Following up on the ideas in the previous post about how valuable it is to try to understand what “users” of a product/service actually think, and given that I’ve been maintaining this blog for almost a decade without really knowing what readers/visitors think, like, or what they are looking for. . . I have created a one-question/anonymous form that simply asks:
“What is it that you are looking for at Le Minh Khai’s Southeast Asian History Blog? What are you interested in/curious about? What is it that you would like to see more of? Thank you for responding!!”
If you have the time (and it can take as little as a few seconds), please let me know what you think, so that I can do a better job of producing a blog that is of interest.
Thank you very much!!
This Post Has 7 Comments
Since you asked…I discovered your blog a few years ago. I was doing research for a novel about a 19th century woman who travels to China and what is now Vietnam. I was looking for small, telling details, and some historical context on what life might have been like in Hanoi in 1899. It is now finished (hopefully soon to be published) and I am considering a sequel. Happily I re-discovered your blog. I find it fascinating – even the information I cannot use. In fact, it prompted me to make my first trip to Vietnam and Cambodia last year.
I can only imagine that students and scholars feel the same. So, thank you!
Great!! I’m glad you have found the blog helpful, and I’m also happy to hear that this blog had contributed to the tourism industry in Vietnam and Cambodia!! 🙂
O.k., it appears that this comment may have been too long in its original form, since it apparently did not post, so I have cut it down significantly…
(Originally attempted comment 25 April 2020)
First of all, professor, I hope you & yours are surviving the pandemic in good health and without inordinate difficulty of any kind; the same goes for anyone else who may read this…
Well, I was actually looking for something you wrote a while back about the late Benedict Anderson’s absolutely brilliant & justly renowned ‘Imagined Communities’, which I recently (somewhat belatedly, I know…) read for the first time. Given that I haven’t been able to find the post I was looking for, it occurred to me that perhaps your adding a search engine would be useful. I have no idea what that would entail technically, but it would definitely make things easier if it were possible.
As far as what I’m looking for in your blog, it’s quite simple: put bluntly, for a practically uneducated ghetto privat-dozent manqué like myself it is an incredible privilege to have this sort of entrée to the academic sphere even as an observer, and the occasional opportunity to participate in the discussion is simply an extra spoonful of schlag on the pastry. This is especially true given the fact that the only university within easy reach here in Detroit (Wayne State University) has had a complete prohibition on auditing classes since at least the late 1990s (I don’t know for certain, but I’ve been told it is much the same elsewhere). As I’m sure you are aware, for those of us who “tote that box & lift that bale” for our living, higher education is essentially an unattainable luxury- but at least books are inexpensive! More to the point, your blog and the community that you have encouraged to develop around it are not only freely accessible but consequently a practically unique interface connecting working professional scholars such as yourself not only with others “inside” academia (like graduate students, etc.) but also those of us who are for various & sundry reasons “outside” academia. Equally important is the fact that this community is truly global in scope- after all, as human beings we are inescapably limited by time and distance, even leaving aside language, with regard to not only social interaction but books and other media as well! So keep on going the way you have been- I know I am not the only one who is extremely appreciative of your efforts.
Getting back to what I mentioned above, i.e. ‘Imagined Communities’, which in this particular instance was the impetus for my visiting LMK once again, the very best thing about that work (from my perspective, anyway) was actually a mistake! For reasons that will no doubt be obvious, I don’t think it was Professor Anderson who made the mistake- the edition I have is the 1991 revised edition, and I suspect the error was most likely made by an editor or proofreader. The error is in the only footnote on page 117, in which Eduard Douwes Dekker (a.k.a. Multatuli) is described as “a Eurasian”. I am certainly no expert on so-called “classic literature” or the history of the novel as a literary form; nor am I particularly knowledgeable about the history of the Netherlands, Netherlands East Indies or Indonesia, except for what little I’ve picked up while reading about the history of Europe and South East Asia generally. I had, however, seen a photograph of Multatuli (and had somehow picked up a vague précis of his career), so I was quite certain he had not been Eurasian. You have most likely already guessed where this is going- I was unfamiliar with the life and career of Multatuli’s grand-nephew, Ernest François Eugène Douwes Dekker (a.k.a. Danudirja Setiabudi), but evidently he, rather than Multatuli, was supposed to be the individual to whom the footnote referred. When I ran his name through a couple of search engines, E.F.E. Douwes Dekker immediately seemed to be a far more fascinating individual than his somewhat better-known grand-uncle. Happily, it turns out that there is an enormous (800+ pages!) recent English-language scholarly biography of Douwes Dekker/Setiabudi, ‘The Lion and the Gadfly: Dutch Colonialism and the Spirit of E.F.E. Douwes Dekker’ (2007), by the late Dr. Paul W. van der Veur, Professor Emeritus of political science at Ohio University (Dr. van der Veur, who received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1955, was the founding director of the Southeast Asia Program at Ohio University, which he led from 1967 to 1991). Even better, I found an affordable N.O.S. copy of the book, which I received in the mail a few days ago & can hardly wait to read!
21 June 2020
Update: 75+ pages into the book, it is already apparent that it is going to be very, very good!
Thanks for the kind words!! And yes, I’m aware that the search function is not working on this site. I need to get around to figuring out how to get it to work. Meanwhile, what I do when I want to find things is to just google for “leminhkhai + search terms.”
Thanks also for the recommendation of The Lion and the Gadfly. I haven’t read it, but it looks very interesting.
As for Imagined Communities, that was a very influential book when I was in graduate school in the 1990s, and I remember finding it very interesting. I assigned it a few times in graduate seminars in the 2000s and remember some students complaining that it was difficult to understand. I didn’t remember that; perhaps because by comparison with some of the postmodern works that we graduate students had to read in the 1990s (Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha) it was not as jargon-filled. However, I was looking at it more recently and got annoyed at how little effort Anderson made to communicate with his readers. There are passages of that book that are essentially written from the assumption that the reader should share the same knowledge that he obtained at Eton College and Cambridge in the early 1950s when he was studying the classics. When I first read it, I think I must have assumed that it was just “erudite” and I didn’t know enough. Now, however, I see erudition mixed with an elitist disinterest in communicating with anyone beyond the ivory tower. So if you’ve managed to get through it, good job! But if you have not, no worries as you probably already have the gist of it.
Professor- this was the remaining portion of the above comment; it was tacked on because I couldn’t think of a more appropriate place to put it. As that is still true, I am posting it here anyway, in the hope that you and/or others among your readers may find this information useful…
(Originally attempted comment 25 April 2020)
I realise this comment is already quite lengthy, not to mention all over the place in terms of content, but I would like to make two more (related) points. First, I’ve most likely already mentioned this at some point, but I would encourage not only you, professor, but also anyone else reading this who is a published author, to take advantage of the resources available to authors through the Goodreads.com platform. It is both free and easy to do so, and I promise you it will be well worth the relatively small measure of time & effort required. Those of us who have been active in that community during the past 10+ years have participated in the creation of an amazing resource as well as a pleasant online community for anyone who loves books.
This brings me to my final point- toward the end of last year, I was attempting to find information on one of the Cornell Studies on Southeast Asia Series monographs, and found it a bit difficult due to the fact that there was apparently no discrete list of the series anywhere online. In addition, the SEAP & CUP websites are not the most user-friendly I’ve ever encountered, which is apparently not uncommon for higher-education related websites. Luckily, Goodreads provides a series-listing mechanism, so I decided to rectify that situation, and you can find the list here: (https://www.goodreads.com/series/55967-studies-on-southeast-asia)
I added No. 28 yesterday, so the only one still missing is No. 4; if anyone knows the title or author of that monograph, please let me know! While I was at it, I listed the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Series monographs, which you will find here: (https://www.goodreads.com/series/256934-cornell-university-southeast-asia-program)
Since there are so few of them, I figured I might as well also list the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Translation Series, which you will find here: (https://www.goodreads.com/series/288116-cornell-university-southeast-asia-program-translation-series)
During the last few weeks, since we are under a fairly strict quarantine regime here in Michigan at the moment and I consequently have more time at my disposal than is normally the case, I decided to attempt the same thing for the Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph Series. This one is still a work in progress, but so far I have 60 out of 67 works listed; you will find the series here: (https://www.goodreads.com/series/287966-yale-university-southeast-asia-studies-monograph-series)
Eventually I hope to complete listings for the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Data Paper Series as well, but given that the series is older (1950s & 1960s) and contains more than 100 works, it will no doubt take a while. For now, you can find the series here: (https://www.goodreads.com/series/288133-cornell-university-southeast-asia-program-data-paper)
Any help with those last two would be very much appreciated; “librarian” privileges are not difficult to get on Goodreads, and are fairly easy to use as well…
1 May 2020
Update: since I have been prevented from posting this comment in a timely fashion due to being repeatedly “Blocked as a suspected bot”, over the past several days I have been able to complete the listings for all 119 books in the Cornell Data Paper series. I have been unable to find cover scans for several of those listed, however, so if anyone has copies of any of them, please either add them yourself or send a scan/photo of the front cover to me at (DimestoreLiam@live.com) so I may do so…
Thanks for this promotion of Goodreads. Yes, I have to admit that I’ve never paid much attention to it. When you Google a book title, usually Amazon comes up first, and I click on that link. That said, I have noticed more recently things like what you mention here: lists of books in series, etc. That made me aware that some people are very actively involved. but I hadn’t thought more about that.
A couple of questions: 1) It is just for books, correct? 2) Any sense of what the demographic that uses Goodreads is like (or if it is possible to identify it)?
It is just for books, although that includes some works more properly termed pamphlets (like Hồ Chí Minh’s ‘Le Procès De La Colonisation Française’ or Sutan Sjahrir’s ‘Onze Strijd’) as well as some of the extremely short (15-20 pages) early works in the SEAP Data Paper Series. In a nutshell, it is a book cataloguing & listing tool with reviews, and also an optional social-networking capability. Among the many ways the platform can be used is linking a GR profile page to a blog. As a published author, you automatically have a profile which lists your books, and in your specific case your profile has already been linked to your blog.
One of the many ways I personally use Goodreads is to keep track of my personal library. Because at this point I cannot always remember each of the more than 500 works I have in the “Indo-China” section (a situation exacerbated by the fact that most of my books are still in boxes at the moment), this aspect is quite useful for me. For example, I have somehow ended up with two copies of Langer & Zasloff’s ‘North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao’; if I had run the ISBN, title or authors through the GR search engine, I could have avoided purchasing the unneeded extra copy.
One of the recurring themes in your blog posts has been the impact of the “digital revolution” on not only pedagogy but worldwide society generally, “how dramatically technology is transforming our lives, and about how the professional world I inhabit (academia/the Humanities/area studies) does not seem to be adapting to these changes all that well” and “what this means for communication, web design, the building of online communities, etc.”; this is the reason I have suggested that you might find some utility in the Goodreads platform. If nothing else, it can function simply as one more point of entry to your blog. Just for the record, I have no financial or other incentive to do this. Like the overwhelming majority of “Goodreads Librarians” I do this work on a volunteer basis because I believe that GR is a useful tool for anyone who reads, for any reason. Not only myself but many thousands of others around the world have put in an enormous amount of work listing books and correcting listings as necessary, precisely so that the database would actually be useful for purposes of scholarship. Because the listings are user generated, we have much more extensive and accurate information than a commercial website like Amazon (Amazon actually purchased GR several years ago, but at this point they mostly leave us alone).
As far as the user demographics are concerned, I don’t have concrete numbers. There may be tools for this available to authors who take control of their profiles, but I don’t know for certain. After I post this, I will send you the “Goodreads Author invitation” e-mail, which should give you more information. And unless you have more questions, I promise I’ll shut up about it after this!