet, in southern Norway especially, it is precisely the promise of embrace in those rainy valley forests, the comforting smell of vegetation and the older more tamed appearance of the southern Norwegian landscape which sets it apart from Iceland. With perhaps the exception of the bare sharp but short peaks and the tundra of Northern Norway, the rest of Scandinavia simply cannot generate the same sense of complete nakedness one is faced with when they confront the mountains of Iceland, or its strange rock and lava fields. Even the bright green of a field of moss surrounding a lake might share the horizon with steam emerging from some mouth the earth has yet to close. And the smell…everywhere in the country a mix of strange and unfamiliar smells, perhaps sulfur? Perhaps some other product of subterranean fires?
The Icelandic language too continues to fascinate me. I am still intrigued by the strange sense of familiarity the language has when spoken. I feel like I should be able to understand what is spoken (given its close connection to the Norwegian idiom) and everytime someone mistakes me for a local and I am able to guess the meaning, I sometimes catch myself responding in Norwegian, as would be the perfectly natural thing to do in Sweden or Denmark. I feel a deep frustration at having to respond in English. I know many Icelanders can speak Danish or some other dialect of what many of them rightly call the “Scandinavian” language but I cannot assume this. The written language, with its prolific use of those beautiful and ancient letters ð and þ, is almost completely unreadable to me but when spoken, it sounds so bizarrely familiar, and occasionally whole phrases come through only to descend into what seems like playful gibberish. Learning a language that only a few hundred thousand living and perhaps a few million dead people can speak seems unpractical, but if I found myself living in the island at some point, I would eagerly take up the challenge.
On my first night I stayed in the city, parking my car in a quiet neighborhood and sleeping in the back of my car. I woke frozen in the morning and decided early August was a great time to buy a nice warm winter fleece and promptly went shopping for one. After this early morning shopping spree, I decided to visit a thermal pool. I avoided the one I was told was most favored by tourists and instead visited a thermal pool deep in a residential area. Already by my second day I was beginning to wonder if there were openings for historian of East Asian history at one of Iceland’s few institutions of higher education that I might apply for and began imagining what life would be like here if I could spend a decade on the island. I loved the thermal pool, which warmed me right up in a quiet and relaxed local environment. It resembled some of the smaller scale sento public baths or hot springs in rural Japan I’ve been to. Old men exchange gossip in the shower room, and local neighborhood residents bathe and swim together in a steaming outdoor pool and collection of other hot pools and steam rooms.
My full day of driving (see the map linked to below for the GPS track of my travels) following my morning bath took me to heavily touristed sites like the rich historical þingvellir, the Geysir, and Gullfoss. As I suspected, however, I far more enjoyed my own slow wandering on the roads (many of them rough gravel) south from these sites towards the southern coast, which was nothing short of spectacular. The glaciers of the south were hidden far above the clouds with only an arm extending into view here and there. The best clue of their presence were the hundreds of waterfalls that descended like so many white ropes descending from the clouds.
By early evening I had reached Vik on the southern tip of Iceland, and spent some time watching the waves crash against the cliffs at nearby Dyrhólaey before driving late into the night all along the southern coast until I reached the lighthouse at Iceland’s southwestern tip, west of Grindavik.
My late night trip on a long and bouncy gravel road through black lava fields was dimly light by the sun, already rising – or was it still setting – at one in the morning. I could just make out the strange shapes of the terrain around me and I hope some day I can make the same drive again by day. I finally parked along the coast and lay down in the back to sleep while strong winds coming up from the coast rocked my car and sang me to sleep.
I awoke at five, freezing, despite my new fleece, and walked out to a nearby cliff beyond the lighthouse for a last moment of reflection before heading to the airport.
Later, on arriving in the US my dear friend Sayaka showed me a Sigur Rós video she thought I might like. The video concludes at the same cliff of that last morning:
I have already had occasion to mention my mother’s online historical project warsailors.com but I wanted to write a short post to congratulate her on the completion of a remarkable achievement.
My mother’s ship lists contains detailed information on hundreds of Norwegian merchant marine vessels from World War II that played a key role in supplying the allies in Britain and elsewhere during the war. She also contains information on many of the ships in the home fleet under German control.
In addition to reference information about the ships such as the years they were built, tonnage, and their fate during or after the war, she has assembled an incredible collection of anecdotes, crew lists, prisoner of war information, and other valuable information about the ships that are useful not only to historians but also the thousands of descendants of sailors who served and in many cases died on these ships.
The primary task she has dedicated herself over the past months is to organize, process, and upload thousands of images of voyage lists of these vessels taken from the Norwegian national archives and post the images as links from the various ships where they can be viewed directly and compared to similar voyage records compiled and already available online by an Arnold Hague for fact checking purposes.
I have picked a ship completely at random, M/T Dageid, which shows you the kind of pages that have grown out of her years of work. I’m sure she has other ship entries that she is particularly proud of, but this random entry is already impressive. The ships now contain up to a dozen or so links to pages of the voyage records so, for example, descendants can determine where their merchant marine, or at least his ship, was at a given time during the war.
Although the links to these images are small and may go unnoticed, they represent many hundreds of hours of work by my mother. She now returns to her previous task of meticulously assembling and organizing information about the hundreds of convoys these ships sailed in. You can see her considerable progress so far on her convoys page.
Last week I paid a visit to a wonderful archive in a medium sized city of Shandong province, China. There I looked up various documents from the 1940s for my dissertation research that are a bit more local in scope than those I have been looking at in the Shandong Provincial Archives here in Jinan.
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.
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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 [↩]
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’ve been outside of Jinan this week, traveling about a bit. Yesterday I caught a ferry from Penglai (蓬莱) to a group of islands known as Changdao (長島) county which I had been told were well known for their scenic beauty. I had a day left of traveling with no specific plans and it seemed like a nice quiet place to spend a day before I head back to Jinan for my last week in China. I arrived in Changdao late in the afternoon and after checking into one of the only hotels open before the summer tourist season starts in May, I wandered about the town a bit. I didn’t ever get outside the sleepy fishing town in the south of the islands either that evening or the next morning when I caught the ferry back to the mainland. Instead of making it out to see the Changdao National Forest Park and Changdao National Nature Reserve, instead I mostly roamed about the back streets of the town and port.
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?
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. [↩]
I confirmed there is no special information in either Chinese or English posted about the status of the islands when I returned to Penglai[↩]
I’m working on my last batch of documents in the provincial archives in Shandong. There are two challenges to doing my historical research here which I often think about. The first is the problem of access to both the archive and much of its contents. I have been very fortunate but I regret that it is more of a result of good fortune than anything else. This posting will focus on the other problem, the need for a kind of triage in the archives and the constant awareness of my own personal limits as a reader. It is a humbling experience, and I suspect many, if not most, historians, come to face it if they have spent much time doing archival research, especially dealing with documents not in a language they speak and read natively.
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. Continue reading Triage in the Archives
In the first and second postings on this topic, I described my approach to a lack of connections between my notes on my sources and my broader dissertation outline. I explained how I organized my material and how I’m trying to use my task management software as way to create a link between the increasingly large number of note files and sections of note files on individual sources and the broader outline of the dissertation I will begin writing this year.
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. Continue reading A Proposal for a Powerful New Research Tool – Organizing Information for Dissertation Writing – Part 3 of 3
In the first of three postings on this topic I explained that I have become increasingly concerned that there exists a vast and empty middle layer of organization between the various primary sources, notes, and ‘notes on notes’ I have on the one hand, and my dissertation outline. I have felt the need to develop some way, while I’m still out here in the field conducting my research, of better tying up the many individual fragments of information I find in the sources with the arguments I want to make in the written dissertation.
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.
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.
I spent some time going through entries in a “hyttebok” (literally cabin bok) or “dagbok” (diary) for a small cabin owned by the family of my great-grandfather some two hours hike into the forest from my mother’s hometown Hegra. These cabin guestbooks are a wonderfully fun source to read through as well as being of special interest to my family since some of the entries are written by my grandfather, great-grandfather and other relatives.
Like many such cabins in the region, anyone passing through the forest was free to stay (one entry shows four men, probably loggers, stayed for three months) as long as they cut wood to replace what they used, cleaned the floors, made the beds, and any money visitors left in the cabin was used for upkeep. Some of the entries are simply hilarious. Some contain poems, some have drawings, and others scold previous visitors for not chopping up wood to leave for the next visitor. Some reveal interesting customs from decades past or talk about the activities of the inhabitants. August entries almost all refer to picking tyttebær, and in one 1932 entry we learn that my great-grandfather and grandfather had a father and son stay in the cabin that involved the recreational, “firing of revolvers.”
One entry I came across from 1935 was, alone among all the entries, written in English. The entry was signed, “From an Englishman” but I think some careful textual analysis might furnish some reasons to doubt the nationality of the writer:
Trönderheimen 17/4-35
We was coming here about one o’clock, and we like this småll hous very good. Åsta is gon and fiks the bed now, and she want me to go too and I hope she will get an good bed friend. Olav and Marie shall altso go to bed, but I think they do something rong, because Olav is like an young horse. Marie says kiss me but I don’t want it because Olav don’t want it.
