Tag Archive for conferences

And the days are not full enough

The past month has been conference season for this Asianist – and a pretty exciting one, at that! I am feeling both rejuvenated intellectually & yet also melancholy. I relish the opportunity to reconnect with old friends & acquaintances and make new connections, but it reminds me how much I miss some things (and many people). However, it’s been a generally good cap to an almost-over-academic year that has been pretty upsetting for me, personally and professionally – I’m ready to have a summer of work and relative silence, one that I hope will be an opportunity to recenter.

In March, I went (for the first time) to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference, where I was lucky enough to participate in a really cool panel called “Retelling Fantastic Tales.” Luo Liang organized a really diverse & interesting group of papers, most focused on East Asia, but also some forays into other parts of the globe. Strangely, it was my first opportunity to sit and talk fantastical tales with other China specialists – ever! I absolutely loved the ACLA format, which is much more like a workshop. I wish more major conferences would follow it; it made for a much more positive experience presenting than the usual ‘2 hour panel with some commentary & audience questions.’ I was also excited to have the opportunity to get feedback from literary scholars on my work – one thing I’ve always loved about my project on ghost opera is that it really does lie at the intersection of several fields. Although my work is very much for China specialists (transnational? What’s that?) – unapologetically so – I do hope that it will be of interest to non-historians, and it sounds like it is. I made some great connections & came home feeling pretty good.

Boston wasn’t too bad, either (also my first time there). The weather was pleasant & I had some really good food – and bad Americanized Chinese food for the first time in, uh, years, but that can be fun, too. And I had a wonderful night out with a friend I hadn’t seen in 9 (!!) years, not since I’d left Taiwan before starting grad school in 2007. It was great to pick up where we left off & to catch up after all that time.

I just returned from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Seattle. I wasn’t presenting this year, but I’ve determined that – barring unforeseen financial difficulties – it’s a really important few days for me & I need to make the effort to go, even if I’m not getting a line on my CV. I skipped last year’s meeting in Chicago, and spent the whole conference feeling sorry for myself that I was alone in Bozeman. AAS is not so much about the conference portion for me (though I do like dropping in on interesting-sounding panels, and of course – the exhibit halls, with university presses running great sales on both new titles and old!), but having the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meeting new ones. This year was particularly fun, as the American Society for Environmental History was also going on, so my first night in Seattle – when I was feeling a bit grumpy for having some plans fall through – I finally got to meet a Twitter friend for real. We had some amazing food and cocktails and hours of great conversation. We had Skyped previously for work-related reasons, but it was a real delight to have a nice evening out with someone I always thought I’d get along brilliantly with & to no great surprise – I did. I also got to meet up with Nick Stember (aka the translator of that little Star Wars thing) for a quick chat – I hope next time, we’ll have a little more time to talk. But it’s always good putting a real face to the name, especially for someone that had a lot to do with the internet success of the lianhuanhua.

I really liked Seattle – another place I’d never been. A friend took us out to his family’s beach house on Vashon Island – an opportunity to get out of the city – and it was just gorgeous. But it also made me terribly homesick: the combination of a few days of running around AAS & seeing people I hadn’t seen in years, having a big UCSD program get together (where I stood up and said I had always appreciated how special our program was, but I really recognize it now that I’ve moved to being faculty, and how lucky I felt to be a part of such a strong, talented group of scholars), and seeing scenery that was so familiar. I thought of all sorts of little moments of years past, and really mourned the fact that it will never be like that again. I mourned who I used to be (as a friend said a bit wonderingly while we were walking around Somerville in Boston, ‘Taiwan seems like it was just yesterday! But it wasn’t. You were twenty-three once!’ I was. I was … we all were), since I feel like I’ve lost a sense of myself the past year – I wake up sometimes and am not sure who I am, other than a historian of modern China who does mostly serviceable work and stresses about everything. I wanted a few more days, the opportunity to cram in more time with people who matter to me & who I don’t get to see enough, a few more hours to catch up with people who have seen my ups and downs over the years and still love me, despite the fact I’m a giant ball of stress prone to emotional meltdowns and a pervasive sense that I’m just never going to be enough for anyone, or any institution, or any press. I missed people who weren’t in attendance – my faithful editrix most of all – and a wonderful little conference we had in Santa Cruz the summer I finished my dissertation ….

I’m still mourning. But life doesn’t stop, of course, and we keep moving forward: for now, looking towards the end of the semester, I have a book manuscript to worry about, and adventures to plan for the dog (more popular among my friends than I am!), and a long summer that will inevitably feel too short.

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And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll [Probably] Do Again

Back in my second year of grad school, Ian Bogost encouraged me to apply to the world’s most insane sounding conference (or at least, the most insane sounding conference I had ever heard of): Foundations of Digital Games 2009, which wasn’t just outside of my area in a variety of ways (my only credibility vis-à-vis “game studies” of any stripe was, of course, my time at Kotaku), but on a cruise ship. And not just any cruise ship, it was on a Disney cruise ship.  The professor who wrote me a letter of recommendation for the doctoral consortium kept saying ‘This is a boondoggle!’ When I found myself dressed up for the ship’s ‘pirate night’ – alongside some academic luminaries – I could see his point. But it was my first game studies conference & I had a really splendid time meeting a lot of people doing very interesting work (I also wrote a large swath of my Li Huiniang paper – which was eventually published in Modern Chinese Literature & Culture – on the sun deck).

Actually, FDG is a serious conference – particularly  strong in technical areas that I don’t understand – it just happens to have a unique setting. People’s response when I tell them about it is either “That sounds horrific!” or “That sounds amazing!” It’s a combination of both – I really like the fact that everyone’s trapped on a boat together, but I’m not much for cruise ships. I don’t get the appeal, and find the whole non-conference portion of events kind of traumatic (the exception this year: sitting in the cantilevered hot tubs after dinner, when the upper deck was largely deserted). There’s a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace entitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which sums up my feelings on cruises-for-pleasure:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir – especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased – I felt despair.

Despite the essay being nearly 20 years old, the mass-market Luxury Cruise seems to have changed little, and Wallace’s observations are frighteningly on point – and frighteningly funny. Further, I spent a fair amount of time sitting on Deck 4, away from the craziness of the upper decks, reading War & Peace, which also probably goes a long way in explaining why the idea of a mass “luxury” cruise for pleasure fills me with terror. Boat-induced despair aside, I really enjoy FDG, even though (or because?) it’s a conference largely outside of my wheel house .

Anyway, my professor wasn’t the only one to say “You’re going WHERE? For a CONFERENCE? And you expect me to believe this is legitimate?” (as I discovered when trying to register for this year’s conference & my university purchasing card blocked it – necessitating a call to the accounting office saying it really was a legitimate conference & I wasn’t just trying to use university money to pay for a mid-semester vacation). The past four years, FDG has been off the boat & I’ve been busy enough with other stuff that I haven’t been tempted to apply (though it was in some very nice locales), but I looked with some longing at the CFP when it came out this year: it was back on the boat (though not a Disney boat)! I haven’t been terribly productive this year research-wise & whipping up abstracts has been like pulling teeth with pliers sans anesthesia, so I forgot about FDG for a while, since it is a more technically-oriented conference & I figured my abstract on soft censorship in the PRC would probably be better received at DiGRA.

But a bit before proposals were due, Ian once again suggested I apply, though this time with a panel – something Asia-focused. I roped in William Huber (currently a lecturer at Abertay University), an old friend from grad school, who then roped in Mia Consalvo (Canada Research Chair in Game Studies & Design at Concordia University), for a panel on “game studies and area studies.” Both William & Mia have research interests in Japan, and I, of course, am a Chinese historian; Wm. and I have spent a lot of time over the years chattering about the crossover between the two fields – how can people like me do a better job with games? How can games people do a better job with topics based in (or strongly connected to) Asia? And why should we care? We each have our happy little academic homes; who cares if area studies people do a lousy job with games & game studies people often do a lousy job putting some topics in a broader context? I was grousing about putting the abstract together to a friend, also an area studies person, who said, “Well of course you’re having trouble putting together an abstract – it sounds ridiculous. What could area studies possibly learn from game studies!”  I bit my tongue from elaborating on my experiences leading students through monographs this semester that have illustrated the weakness on both sides. If nothing else, the frustration of teaching with this stuff has heightened my sense that both sides have something to learn from the other (never mind having spent a couple of years motoring around on the edges of academic fields thinking how I could combine two interests into one satisfying whole).

One thing that area studies people love to do is critique area studies. Certainly, there are a lot of problems with such a “meta-discipline” (too many to rehash here), and there’s a lot to be said for the attempts to get out of an area studies, nation-based paradigm. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the general foundation area studies at least purports to demand: linguistic competence, grounding in history, and the umbrella nature of bringing together scholars in a variety of fields to research X. Yes, the “long-term view” has often caused a lot of problems (mod theory, anyone?), but there is a long-term view.

Yellow MusicGames are interesting to plonk down in this context, because we treat them very differently than, say, Chinese opera: they’re global in a way a lot of other cultural products aren’t, almost from their inception. In Yellow Music, Andrew Jones discusses the circulation of jazz (and technology) in a way that’s resonated strongly with me over the years (in a monograph that has the hands-down best conceptual use of “colonial modernity” I’ve ever come across). He notes that one African- American’s account of the Chinese jazz age of 1930’s Shanghai “alerts us to the folly of trying to understand Chinese jazz as an example of Western influence on Chinese musical forms. Nor can the ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese jazz’ be relegated to the realm of the merely adjectival ….” He further notes that we must “look at the ways in which both (and indeed all) parties have been and continue to be inextricably bound up in a larger and infinitely more complex process.” While we sometimes append some sort of national marker to games (the ‘Japanese’ in JRPGs springs to mind here), we frequently don’t – often because national origins are obscured through translation and localization, and a rather interesting process of naturalization.

So, for those of us who came up through an area studies framework, games provide a possibility of escape from national boundaries. And if you tend towards studying things that hold, perhaps, limited enchantment for those outside a really narrow circle of academics, the idea of studying something that can find a comfortable home in multiple areas, of interest to many kinds of people, can be intriguing indeed. At the same time, the type of studies that currently exist (I think here particularly of Anne Allison’s work on Pokémon) can often look a bit off-kilter to people who play games (to say nothing of people working in game studies “proper”). So, the lessons of game studies for the stodgy old formation of area studies are two-fold, at least: (1) a way to get out of nation-state centered narratives; (2) ways to deal with games (and other “new media”).  I’ve fielded a couple of questions recently regarding histories of (analog) games in China & I’ve found myself reiterating the fact that there just isn’t much out there, even on important games like weiqi and mahjong. While we were taking in the sea air on my beloved Deck 4, Wm. asked what a ludologically-focused history of weiqi would look like – I said one probably wasn’t possible based on the written evidence left behind (the best “games” paper I’ve read on pre-20th century history of Chinese games is actually very philological in nature – requiring some serious classical Chinese chops), but it sure would be interesting to see a collaboration between a game studies scholar & someone more ensconced in literary or historical studies of area X.

Since this was a game studies(ish) conference, what game studies can get from looking towards another, older “meta-discipline” is the topic we focused more on. Mia told an interesting story about being invited to speak on Japanese videogames at a conferenced focused on Japan – not games – and being on a panel with people working on Noh drama, textile production, etc. She said she felt weird to be on a panel with these other scholars, but at the same time, it was elucidating in underscoring that all of these people – working on very diverse topics – felt part of the same fabric, so to speak.

Some of this is a question of focus – my fundamental object of study is China (how’s that for an area studies mindset?); I’m interested in games culture and games history for their own sakes, but in doing my own work, I am (at the moment) more interested in what games tell me about China, not what Chinese games tell me about games. For the majority of people working in game studies, their fundamental object of study is games. But Anne Allison’s work on Pokémon would’ve been improved had she had a better foundation in straight-up “history of videogames”; other work on the game studies side would be improved if there was a better foundation in historical, anthropological, sociological studies coming from the area studies ghetto. For me, this segues into my general wish for better cultural histories of game(s) culture(s) – I get frustrated with histories that don’t nestle themselves into the bigger fabric of non-games related subjects. 

There’s no point in talking about what the “perfect” scholar would look like – rather, the discussion to continue having is how we can bridge the gap between two sets of researchers separated by a common object of study (games). Game studies is on the whole a lot more open to collaborative research than my home discipline, and it seems a sensible place to start. I heard some scattered chatter about the problem of people coming from “outside” fields and getting rejected for conference after conference, even though they’re doing the kind of work that a lot of people in game studies would appreciate. I’ve been pretty lucky thus far in applying to game studies conferences (my first rejection came from a very properly game studies topic!), but the field can sometimes feel a little closed to outsiders. Silly sounding things like abstract formatting, or CFPs that emphasize “quantitative” research (which I’ve been told is code for “we expect some rigor!”; but for me – who does not, has never done, will never do research that could be classed as “quantitative” – it can be demoralizing, a “we don’t want your kind here” sign, even if that isn’t true) can be really off-putting for someone coming from the outside. I don’t mind learning how to write new kinds of abstracts, or present my work in a different manner; but I do mind things that seem to signal my kind of work isn’t wanted, period, full-stop.

I had just been at AAS prior to FDG, and I love having a well-feathered, comfortable nest of Asianists to flee to once a year (so I understanding being protective of one’s comfortable academic/intellectual space – it’s valuable and necessary) – but it would be really, really nice (for both fields) to see more representation of games scholars at places like AAS, and more people from boring old disciplines at places like FDG and DiGRA. I derive a certain amount of enjoyment from being a Really Odd One Out at places like FDG – I had an amazing epiphany about my dissertation/manuscript over the last dinner at FDG, and part of the reason for that is I’m forced to get out of my familiar sinological/historical happy place – but as Wm. said, “This field can feel very small at times.”

In any case, I wish I had sat down immediately following our panel to scribble down some thoughts (alas, Tolstoy’s “rollicking rom-com” & the view from Deck 4 were calling my name) – it was a nice discussion, and one I was glad to be part of (thanks, Ian). Hopefully it’s one that we can continue. Maybe even on a cruise ship.

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Thoughts on our 2014 AAS Roundtable, Part II

As I mentioned in my general ramblings on our AAS roundtable, the general theme was “access.” Although Alan & Nick in particular focused on issues of accessibility in regards to sources (mostly for teaching), Amanda & I riffed on the theme of accessibility of sources (mostly for research). I spoke for a very short period of time – hoping, I think, that there would be more discussion in the comments period of some of the points raised regarding research (and there was a comment – tied, actually, to Nick’s discussion of the Japan Disaster Archive – about issues related to IP). As it turned on, the teaching portion was apparently of much greater interest to everyone, but I wanted to scribble down some thoughts beyond my short comments at the panel.

In speaking of access, I was specifically referring to the problem of getting into important, subscription-based repositories of digitized sources, databases like Duxiu, ChinaMAXX, China Academic Journals (CAJ), and the like. In some respects, this is the dullest manifestation of anything related to “the digital”: we’re talking about paper sources that have been scanned, OCR’d, and put up on subscription-based sites. We’re not talking world-changing, discipline-transforming use of technology here, are we?

Not exactly, no, but you’d be surprised. During our research seminars in grad school (and at other points, of course), my advisors would occasionally comment on the changes the field had undergone since they did their research decades ago. The ability to do keyword searches of Chinese-language materials has changed the way we research – for one, it means that you (very easily) can find references in the most scattered of places. The example I usually point to is my discovery of a poem one of my playwrights, Meng Chao, published in Xin tiyu 新体育, the premier sports & physical culture magazine of the 1950s and 1960s. I’d been thinking of getting something going on Chinese mountaineering, but turning up this little gem while running a usual search (in hopes of turning up something from one of the theatre or literary journals) really made me sit up and take notice. Now, I did have a similar experience after I purchased a 1967 newspaper article on ghost opera off of the second hand book website, kongfz.com (I’ve written about the glories of online book shopping in China before). There, I noticed a strange line about a 1962 spoken language drama titled Mount Everest. But that was happenstance on a whole different level – the kind of thing that is tremendously difficult to replicate.

My advisors commented on the change – the ability to really drill down on a narrow set of terms or people and have hundreds or thousands of articles at your fingertips is quite different from spending ages paging through paper documents by hand, looking for scattered references. On the one hand, there’s a lot that can be gleaned from perusing hardcopy sources while you look for references here, there, and everywhere. On the other, databases can turn up references in the least likely of places – like Meng Chao in a magazine that I would never otherwise pick up while researching opera!

The accessibility of these databases, with enormous stores of documents, hasn’t lessened my reliance on hardcopies; for instance, I own a fairly complete run of Theatre Report 戏剧报 for the years between 1955 and 1966. This is one of the primary sources for my work on opera reform & it was a fairly expensive (and space-consuming) thing to purchase. I did so because I like being able to browse hardcopies, and it is different from “browsing” digitized issues on CAJ, or doing specific keyword searches on Duxiu. I also own a lot of very minor regional drama publications from the 1950s, most of which don’t exist in libraries or digital archives. But there’s simply no denying that one reason I managed to cough up a dissertation that was reasonably solid is because I had the tools at my disposal to make wading through thousands and thousands of articles feasible. These tools are simply part of doing research these days – important parts of research.

And unfortunately, because I didn’t land at a school that has a large Asian studies program & the resources to devote to it, it’s access I’m scrambling to maintain after this year. Access that my work in large measure depends on. Before this gets taken out of context as a “poor me, I didn’t land a job at an Ivy” whine, let me say that I’m quite happy where I am, and this is problem that extends to what I suspect is most of us in this field (at least in the US). I realized that this was a bigger problem than I had first thought when a friend, who is installed at a very well-respected private institution (although one with – again – a relatively small body of Asianists) emailed to ask what I was doing about access; I was shocked that my friend’s school didn’t subscribe to these kinds of resources. So even places that look like they have more money to fling at research sources than my land grant institution often can’t justify it for a handful – if that – of faculty members.

My advisors may have commented on the way this changes how their grad students approached research topics, but no one is talking about how access – or not – to these sorts of materials are important for the field as a whole. Most of us don’t wind up at institutions with a large population of Asianists, and anyone in academia can speak to the trimming of budgets that make every penny really count. In today’s climate of reduced funding for libraries, and the fact that many more schools have at least one Asianist (if not more) on the faculty than was probably the case forty years ago, what happens to those of us outside the realm of a relative handful of institutions that can afford subscription services?

Here’s what I sort of feel like my field is telling me, mostly by not saying anything at all (that’s Duxiu, by the way, my most oft-used database):

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This is a really, really important issue, and it’s something I feel like our (inter)national organization dedicated to Asian studies could actually facilitate discussion on – and maybe even solutions. Database companies are not set up to cater to individual scholars seeking access; they negotiate contracts with individual universities and consortiums (many UC campuses, for instance, buy in to online resources together). Some companies, like East View (which handles CAJ and other Chinese materials, as well as databases of Russian & Arabic sources), specifically request you go through your libraries – and based on their pricing structure, my university would fall into the same category as, say, Harvard or Berkeley (which certainly have a lot more Asianists than we do!).  I am definitely exploring my options, including getting in contact with institutions that have (in theory) service to neighboring areas like Montana as part of their mission. But wouldn’t it be nice if people – including independent scholars, and people in more populated areas – had an easy way to buy in to subscription services?

In my presentation, I mentioned the German system, which is brilliant, wonderful, and inclusive. Individuals – and institutions – can subscribe to CrossAsia, which provides access to a wide variety of subscription services. All an individual needs is a Berlin Staatsbibliothek card (which is acquired for a very reasonable yearly fee); those affiliated with institutions can get access in that way. Over dinner, Hilde explained a little more about how CrossAsia came into being – basically, an individual librarian marshaled the entire effort and managed to pull all German universities into the system. For small outposts, it actually made it affordable to get their Asianists access to a huge number of databases. For much bigger programs, it wound up being cheaper for them to both maintain access to the things they already subscribed to, and gain access to new resources. Put into American terms, it’s a system that made sense for the Montana States or Mary Washingtons of the world and the Harvards and UC systems.

It would be delightful if this could be replicated nationally, but the US isn’t Germany. Still, I can’t help but feel there’s more we collectively could do as a field to make inroads in ensuring access to vital resources. I chatted with a colleague after this panel, and mentioned the access issue – he said that it was funny (though not surprising) that a lot of the promise of digitization & popularization, etc. has wound up reinforcing old elitist boundaries (this is someone who left one of those Old Elite Schools to come to a land grant institution, so it’s not bitterness on his part). No institution could afford to replicate today the kinds of collections found in the bastions of area studies – not even the bastions, as the price of (print) sources is simply astronomical in many cases. And yet, very often, access to these things which should help spread the wealth around a little more is still limited to places that can afford to cough up very expensive yearly fees, negotiated by individual institutions. It’s just gatekeeping of a different manner.

I’m not asking to simply leech off schools with better endowed libraries than my own, for free; I would cheerfully pay my own money – far more than the cost of a Berlin Staatsbibliothek card – every year to ensure I had access to materials to continue doing my research with a minimum of muss and fuss. At the same time, I am not in a position to negotiate as an individual with CAJ, with Duxiu, with the People’s Daily database. If the German case proves anything, it’s that not just smaller institutions won by coming together in a consortium: even the big, elite Asian studies institutions got something out of the deal (the same thing smaller institutions got, actually: more & better access, cheaper). The more people – or institutions – you have bargaining with database companies (who really have a lot leverage in this situation, just as companies like JSTOR have in providing access to academic journals), the better.

Bigger programs are already subsidizing my research, to some extent – every time I order materials on inter-library loan (things like microfilm – the type of sources that are often available, at least for my period, online through databases), that costs everyone money: my library, their library. Does ILL really make more sense than providing some kind of buy-in to subscription services for a reasonable fee? I’m not a librarian – and don’t know the economics of everything – but I think we need to at least start having a conversation (between academics, librarians, and database companies) about how we could all work together. Both the elite institutions, and those of us who have left the elite nest at the conclusion of our graduate training.

I’ve been encouraged to talk to our library about subscribing to at least one critical database, and I’ll probably broach the subject with our librarians (and see what suggestions they have). But truthfully, I am at a land grant institution, one without massive resources or a wonderful Asian studies collection. I’m a lot more interested in making sure my students have access to books, so I can stop lending out my personal copies of tomes I consider basic acquisitions for an academic library. The thousands and thousands of dollars a year it would cost to negotiate access that would benefit only me are, in my opinion, better spent on acquisitions that would benefit a lot more people. 

I’m not ashamed for holding a TT position at a school without a history of being a hotbed of Asianists. Really, that describes most of us – few of us will wind up at institutions that look like the universities where we trained as grad students. Even a relatively lateral move – say, from one UC to another – is not going to mean a total equivalency in regards to resources (for one thing, different schools – even the bastions – have different emphases in their collections). Isn’t this the kind of discussion we should be having? The debate over open access to academic publications acknowledges that databases are a relatively new, very important issue – and access to those resources is incredibly important. The accessibility of primary source databases should be part of that discussion. And, just like bigger conversations on teaching and research, this is something that I want my field to be participating in. Keeping an eye on AHA discussions is great, but there are some specific issues here that we need to be discussing, not just skirting the edges of in broader, discipline-wide conversations.

Things have changed a lot since my advisors did their training. I just hope that it doesn’t take another forty years for us to collectively figure out how to manage the changing landscape of the past ten.

Thoughts on our 2014 AAS Roundtable, Part I

Chinese typewriterI just returned from a rousing Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Philadelphia, which is the annual gathering to wallow (in the most wonderful way) in Asian studies for a few days with old friends & new friends. What follows are some (probably confused and somewhat random) thoughts on the panel I was part of (part I) & some expansion on things I only touched on in a few minutes (part II) – I think we’d all like to keep a conversation going & I hope this year’s AAS (and our panel) was a piece in getting that conversation going and sustaining it.

I was part of a roundtable called “Charting the Digital in Asian Studies: Promises, Realities & the Future of Teaching and Research.” It was spearheaded by one of my best friends in the field, Amanda Shuman (PhD candidate in East Asian history at UC Santa Cruz) – we talked last spring about getting a panel on “digital humanities” together (because we’re not really doing as much discussion as a field about tools & methodologies for teaching & research as we should) & Amanda did the legwork. To our great surprise, we were actually accepted. Amanda was unable to attend in person this year because she was recently delivered of child, but she Skyped in to the panel (the technical issues are a story for another day, I suppose).

I was really delighted to be included with a very experienced panel of fellow Asianists doing some really amazing work. Hilde de Weerdt (professor of Chinese history at Leiden) was our discussant & also introduced her own very new course aimed at getting students both working with classical Chinese sources & using digital tools to map those sources (in this case, correspondence). We also had Alan Christy (professor of Japanese history at UCSC), who I met for the first time (having heard a lot about him from Amanda) last year when he graciously allowed me to tag along to a workshop in Santa Cruz set up to discuss a long-running UCSC course with a significant digital component (Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War). This go-round, he discussed another project with students involving a large collection of photographs of Okinawa in the 1950s, also under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories at UCSC. Sue Fernsebner (professor of Chinese history at University of Mary Washington) – my undergrad mentor who I’ve written about here – talked about her experiences designing and implementing an undergraduate methods course with digital components (she posted some links & description over on her blog). Finally, Nick Kapur (post-doc at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard) discussed his involvement in Harvard’s Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters.

It was in one respect a little disappointing (having absolutely nothing to do with my fellow panelists or our discussion!): it seems a shame that there are so few panels at the “premier Asian studies conference” dealing with the practical matters of teaching & researching concerns (related to the digital or not; but bluntly, I think the issues we were talking about were largely just as useful for people who have no interest in “the digital” or computational tools). Ian Bogost, one of my favorite (and grumpiest) people in academia, has written a fair amount about the problems inherent in these “digital humanities” discussions (and certainly, a lot of other people have, too). I’d like to think we weren’t simply (in Ian’s words) “pat[ting] ourselves on the back for installing blogs and signing up for Twitter” – I am always keenly aware of the general lack of knowledge among historians at large. The general theme of our roundtable was access (in various permutations), and in its teaching manifestation, one even the technophobes among us should be interested in: how do we, as Asianists, get our students into sources – beyond the limits of those available in translation – when our students generally don’t have the capability to read those languages?

This isn’t a “digital humanities” problem, it’s a “we teach things in languages other than English” problem. Alan described the types of discussions he’s had with students who come in wanting to research a variety of topics. “Do you read Japanese?” he queries. Of course they don’t. “Well, there are all sorts of things in Japanese; nothing in English; sorry, pick something else.” I’ve only been installed in a faculty position since last August & I’ve had this same conversation multiple times. “Great idea!” I say, when a student trots out an interesting research topic, but one I know that’s simply not feasible given linguistic limitations. “But you can’t.”  I jealously look at my Americanist colleagues, who can cull from their plethora of English-language sources to find things their senior capstone students can work with. It’s not that I don’t have sources; I have tons of them! But they’re in Chinese. I would love to find ways to introduce my students to sources that are not only in my general area and happen to have found their way to English translation (to have a useful collection of sources – in English – like this is rare enough; one reason Sue’s methods course was based on the Taiping Civil War, since there is a weighty 3 volume set of documents/documents in translation), but things I have worked with extensively in my own research.

It’s really inspirational (I hate using that word; it sounds schlocky in the context of teaching, but it’s true) to listen to Alan talk about taking students who don’t read Japanese into Japanese archives in Japan and having them really get into sources. Obviously, they can’t read them, but he noted that students’ abilities to suss out relevant sources is really quite impressive – particularly considering their lack of linguistic skills. How might we use digital tools to facilitate that sort of experience? Who doesn’t want their students to be excited about research – excited about archives – and to have them being excited about doing work in a foreign language they don’t know? Wow!

That’s why it’s disappointing to me that we had a somewhat sparsely attended panel at our “premier” conference, because I really think this is the sort of discussion that is most fruitful at a place like AAS. Sue mentioned that the American Historical Association conference had a lot of panels concerned with teaching & research methodologies; I’d like to hear from historians in other areas (and I do like hearing what methods, tools, and approaches my colleagues are using), but honestly, I want to hear from people who teach classes in areas like me. I want to hear Alan, Hilde, Sue & Nick (and others) talk about how we get students into foreign language materials in productive ways – and yes, that often involves what falls under the heading of “digital humanities.”

I think Ian’s criticisms from a few years ago of “digital humanities” are well taken, but one reason that I occasionally feel a little defensive is that a great many other people aren’t trying to lead undergrads through a very foreign history, where the tools of our trade are things in foreign (and very difficult!) languages. Can you blame us for getting a little excited about what must seem very pedestrian tools and oh-so-twenty-years-ago methods to academics in compsci or other “computational” fields? Ian talked, in a 2011 post, about the problems of “digital humanities” borrowing, rather than inventing, tools:

… the digital humanities more frequently adopt rather than invent their tools. This is a complicated issue, related to the lack product development and deployment experience in general among humanists, and their lack of computational and design abilities in particular. (By contrast, most scholars of physics or biology learn to program computers, whether in FORTRAN or MatLab or with even more advanced and flexible tools.) As a result, digital humanities projects risk letting existing technologies dictate the terms of their work. In some cases, adopting existing technology is appropriate. But in other cases, the technologies themselves make tacit, low-level assumptions that can’t be seen in the light of day. While humanists can collaborate or hire staff or otherwise accomplish technical novelty, it’s often at a remove, not completely understood by its proponents. The results risk reversing the intended purpose of the humanities as public spies: taking whatever works from the outside world un- or under-questioned.

This is all very true (and a good cautionary point – Alan & Sue both talked about their efforts at learning more of the ‘under the hood’ stuff); on the other hand, most scholars of physics or biology don’t learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean (on top of much more pedestrian European languages, of course) and their classical antecedents in some combination. On some level, griping at us because we don’t also program is just dumping salt into the wound of language acquisition (which we already have to do a lot of). How can we design tools – or even know what we’d like to accomplish – if we haven’t mastered the basic tools of our historical trade? On the other hand, when do we learn how to program? During grad school? While scrambling to get tenure? After tenure? Never? Since I do hang around the edges of game studies, I know a lot of people (including Ian) who are incredibly technically proficient and I never forget that I’m barely competent in the most basic of ways when it comes to using technology. But do I really have to try and catch up to them, on top of just trying to be the best Chinese historian I can be? Is anything less than this just feeding the problem – am I one of those people patting myself on the back for being barely technologically competent? I’d like to think not, but I don’t know.

In any case, some of this is very specific to certain subsets of the historical discipline, which is precisely why I’d like to see more discussion and debate at our conferences (and our big conference in particular). It would sure beat seeing yet another person stand up and read us a 10 page paper in a flat monotone, don’t you think?

Speaking of patting ourselves on the back for using Twitter, the live tweeting at AAS is pretty dismal (and that’s being generous), much to my chagrin; but (not surprisingly), all of my fellow panelists can be found there:

Amanda
Hilde
Alan
Sue
Nick