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H-ASIA ************************* From: mlevine@lcsc.edu H-Asia Roundtable: "H-Asia: The First Ten Years and the Next Ten Years" Ed. Note: I am giving a three part report here on the recent H-ASIA Roundtable at AAS. This is a long post, but the idea is to begin a dialogue with subscribers. PLEASE do respond with your reactions and ideas. MAL Roundtable Summary/Next Steps - A Discussion I. Roundtable - Issues & Ideas On March 6, we had a Roundtable and Reception to celebrate the first 10 years of H-ASIA and to explore what directions can be taken for the next phase of the discussion network. First, we must thank Mark Kornbluh and the H-NET organization for providing the breakfast reception. Secondly, on behalf of all H- Asia editors we want to thank all of those who turned up at 7:00 am in the morning, (we had more between 30-40 people) and a very special debt of gratitude for the thoughtful and serious suggestions from our panelists, who spoke in the following order:Nixi Cura, Union College, Vincent Pollard, University of Hawai'i, Tom Grunfeld, SUNY Empire State College, Mark Seldon, SUNY-Binghamton. The panelists all had high praise for H-Asia as a community of Asia scholars, as an arena to discuss questions, issues, as well as announcements. The majority of time, however, was given to suggestions on areas that could use improvement. The following are some of the areas discussed: It was mentioned that the posts widely range in geography, discipline, and subject area. Although this can be construed as a strength, it also leads to several messages a day in an inbox, and given the amount of email that inundates us all, should we lesson the amount of posts or change the configuration of how we post messages? It was suggested that there was a sense of fragmentation due to this range of posts and subscribers are spending more time deleting messages than reading them. It was observed that most of the editors are senior or independent scholars, and that junior scholars and graduate students face a paradox in terms of H-Asia involvement. The promotion and tenure as well as the hiring process does not esteem electronic scholarly activity as it should. So what is the goal of their participation in H-NET? How can graduate students be included more in the H-NET network? How can junior scholars be included and yet enhance their professional advancement? How can we reach out to more of our Asian colleagues, since our discussion network is H-Asia? Although we have scholars in all Asian countries who subscribe, is there more that we can do to give a direct connection with them? How can we enhance the content of H-Asia? One of the most popular threads were solicited "in-the-field" commentaries. Should we increase this kind of post with a series of guest editors? What other ways can we deepen content areas? Should we increase our Web activities in H-Asia? Would we be duplicating other efforts? Who would do the Web master work? Are we publishing enough book reviews? (See next paragraph). Some points that the editors raised were that the increase in spam has limited their time to deal with generating some threads. Since all labor is donated and donated daily, it is not always easy to do more without more people pitching in to the endeavor. For example, on the book reviews, it is sometimes difficult to get people who say yes to deliver the reviews (as is the case in print reviews). II. Next Steps After some discussion, the editors of H-Asia would like to suggest the following: 1. Generate/publish a Bi-annual Tip Sheet on time saving issues such as Digest, Setting subscriptions for times such as vacations, stating affiliations, and so on. 2. Recruit more editors, including a Web editor, and a special graduate student editor to generate discussion of issues affecting grad students in Asian study areas. We did recently ask for editor volunteers and Frank Conlon, who has had quite a bit of travel on his plate, is organizing some nominations. We still will need a committed Web editor and a Graduate student issues editor. 3. Recruit guest editors to develop threads such as Asian Elections, Special discussions of scholarly trends; Other areas that might be good to develop as threads are: *Special Asian language publication reviews *Engage more scholars and graduate students in Asia 4. Work alongside H-NET and other online scholarly organizations to create promotion/tenure guidelines for online scholarship. 5. Possible collaborations among ourselves and with related H- NET Discussion Networks in online projects that we might want to develop as an online community. Given the breadth of our membership, could H-ASIA foster collaboration among Affiliated Societies? 6. We need to reconstitute our Advisory Board. Although the Advisory Boards are not engaged in day to day functions, the growing issues in the electronic scholarly world (contested posts, IPR issues) require that we pay more attention to this issue. III. A Surprise in Looking Back As I was preparing this summary and suggestions, I inadvertently opened up a file from 1997 that had a several page survey I wanted to post on H-ASIA, which interestingly reflected many of these issues we need to discuss. I won't post all the survey/ideas, but some of them are similar and expand our discussion, so I'll end with some of them. Interestingly some of these ideas have been used by other lists or online organizations and we do not need to duplicate them. For example, H-NET has a spectacular Job Guide, Announcements, and has developed an Editors Directory and other Directories are under development. We have the WWW Monitor reports that reviews Web sites in the field, and other online and national groups who perform great services and have Web sites with great information. *Excerpts* from Survey and Web Expansion Ideas (1997): *Current H-Asia Posts - Content (survey) 1. Are the contents of H-Asia posts redundant over time? If so, how would you suggest we deal with this? Do you think this has to do with the length of time you have been subscribed? 2. Do you value from the interdisciplinary and interregional subject matter posted on H-Asia? Is it desirable to encourage more comparative discussions? 3. Would you like to see more posts in the areas of: Book Reviews Bibliographies Regular columns Politically oriented debates, such as Human Rights, Internal Politics Member News *Areas of Web Expansion (ideas) Possible areas of expansion could include: 1. Area of Communications A Worldwide Email and URL Directory of Asianists with a search engine Temporary Directory for those on sabbatical or short research trips A Directory of Asian Programs 2. Education and Asian Studies Expand the syllabi section Textbook Reviews Video and Film Reviews Interactive Discussion Threads on Relevant Asian-related topics that can be accessed by courses worldwide (materials and time- lines announced ahead of time) - for use by students Other materials - For example, short units on the Chinese New Year, the Japanese haiku, short language lessons, that can be downloaded or utilized in computer classrooms as an outreach service 3. Languages Development Information about learning Asian languages 4. Computers and Asia Information about computer issues and Asianist concerns such as browsers and Asian language word processing. Updates on Internet access to Asian countries Other technical questions 5. Research Development Descriptions about Archives, Research facilities and library collections Create databases on specific research areas that can help researchers before they go to a research collection Original databases so that we can start sharing our data and enhance the overall ability to make informed analysis 6. Outreach areas Development, as mentioned above of some small units for K-12 teachers. Development of chat rooms for Higher Education students. ********************************************** To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: h-asia@h-net.msu.edu To unsubscribe send your message to: listserv@h-net.msu.edu with the message: unsub h-asia H-Asia Web Site: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~asia/
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