Anticipation

The last time my uncle downsized his residence, the process yielded two boxes of Grandfather’s manuscripts. This summer he is once again moving to a smaller flat and this time he found correspondence between Grandfather and his younger brother. It just so happened that I have already scheduled a trip to Hong Kong later this month, so I won’t have to wait too long to read these letters and convince my uncle to entrust them to me for safekeeping.

What else await discovery? If I ever need more impetus to “get on” with the interactive narrative--i.e., website/open peer review--project, these letters have given me the much need kick in the behind!

Stay tuned! Next update will be in August.

Inching Closer to Website Launch

This morning, I took a big step toward completing the basic structure for my website by installing a CommentPress blog as one of the sub domains. (CommentPress is a WordPress theme created by the design team at the Institute for the Future of the Book http://futureofthebook.org.)

This blog--I’ll provide the url here as soon as I have launched the website-- is to be used exclusively to post my writing-in-progress (episodes) and elicit paragraph-by-paragraph comments from readers. In other words, I will subject my writing to a blog-based peer review process. (The New Media Consortium offers useful examples on their site: http://wp.nmc.org/.)

Although I have set up the blog, the rest of the website is far from complete. A main reason for this is that I am not sure what I want to do with the site. I am committed to creating knowledge/publishing in a networked environment, which means that my website must be more than just pages with hyperlinks that I control. The blog platform, and CommentPress in particular, seems to fit my needs, so why should I create a “parent” website at all?

Digital Preservation

Last week I went online to re-visit a site about Newark’s Chinatown history that I have bookmarked: “When Newark Had a Chinatown” (www.newarkchinatown.org). It has vanished. Google last cached its home page on April 19, 2009, but all the links on the cache page are broken. Next, because both Google search results and my own notes document a connection between the history site and Sumei Multidisciplinary Art Center, I went to www.sumei.org to check if the Chinatown history project had been discontinued and, worse, dismantled. “When Newark Had a Chinatown” is still listed on the Sumei site as a permanent exhibit of the Center, but there are no active hyperlinks.

Historians are by nature detectives, so I took the next logical step--exploring the rest of the Sumei site, including clicking on the email addresses (shown as active links) of all the listed staff members. More dead ends and puzzles. For example, clicking on the active link xxx@aol.com took me to AOL’s website. Similarly, xxx@optoline.com took me to Optoline’s site. Something is very not right here.

Whatever the root cause might be for “The Case of the Vanished Website,” this is a timely reminder of the need to be vigilant about digital preservation. With respect to my “grandfather project,” I have to ask myself what would/should be its shelf life. My book, articles, and short stories are in print, years after I have lost interest in them. They may be gathering dust in libraries, but they continue to exist and maybe still being read and commented on by a new generation of students. They are my legacy, for what it’s worth.

But my “grandfather project” is intended to be a Web-based, networked, multimedia production. What if one day in the future, I decide that I am no longer interested in it, or that I have nothing more to add, and stop paying for web hosting? Poof, the site will be gone, forever. Vanished.

How important is it for scholars’ work to outlive them?

Garden Reclamation Project: Day Two

I know that this is off-topic, because this blog is not about my personal life, but I just have to share this photo with you. It's part of my perennial bed, stripped to the bare essentials and freshly mulched. Both my mind and body feel great!

My Summer Writing Room

I took this photo this afternoon with my iPhone. It is an arbor whose shade is provided by two intertwining wisteria vines. I planted the wisteria when I moved into my house almost two decades ago. The arbor was bare when I planted the wisteria roots at the base of two posts. The roots were house warming presents from my mother. As you can see, the vines have flourished beyond imagination and they provide a shady refuge deep in my back yard, some 60 feet from the back of my house. The arbor will be my summer writing room. I can imagine sitting there for hours on end, typing away on this laptop. And I will celebrate each successful writing session with a glass of chilled white wine.

I spent a small fortune creating my English cottage garden but I have allowed the flower beds to be smothered by invasive weeds. I would begin every summer with a vow to restore these beds to their former glory but like so many of my vows I was unable to keep them.

I sense that this year will be different. I have already cleared three perennial beds and received delivery of four cubic yards of mulch. As I was pulling weeds from the beds, I began to recognize an analogy between my neglected garden and my New Chinese Women Magazine project. Will I be able to reclaim this research project? I have begun to clear my mind of clutter, to make room for new ideas and insight. I am counting on many days of fair weather so that I can write and think, and think and write, in the shady arbor deep in my backyard.

Deja Vu

Last weekend I took time out of my end-of-semester busy work to thumb through Joan Judge’s The Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008). Since I have been translating the biographies of Joan of Arc, Mary Lyon, and Margaret Fuller for my Yan Bin project, I checked out the book’s Index before even looking at the Table of Contents. My heart dropped to my toes when I was done.

I experienced a similar sensation only once before, when I was in graduate school. My dissertation topic had just been approved by my committee, an outcome that remained uncertain until I replaced the chair with another faculty who understood and supported my project. It was a difficult process and I was more than ready to leave the ugliness behind me and move on to the next phase in my graduate career. I was eager to start doing research about a subject that no other history student had tackled before. I was all fired up and ready to go!

I still have vivid memories of what happened next. A fellow student in one of my graduate seminars knocked on my door and announced breathlessly that she had found an article published in a well-regarded journal on exactly the same subject as my dissertation! My head throbbed and my heart raced. I was convinced that my academic career had come to a crashing halt even before it had the chance to begin! How would I be expected to contribute to the scholarship in my field when all I would be left to do was to regurgitate someone else’s work?

I recall this feeling of doom and gloom, and more importantly, my eventual recovery, because I need to remind myself that in the field of humanities, no single person “owns” any subject, primary source, or text. No single person has monopoly over interpretation, analysis, or explanation of any subject, primary source, or text. If I was able to regain my balance and rational senses when I was an unseasoned graduate student, to stick with my original dissertation topic (and eventually wrote what scholars in the field consider to be a groundbreaking book based on my dissertation), surely I can find a way to continue my Yan Bin project in a way that breaks new ground? But do I care any more?

My Very Own Website!

I registered a domain name and rented server space from a web hosting service. The site is empty and I won’t disclose the url just yet; but if all goes according to plan (ha!) I should begin to upload content to the site at the end of May. This site will hold my experimental work. The tug-of-war between heart and mind ends in a stalemate, as it well should. I will continue to write conventional academic essays but I will also indulge in my dream of being a new media author. A heavy weight has been lifted off my shoulders.