Settling In

I have made my move to Cambridge in the Boston area and I’m still getting adjusted. I haven’t met many people, visited my department, or done much else than locating food, various shiny objects for my den (like a spoon for cereal), and doing a bit of random exploring by bike. Classes start on the 20th and I’ll hopefully have more to report by then, but in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Shi Shi poem. I was delighted to find this online, complete with audio versions in Mandarin and Cantonese thanks to No-Sword.

Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy

Over on the EAIA blog I mentioned and summarized an article in International Security on the US-Japan alliance. I brought it up as a kind of controversial Realist article. Sayaka took the bait and bit a chunk out of the essay in a response she wrote in the next posting. She makes several excellent points about the article, which completely dismisses Constructivist approaches to Japanese security policy in favor of a clean “Passing the Buck” Realist interpretation. Sayaka accuses the author of oversimplifying the opposition with a straw man argument.

It is wrong to assume that Constructivists only look at notions and ideas even if Realists only look at power and the structure of international society.

Third, related to the previous point, the attempt to answer the question “Is [Japan’s policy really about] Pacifism?” by looking at the size of the military is off the point. The questions should be, “Why do[es Japan] not exercise normal military power even though it has acquired a huge military capability?”

Columbia: Chinese Connection

There is a conference coming up (Sept 10-11) at Columbia University on its “Chinese Connection” or famous former students of Columbia who went on to become famous people. It is kind of a promotional event for the university so I think it will mostly be warm and fuzzy but may have some very interesting talks. The RSVP page doesn’t say anything about charging money to attend. There is an article on their site on the early history of East Asian studies at Columbia University. I haven’t read the whole thing, but similar celebratory tone. It is written by Professors Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene, two of CU’s giants in the field.

Nature: Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

I have been following the progress of the Open Access movement in academic journals as closely as my time allows. I gave a presentation to a number of professors and students at Waseda University which talked a lot about the OA movement and I could tell that others became interested when they heard about it. This movement, to provide more open access to research articles that are usually only archived in expensive online databases or not online at all. The movement is making most progress and getting most discussion amongst scientists. There is a great blog, I may have mentioned before Open Access News, and there is also a great series of articles in Nature magazine (they also have an RSS feed for the series).

One recent article in this series mentions the fact (often discussed in these articles) that open access journals are cited more often than those only accessible in subscription databases. It also adds more evidence to this from their own research. However, they also add that some of these articles are from subscription only journals but which authors have “self-archived” and put online.

One way to estimate [the access problem] is to compare citation counts for Open Access articles with pay-to-access articles. Lawrence4 found that in computer science citations were three times higher for Open Access articles than for papers only available for payment in print or online. Kurtz et al. have since reported similar estimates in astrophysics, and Odlyzko in mathematics.

We are carrying out a much larger study across all disciplines, using a 10-year sample of 14 million articles from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)’s database; initial results, for the field of physics, show Open Access articles being cited 2.5 to 5 times more than articles that users’ institutions must pay to access online, with this advantage peaking within about 3 years of an article’s publication.

All these articles were published in subscription-based journals, but some were made accessible because authors had ‘self-archived’ copies on the Web-see http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/. Physicists have been self-archiving in growing numbers since 1991 in a central archive called ArXiv. Computer scientists have been self-archiving on their own websites, which are then harvested by Citeseer.

They go on to discuss the “green” and “gold” (the latter meaning fully open online access) approaches to Open Access. It is a good read. The original article on Nature is online as is a more extensive article by its authors on their findings.

Chronicle: E-Learning Dissapointments

The Chronicle had a recent article on “Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust.” I think one of their points was interesting:

What’s the reality? For the most part, faculty members use the electronics to simplify tasks, not to fundamentally change how they teach their subjects. They readily translate lecture notes into PowerPoint presentations. They use course-management tools like Blackboard and WebCT to distribute class materials, grades, and assignments. But the materials are simply scanned, and the assignments neither look nor feel different. Even when the textbook comes with an interactive CD-ROM, or when the publisher makes the same material available on a proprietary Web site, most faculty members do not assign it. Only modest breakthroughs have occurred — in the use of e-mail to communicate rapidly and directly with students and in the adoption of computerized testing materials.

Indeed, many people believe that the rapid introduction of course-management tools has actually reduced e-learning’s impact on the way most faculty members teach. Blackboard and WebCT make it almost too easy for professors to transfer their standard teaching materials to the Web. While Blackboard’s promotional materials talk about enabling faculty members to use a host of new applications, the specific promises that the software makes to potential users are less dramatic: the ability for them “to manage their own Internet-based file space on a central system and to collect, share, discover, and manage important materials from articles and research papers to presentations and multimedia files.” All that professors need to use the product are the rudimentary electronic-library skills that most have already mastered. Blackboard and WebCT allow the faculty users, when asked, “Are you involved in e-learning?” to respond, “Yes, my courses are already online!”1

If you don’t have database access to the Chronicle, you can read more on their observations by downloading their report “Thwarted Innovation”

1. Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust ,  By: Zemsky, Robert, Massy, William F., Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 7/9/2004, Vol. 50, Issue 44 (On EBSCO)

Working them Stats

David Weinberger has blogged a Kerry camp poll analysis at Corante setting the expectations high for the Republican convention. It is really amusing to read in a cynical light, especially when read against the kinds of media analyses and use of statistics during the lead up to Democrats’ convention.

History Channel: North Korea Documentary

I’m in the middle of watching two horrible documentaries on North Korea on the history channel. It is a commercial break now but we have just been told that “the story goes that” Kim Jong Il murdered his brother while they swam together in a river as a child. While described as a “story” the very next statement made by some former CIA guy they interviewed was basically that murdering his own brother had a “psychological impact” on Kim which helped set the tone for his murderous career. This of course sets the tone for the remainder of the second documentary, entitled, “The Real Dr. Evil.”

While filmed in the dramatic “unsolved mysteries” or “inside report” kind of documentary style to help accentuate the eeeevvviiilll of North Korea and Kim Jong Il, it is as if someone ran an “IMPORT SCRIPT” command on the old South Korean anti-communist education system. I’m not suggesting that Kim Jong Il is a warm and fuzzy loving guy, but these dramatized shows (also very popular in Japan) accomplish nothing but to set up the DPRK as the demons they are portrayed as in old Korean textbooks.

Update: I finished watching the show. Well, I’m all fired up now to despise that cold blooded Dr. Evil Kim Jong Il and his “precious” nuclear weapons. I wonder what it must be like for these interviewees in such documentaries to have things they say get woven into these shows and whether they feel like their “main point” is getting through. In the case of one of the few “scholarly” types interviewed, Selig Harrison, who is the author of Korean Endgame and is a DPRK expert with very moderate positions currently at the Center for International Policy I am not sure he did. I found a nice article written by him for the Nation in which he reviews several recent books on Korea, including works by Cumings and Armstrong.

Cliopatria: Swift Boat Historiography

Jonathan Dresner has a great posting over at Cliopatria on how interesting it would be to think about the Swift Boat issue from the perspective of historiography.

Historiographically, how would we balance contemporary documents against decades-removed oral history, if it were not a partisan issue? When is absolute certainty justified in the face of contradictory sources? What bigger questions does this connect to (i.e., is this really an avenue worth pursuing) or are there analyses that need to precede asking the questions we’re asking?

He concludes by asking how close historians need to get to the “truth” of history.

Do we, as historians, really need to answer these questions, or is it enough to note the “interesting” vagaries of sources and leave it at that?

This kind of question is one that also deeply troubles me, just as I am about to begin a PhD program in history. I hope Dresner will have more words of wisdom on this in his future postings. My feeling right now is that how “vague” we leave contested moments that find their way into our narratives will depend ultimately on the questions we posed in our work. For example, the Swift Boat veterans, and those who seek to reveal their contradictions at least both seem to agree that the questions are “Was Kerry a liar?” Or more broadly, “Is he ‘unfit for command.'”

The shift of public debate to this kind of question marks a significant “historiographical” coup for supporters of the Bush campaign insofar as Kerry’s military record was previously approached with questions like, “How much does his military service make him a better presidential candidate to lead a country at ‘war'” or at worst, “Does Kerry’s activism following his service in Vietnam show a profound disrespect for America’s men and women in uniform?” While I personally find all these questions completely uninteresting, it is easy to see how the latter two allow a historian or commentator of any flavor to leave the vagaries of his months of service alone. Jonathan Dresner really brings up some important issues in postings like this one but to his, “Do we, as historians really need to answer these questions?” I would add one more query, “Do we, as historians really need to ask these questions?”

Kodomo no Kuni Website

I found a link on Blogdex I thought I’d pass on. It is a site dedicated to Artists and Children’s Books in 1920s Japan, and in particular, the journal コドモノクニ (“The Land of Children”). The materials are prepared by the International Library of Children’s Literature which is a beautiful library connected to the National Diet Library found just behind Ueno Park in Tokyo.

I think the Kodomo no Kuni website is a good example of the kind of history project I hope to become very popular in the future: pick something manageable in scope, put a lot of materials not available online into a format easily viewable online with a pleasant and accessible design. Provide some introductory narrative and some primary materials. While this site doesn’t provide it, I think it would also be good to provide: a more extensive index and database of materials not included for display in the main presentation of the site but can be viewed by those who are interested in seeing more (like the Columbia University Ling Lung women’s magazine project which in contrast, lacks the presentation of the Kodomo no Kuni site), links to more information, the ability to easily download materials for offline viewing, a place for users to post comments and new info, and some kind of updates or an RSS feed for newly added material. I have a few of these kind of small projects in mind and will post more when I get something going on them.