AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter 1:1(March 1998)

The New Zealand Directory of Asian Studies and Expertise

A personal note by

Tim Beal
Secretary NZ Asian Studies Society (1995-7)
Centre for Asia/Pacific Law and Business
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600 Wellington
New Zealand

Email: Tim.Beal@vuw.ac.nz

FOUNDATIONS

Although New Zealand is a small country it is not easy for Asianists to keep in touch with each other and to know what research and teaching is going on elsewhere. It is even more difficult for those outside established networks such as the NZ Asian Studies Society. Prospective graduate students searching for appropriate courses or supervisors, media or business trying to identify people with specific expertise, had no single source to refer to.

In 1993 Dr Edwina Palmer, Dr Paul Harrison and colleagues at the University of Canterbury produced the first Directory of Asian Studies in New Zealand for the NZ Asian Studies Society. This was a pioneering work that produced a foundation on which I was able to build when I was asked to do a 2nd edition in 1995.

The first edition was basically a listing, university by university and department by department, of Asianists and their publications. It was thus an excellent source of documentation but it was less useful as a tool for which to search for information. Moreover, as a printed book it was inevitably out of date as soon as it was compiled.

I approached the task from a different direction. I saw the directory as primarily as database with two outputs. The first was a printed book and the second was a Web version. There were two other major differences between the two editions. The 1st edition listed people in what could be clearly identified as 'Asian Studies' departments, or cognate disciplines such as history, in universities. I divided entries into two forms - institutional and individual. The institutional entries were usually constructed by the local member of the Society's Council and gave a short description of Asian Studies at the institution, basic details such as address, central telephone and fax numbers, list of staff specializing in Asia and a list of courses in Asian Studies. The individual entries were derived from questionnaires sent to present, and lapsed, members of the Society. The other difference was that I expanded the definitions and broadened the criteria for inclusion in the directory.

BROADENING THE SCOPE

There are no tidy definitions of Asian Studies specialist and I have not attempted either to find a definition or to impose one. Clearly a person who teaches, say, Japanese language full-time is an Asian Studies specialist. But what of someone who teaches sociology, with a special interest in the sociology of Japan? What if that person has an interest in the sociology of a number of countries, which includes but is not dominated by Japan or other parts of Asia? By now our definition of Asian Studies specialist is becoming so stretched as to lose much rigour. However, that person may in fact know a lot about Japanese society, and that knowledge might be more valuable because of the comparative perspective. Specialising has its drawbacks. It seems to me that what is important is expertise about Asia not the degree of specialising in Asian Studies as such. This is reflected in the new title of the Directory, which I called a directory of Asian Studies and Expertise.

This does not remove the problem of definition and drawing boundaries, but it makes it less critical. It also leads to three other points. The phrase Asian Studies is, to some extent, an interim term. It is a reflection of the fact that Asia is still seen as an exotic newcomer to our educational world. If Asia were paid the attention in our educational system commensurate with its importance - historical, cultural, economic, religious or whatever - and if it were seen to be a natural part of the world, not something revolving fitfully around the Eurocentric axis, then the label Asian Studies would tend to be redundant. Asian Studies, as a distinct and separate entity would tend to wither away or at least become similar in its scope to, say, American Studies.

That brings me to the second point. Asia has traditionally been defined as that area east of the Bosporus and the Urals. In practice, most of the people in this directory focus on East, Southeast and South Asia. Few stray through the Khyber Pass or into Kazakstan. Even so, the geographical area covered is vast, and very diverse. One danger of using a phrase such as Asian Studies is that it implies there is a certain homogeneity to Asia. If there is one thing that this directory brings home it is the diversity of Asia and the diversity of interest of people who are brought together here as Asian Studies specialists.

The third difficulty with the phrase Asian Studies is that it is too narrowly academic. Whilst the NZ Asian Studies Society was by origin, and continues to be, primarily an association of university academics there seems to be no good reason for it, nor the Directory, to be so confined. A person teaching Chinese in a secondary school, handling the Korean desk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, specialising in Japanese law in a legal firm, being responsible for the New Zealand Dairy Board's activities in Malaysia - all these could be bringing considerable experience, knowledge and expertise of Asia to their work. Whilst I did not have the resources actively to encourage such people to provide an entry for the directory, I was conscious that they, and their institutions, do have a valid claim to be included, and this was another reason for adding the word expertise to the title. The proportion of non-academics in the printed edition is quite small but I hope that, in the future, it will rise.

STRUCTURE

Having decided, in intention at least, what should be included the next step was to work out the structure. The starting point was my thinking about the potential user of the book, and how it might be used. I could envisage a wide range of users - a school leaver wanting to know what is offered in the various universities and polytechnics, an academic wanting to track down colleagues with similar or complementary interests, an organisation, media, government, business, wanting to locate people with authoritative knowledge and expertise on some issue relating to Asia. What these users had in common was that they were seeking answers to specific questions and, in most cases, their time and patience was limited. A traditional listing of information by institution, however comprehensive, is often of not much use to such people. Indeed, the more comprehensive the information is, the less useful it may be because the search becomes more onerous. Listing by institutions is necessary as documentation and is useful for verification and expansion of knowledge already held but it is not much use for someone in search of new knowledge.

The solution to the problem of the searching user is to attempt to start from what is known and link that to the information available. I would not claim that the attempt has been entirely successful, and short of extensive testing with users it is mainly a matter of trying to think oneself into the user's shoes. What I have done is to compile indexes and lists that draw on the information in the individual and institutional entries respectively.

LISTS

List of Courses I compiled a list of courses taught at the six universities(out of the seven in New Zealand) for which we had entries. These I grouped by discipline, with cross references to the institution. This was for users who want to find out where specific subjects are taught.

List of Staff This brought together the staff at the six universities, again grouped by discipline or subject area. On occasions that varied from the formal departmental name but the objective is to help the user who wants to find out, for example, who is teaching on Asian history, and where. Further information may then be obtained from the appropriate institutional entry and, in many cases, the individual entry. Not all staff mentioned in the institutional entries submitted an individual one, but a fair proportion did. When we went to press with the printed version we had some 165 individual entries.

The discipline or subject areas by which I have tried to group courses and staff are not very satisfactory. They are often too broad but were all I could manage with the information and time available. This is something to be refined for further editions and the web version.

INDEXES TO THE INDIVIDUAL ENTRIES

These are compiled from the individual entries and are drawn from the keywords that respondents gave. When first formulating the questionnaire I attempted to find a satisfactory and authoritative list of academic disciplines that could be used as keywords but I was unsuccessful. Whether this means I did not look hard enough or whether no such list exists, I do not know. In the absence of a set list I had to let respondents specify their own discipline keywords. I also allowed them to give four 'general' keywords. The difference between the two concepts is shown in the individual entry form which follows this introduction; the basic idea was that discipline keywords would be formal and general - 'labour economics', 'literary criticism', 'philosophy'- and the general ones more free and specific - 'female worker migration', 'marginalisation', 'minorities'. It was a brave attempt at separating the two but it did not work. It was clear when seeing the entries that came in that the distinction was not clear, so I cut my losses and amalgamated the two. The solution for future development of the Directory is, I think, to construct a fixed and fairly limited list of discipline keywords from this edition and allow respondents, as before, to choose four extra keywords.

The entry form also allowed respondents to give four 'geographical' keywords. This was a much tighter construct than discipline but even so there was an element of overlapping. As with discipline/general keywords I have done a bit of tidying up - mainly by putting the country name in front of a subnational entity, such as province or city, where the two came together. Again, the solution is to draw up a fixed, manageable but reasonably specific list of geographical names so that the user knows where to look and the respondent knows which labels are available to identify interests.

Each index, subject and geographical, one is cross-referenced by the other so that the user looking for someone working, for instance, on anthropology of the Himalayas, may find the answer either through the subject index (under 'Anthropology') or in the geographical index (under 'Himalayas'). There is also an extensive amount of cross-referencing. More information about these indexes can be found in the Guide which precedes them.

The indexes are generated from a text file output from the database in which all entries are held. This is mainly an automatic process but a certain amount of manual intervention is necessary when an entry using a new keyword is entered. In which case the editor needs to decide whether to use the new keyword or to substitute one from the existing list.

FROM DATABASE TO FINAL PRODUCT

The database for individual entries originally had 93 fields. These covered name and contact details, qualifications, course taught and five representative publications. Subsequently three fields for URLs have been added.

The output for the section of individual entries was created from a tab delimited text file generated from the database. I wrote two parallel sets of programs. One read the base text file and printed to a file, embedding Rich Text Format codes for formatting. This could then be opened in Word and printed as camera-ready. The alternative program did the same thing, but embedded HTML tags instead. The resulting HTML files was then posted on the server.

I also used HTML codes in the database itself to identify, where appropriate, italicized parts of fields, or special characters such as umlauts. What I did not attempt to do was to go beyond romanisation into vernacular scripts. That is an interesting challenge for the future.

DIRECTORY ON THE WEB

The World Wide Web, allows publishers, in this case NZASIA, to update, revise, correct and improve their product constantly. Whereas the printed version will only have a new edition every two to three years, the web version can be updated monthly, weekly, even daily. How often it is updated depends, of course, on the time, resources and energy of the editorial team, but compared with a book that has to be printed, bound and distributed, fairly frequent updating is feasible. However, a quick glance at some web pages will reveal that many are not updated frequently. Part of the solution to keeping up to date is to automate processes so that the updating is not too onerous. A considerable amount of work has been done on this already because I had been using the web for proof-reading. New entries and amendments can be submitted via an interactive form on the website. More remains to be done but I am at the stage where updating the web version of the individual entries, and reconstructing the indexes, takes about ten minutes. When time is pressing I skip updating the indexes and processing time comes down to a couple of minutes.

Another advantage of the Directory on the Web is that it is not bounded like the printed version. Whereas the book is finite the web has unlimited links to other web pages.. The initial version had a hyper-link to the respondent's email address allowing fairly instantaneous and certainly easy communication. Subsequently I added three fields for URLs - institutional, department and personal - though lack of time has prevented me from advertising that to existing respondents. However the potential is there. A user can search for a particular combination of subject and geographical keyword. The searching is admittedly rudimentary at this stage and I need to add a search engine, but it does work. The index gives a hyper-link to the relevant individual entry. That gives, in addition to the standard information about the respondent, an email link and in some case URLs. They could, and in some cases do, link into personal pages and even full-text publications.

It was commonplace in the past to talk in New Zealand, an in Australia, of the tyranny of distance which kept us a long way, in space and time, from the outside world in its various aspects from markets to research libraries. Now the Web is slaying that tyranny. I like to think that the NZ Directory of Asian Studies and Expertise on the Web is a part of the process, albeit a small one, linking NZ Asianists with our colleagues throughout the world. To find out more about Asian Studies, and Asianists, in New Zealand visit us at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplab/nzasia.htm

URL http://asiandoc.lib.ohio-state.edu/v1n1/dbs/Directory1.html

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