Summer writing project (Day Forty-Three, I think)

I spent today working on my presentation for next week. Got some slides revised, but I need to figure out if my whole presentation will fit within the 20-minute time limit. Guess I need to finish my script and try it out. I can always take out an example or two, I suppose.

I realized the other day that I had talked about a very similar topic all the way back in May of 1999. Similar problems that we have today with the internet (back then, though, we called it the "Internet"). The more things change, ...

Summer Non-writing Project (Day Forty-Two)

I managed to make three screencasts for my summer class today, so I guess I achieved something. My videos are not at all professional, but at least I've graduated to the point where I can edit out my "ummms" and coughs (well, most of my "ummms"). I've seen some colleagues' and friends' videos, and I can only be depressed about my own. But, as I told one of my friends, not depressed enough to want to do better(!). Actually, I guess my videos aren't that terrible. The only thing students have complained about regarding the videos is that some of them are too long (around 20 minutes sometimes).  

In addition to working on my course, I took a drive this evening. Saw this interesting cloud formation. (It didn't rain, though.)

Summer writing project (Day Forty-One)

I did some thinking about my topic and paper today, but mainly I was working on my course materials for the class I'll be teaching next week (!).

I also "attended" a webinar on Taiwan Studies, "The State of Taiwan Studies: A Roundtable Discussion on Methods and Directions," run by the Fairbank Center. The panelists were:

• Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
• Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University
• Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine

The discussant (who actually didn't get a chance to say a lot, but raised an important question for the panelists), was Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

There was a big emphasis among the speakers on Taiwan's geopolitical relations and status and the importance of studying Taiwan in terms of these geopolitical considerations. As Lawrence Yang put it (and this might not be an exact quote, but pretty close): Taiwan can be seen as "both an outcome of geopolitical mediation among empires or Taiwan itself as a medium by which powers create geopolitical mapping." 

The question that Professor Hsu brought up at the end concerned how China should be situated in Taiwan Studies. This is an interesting question (and potentially, the question itself was even more interesting than the answers themselves), and it's something that probably a lot of people studying Taiwan wrestle with. (Prof. Nachman mentioned this, too.) Both this question and the emphasis on geopolitics have confirmed to me that I've got a good idea for this paper that I'm writing. (Though they also remind me that I have to make sure I actually make a clear argument in the paper!)

Here's the YouTube video of the panel. 

Summer writing project (Day Forty)

Been mostly working on my presentation today (among other things). Went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking into an example regarding an essay from a paper mill that a student had put in their preliminary bibliography. Does being from a paper mill make an essay a bad source for an undergraduate research paper? (Well, it's not the best source, but what kind of bad source is it? For instance, how does it compare with a Wikipedia article as a not-ideal source? I have my ideas, but what do you think?)

Anyway, all that led me to read the Wikipedia article about essay mills and eventually to my copy of Edward Waldo Emerson's Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (1888, 1916), in which Emerson the younger reveals that his father and uncle were part of an informal essay mill when they were in college in the early 1800s:

If the Emersons could not get enough writing to do in the ordinary course of work they sometimes took contracts outside. An anecdote told me of [Uncle] Edward by his classmate shows how the brothers eked out their finances.

Mr. John C. Park says: --

"I and some others used to make a little money by writing themes for those who found it harder. The way we used to do was to write out any ideas which occurred to us bearing on the subject, and then, having cut the paper into scraps, to issue it to the various buyers to use in their themes, condensing and improving all the best of it for our own. Well, one morning, ----, your Uncle Edward's chum, came out and stood on Hollis steps and called out, 'Look here, fellows! I've got something to show you. I want you to listen to this and tell me if it's worth fifty cents,' and proceeded to read what Emerson had written for him. You see he had come down in his style to make it possible for the professor to believe that the theme could have emanated from ----, and in his endeavors to do so had written so humbly that ---- himself doubted if it were worth half a dollar." (26)

Early essay mills... Wonder if they were water-powered...

[Update, June 27, 2021: Yikes! I just did a Google Scholar search for an essay mill, UKEssays.com, and found that papers from that site are actually cited in some scholarly articles!?]

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Nine)

After my meeting this afternoon, I spent most of my time reading Chang and Holt and working on my course materials for the upcoming course. In other words, nothing exciting going on here.  

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Eight)

Managed to write a sentence on my paper today--and it was mainly a quotation. Ah well. Tomorrow I have a meeting, but I might also have some time to work on the paper.

I spent most of the day designing my Canvas site for my Summer 2 course. This is the second time I've taught this particular course online, but the last time was my first time using Canvas, so my design of assignments and modules wasn't very good. Hopefully my new approach will be able to last awhile. 

The quotation in my sentence, by the way, was from Chang and Holt. I've only gotten through a couple of chapters, but thus far I'm finding the book informative and useful for my project. My only complaints are that sometimes the translations read a bit awkwardly and that some of the Chinese-language sources are not very helpfully cited in the bibliography. For an instance of the latter, here's a typical citation for a newspaper article from 聯合報:

Tang, X.-m. (2008, September 25). What era is it now! Anti-communism and recovering nation saunter into history. Retrieved from United Daily News, online, available at: www.udndata.com

Since they were unable to give a URL that would take readers directly to the article (which sometimes happens), it would be good to give the title in Chinese as well as English, so that readers could find the article more easily. I'm guessing that the first part of the headline is something like, 這是什麼時代！But the title in Chinese characters or pinyin would help. The odd thing is that sometimes they do provide pinyin for some titles. 

Anyway, that's enough complaining for the day. As I say, I've gotten a lot out of the book so far.

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Seven)

Not much to say for today. I spent most of my time working on my online materials for the summer course I'll be teaching in July. Will try to do some work on the paper tomorrow, though I also have to work on that presentation. Multitasking!

An exhibit for Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing classes?

This ad for Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Dr. Chris Jones has been blowing up Twitter (is that how the young people say it?).

I'm thinking about using it in my Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing course because of its interdisciplinary connections (how he combines faith and science in his discussion of time, for instance, and how he brings in his multiple degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, and urban planning). Also because of how his personal history is combined with the history of the United States. I don't have time to tease out all of the fascinating connections he's bringing into this ad right now, but there are a lot of them! Maybe my readers can point some out in the comments?

(h/t)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Six)

Today I got up at 2:30 in the morning, thus entirely throwing off my sleeping schedule for the foreseeable future. I had an idea to take another look at an "exhibit" source I had quoted and discussed in my draft, and I found that there was a bit more that I could usefully say about that source. I was also able to attach that source to the book I'm currently reading (Chang and Holt). So I knocked out a couple of paragraphs on that before breakfast. 

Since then, between naps, I have been thinking about whether I should bring into this discussion a conference paper that I wrote about 20 years ago. (The only problem is that someone cited my conference paper in his book, so now I'm not sure if I should cite him citing me!) What I have in it would complicate what I'm talking about in the current paper, but it might do so in a useful way. We'll see...

I also did a bit of thinking and writing and assembling of documents for my July conference presentation. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to be talking about, but I need to get the presentation organized.

Finally, I came across a thread from Anicca Harriot on Twitter about some citation-related tools that I hadn't seen before. 

• Connected Papers, which maps out the network of a particular academic work, its academic sources, and the academic publications that cite it
• Scite, which analyzes how academic works are used in the publications that cite them (uses a slightly different set of terms than "BEAM" [see "exhibit" link above])

I tried two of them on an older article (*sigh* when does an article from 1996 get classified as "older"?) and came up with some interesting results. For the article, Yameng Liu's "To Capture the Essence of Chinese Rhetoric: An Anatomy of a Paradigm in Comparative Rhetoric," I got these results:

• From Connected Papers, I got this cool map. (Hope the link works!)
• From Scite, I got some results, but I haven't set up an account yet to see what they actually are. Looks like they could be interesting, though.

Anyway, another couple of tools to play with (and perhaps show to students in my Advanced Writing classes when we're working on literature reviews. (I've had mixed results when showing them the Web of Knowledge; these look like they might be more user-friendly.) I want to go back to Anicca's thread to look at the other tools she's introducing. Always love it when generous scholars share the tools they're using with the rest of us! Thanks, Anicca! You're a blessing!

Tomorrow is today! (Or, rather, it was today) (Day Thirty-Five)

Well, it didn't quite go as I expected. Woke up at 5:00, but ended up spending hours on other business that needed to get done. I did spend some time thinking about how I've sort of lost my way on my project and how I can find my way back. Ended up reading some more in one of the books I'm using as a source and thinking about how I could use it. And, overall, thinking about why I'm doing this. In the end, I think I'll keep working on it and see what I can do instead of giving up (again). So, onward and upward!

Summer's running out of steam project (Day Thirty-Four)

So as I mentioned yesterday, I took my son to his kindergarten graduation today. He's been doing remote learning this year. Today they had all the remote classes show up for an outdoor graduation, though the "ceremony" was held within the individual classes. But there were a lot of people there, especially for someone who saw (some of) his classmates only once before. I think we both ended up with sensory overload as a result, and took long naps after coming home. (I'm guessing this does not bode well for when I have to go back to teach on campus in the fall. By the end of the first day, you'll probably be able to find me curled up in a fetal position on the floor of my office...)

Anyway, that's all to say that I didn't work on my writing project today. But there's always tomorrow! (Until there isn't.)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Three)

I printed out my draft today to take a look at it overall. Wendy Belcher recommends doing this in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Particularly when you're trying to make sure that your argument is coming through, you should put the whole paper in front of you to figure out if what you're saying is clearly supporting your argument (and that you make it clear how your evidence supports your argument). Mine needs some work on that, I fear... 

More work on that tomorrow, after I attend my son's kindergarten graduation...

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Two): Looking for old Guoyu textbooks

Saw a guy on Twitter say that he read a bunch of articles to write a footnote that he'll probably end up deleting, and I thought, "I need to compete with this." So today I've been on that Taiwan eBook website looking for elementary school 國語 (Mandarin) textbooks. I've found a few, but not what I'm looking for (I'm mainly interested in first-grade texts to compare with that one I found a few days ago).

I found these books, though (among others):

• 初級小學適用國語第八冊 (for fourth grade, published Nov. 1946)
• Lesson One is "我們是中國的少年" (We are Chinese youth)
• Lesson Two is "怎樣做新台灣的少年" (How to be a new Taiwanese youth)
• After some chapters on Koxinga and Taiwan, there's this amazing lesson called "巷戰" (which I'd translate as "urban warfare"). I was reading it to my wife, and she couldn't believe how violent it was, especially for a fourth-grade textbook. Here are some samples: "Everyone is both nervous and excited; they see their dear commanders and brothers [comrades] one by one injured or killed, but they are not sad; they are full of passion [hot blood] to take revenge for their dead." Then there's stuff about a soldier blowing up the enemy but accidentally killing one of his comrades, which makes him both excited to have killed the enemy and sad to lose his friend. 
• 高級小學國語課本第二冊 (for fifth grade, published 1949)
• This has some interesting lessons about Chongqing and Wuhan (even though this is a book for students in Taiwan, it appears they're trying to make students care about the mainland). Also there's a lesson about 伊資 (who turns out to be James Eads), a self-taught engineer who built the first bridge across the Mississippi. The textbook's introduction mentions that they want to interest students in engineering among other things. (In keeping with the Three People's Principles, of course.)
• 初小國語教科書第二冊 (for second grade, 1938)--this text was actually for students in China, so I won't spend as much time on it right now)
• 初小國語教科書. v.1 (I'll look at this later, too)

I've also Googled around looking for some, but evidently I haven't found the right combination of keywords to get what I want. Did find this interesting blogpost: "那些年我們讀的教科書──紀台灣二次政黨輪替." Gotta keep an eye on this blog--unlike the last one I found, this one seems alive still. 

If anyone knows where I can find some books from a bit later--like the 1950s, I'd be grateful!

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-One)

Did make a small amount of progress on my paper today, but I do need to pick up speed if I'm going to finish a draft of this by the end of the month (or the end of the summer?!). Also sent an email explaining my topic for the conference presentation that I'll be doing next month, so I consider that part of my writing. (See Concurrent Session 5 on July 7 for the summary of our panel's topic.) Also had a small family medical issue today that took us away from home for a while. That's taken care of now, more or less.

Back to work tomorrow? I hope!

Next on my reading list

I'm sure my dear reader is dying to know which book I'm going to read now that I've finished A Son of Taiwan. I'm still working on John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, but that's sort of leisure reading. (Sorry, Professor Shepherd!) I've decided to read Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, by Hui-Ching Chang and Richard Holt (Routledge, 2014). I've read some of it before but never the whole book. 

And as I mentioned in a previous post, the book is notable (to me, anyway) for being a rhetorical study that is published in a Routledge series on Taiwan rather than rhetoric or communication. I was looking to see if Stephen Hartnett had cited it, and it appears he doesn't, which is odd since his book is also about the rhetoric of China-Taiwan(-US) relations. I would think that Chang and Holt's book would be quite relevant. One possible reason that it slipped through his radar is that, from what I can tell, the book has never been reviewed in any communications-related (or any other) journals. (I'm judging this from a search of my library database. If anyone can find any reviews of this book in a scholarly journal, please correct me.) I wonder why this book doesn't seem to have been reviewed. It also has been cited only 25 times, according to Google Scholar. Could it have fallen through the disciplinary cracks? 

(By the way, I really wish A World of Turmoil had a bibliography--it was very hard to check through its endnotes to see if Chang and Holt had been cited. Maybe in a future printing/edition?)

Summer reading and reflecting (Day Thirty)

For various reasons, I felt kind of down today--I'm getting frustrated with my writing project, and I was also sad to find out that a colleague was resigning. So I mostly did some reading today (except for when I was having a meeting with another colleague about how we are going to revise a course--that went well). I read four stories in A Son of Taiwan, one of the books I mentioned yesterday. Some of them deal with men who have come back after getting out of prison for political "crimes," and others appear to be more metaphorical takes on the White Terror period. One thing that I got from reading these stories (like Li Ang's "Auntie Tiger") was the feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time. As Li Ang writes in one place,

"It was an era of mad people and beggars. We did not witness the massacre, we did not see piled bodies or bloodstains, and even Third Uncle seldom passed on his tales. Our fear came from having been taught that one could not believe even what one witnessed, for there had to be a conspiracy by enemy spies." (130)

Li uses this idea to describe various rumors that spread about the Taiwanese Communist Xie Xuehong, who tried to lead a rebellion against the KMT in the wake of the 228 Massacres. The rumors (and Li's story) tie her strength and leadership--and mysteriousness--to her sexuality, which is also depicted as strong yet mysterious. As this is a work of fiction, however, I feel I have to read a biography to find out what is true about Xie. I have a biography written by Chen Fangming, but I haven't had time to read it yet. In the meantime, I can read the article by Ya-chen Chen about her that was listed in the Wikipedia references. It's about Li Ang's portrayal of Xie. 

One thing I wish the editors would have done with the book (besides proofreading it a bit better) was expand the introduction. I noticed that that they didn't include any publication dates for the stories, for instance. I'd like more information about the stories, particularly Ye Shitao's, which appears to be extracts from a longer work and is a little hard to follow. 

Two more stories to finish. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on my paper, too.

[Update, 6/12/21: I finished the book last night. A correction: The publication year for one of the stories, Lee Yu's "Nocturnal Strings," was given (1986).] 

Summer writing reading book-buying project (Day Twenty-Nine): New books in the former native speaker's library

A few more books have been added to my collection, which may come in handy as I do my writing. Two of them are from the "Literature from Taiwan Series," that is published by Cambria Press in collaboration with the National Human Rights Museum, National Taiwan Normal University, and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. (I want to visit those two museums once I get a chance to go back to Taiwan.) 

• A Son of Taiwan: Stories of Government Atrocity, ed. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin (2021)
• Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror, ed. Ian Rowen (2021)

These are obviously collections of short stories written during or reflecting on the White Terror period. 

The third book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is a collection of essays by some major figures in and scholars of contemporary Taiwan:

• Taiwan's Struggle: Voices of the Taiwanese, ed. Shyu-tu Lee and Jack F. Williams (2014)

Hopefully I'll be able to dip into some of these books as I work on a couple of projects during the next few weeks before I have to start teaching again in July.

Summer writing reading project (Days Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight): Elegy of Sweet Potatoes

Let's just admit it. My mind is more on reading than it is on writing. Especially when I keep getting good books in the mail. Tuesday (Day Twenty-Seven) I got a copy of Tehpen Tsai's Elegy of Sweet Potatoes in the mail. I finished reading it today (Day Twenty-Eight). I think the last time I read a book this quickly was when I read A Pail of Oysters about 15 years ago. I think this book is about twice as long as Oysters, but like the former, it's highly readable and engaging. 

Shortly into the book I realized that "sweet potatoes" (plural) must refer to all of the young Taiwanese men who were caught up in the Chinese Nationalist Party's sweep of Communists, rebels, people with "wrong" thoughts, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and people who associated with the wrong people (who, in some cases, implicated them in illegal activities or thought crimes in order to extend their own lives). I realized that while Tehpen Tsai (lightly fictionalized as Youde Tsai) is the main character through whose eyes we see part of the White Terror period in 1950s Taiwan, the book is really about the "sweet potatoes" (again, plural), whose lives were for the most part destroyed by the KMT. It's also about their families who, while mostly staying in the background, show through in some scenes (such as at the beginning and end of the book when we see Tsai's family's reaction to his arrest and return), in the letters that the prisoners share with each other, and in the conversations the prisoners have about their families. One prisoner suggests that if he is ever sentenced, he will divorce his wife if the sentence is longer than 10 years so that she and their child can have a better life. Tsai's family shows up in some photographs, as well--the look of joy on the face of his wife, Panto, in the last photograph is particularly moving. 

The book is packed with details and people (I need a list of characters to help keep me straight, especially since some characters are called by more than one name). Although it's not an academic history, you get what feels like a first-hand experience of what it was like to be be imprisoned during the White Terror. (The pecking order for where the prisoners in the overcrowded cells--the newest prisoner usually had to stand next to the toilet--reminded me of Wang Wenqing's (王文清) story, 「獄中獄外的人生」published in 《秋蟬的悲鳴:白色恐怖受難文集》.) I was surprised by how much the prisoners were able to talk to each other in some of the prisons and by the fact that they were able to sing Japanese and even Communist songs while their fellow prisoners were being taken away to be executed.

An informative essay by Michael Cannings about the life of Tehpen Tsai also needs to be read to get a more complete understanding of Tsai and his story. It gives background to the historical period and more details about Tsai's life that are only touched upon in the book--particularly his life post-imprisonment. 

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Six)

I did some writing over the weekend, which led me to think about some things that I needed to read, so today has been a note-taking day. Maybe I'll get back to doing some writing tomorrow (or I might continue note-taking--we'll see). Sometimes you write yourself to a point where you think, I need to find out more about how what I'm talking about relates to other parts of my discipline, and then you find out that someone has written something relevant that seems totally alien to your focus. That's what has happened to me!

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Five)

I might as well start calling this "Summer Reading Project." I've done a lot more reading lately than writing. So far I've read up to the end of the Dutch era in John Shepherd's book, but I've got a ways to go  yet (this is a long book, in case you haven't seen it!). It's packed with information, too. Most of it isn't relevant to my current project, but it's giving me a lot of background on what Taiwan was like in the seventeenth century. 

Guess I'll try tomorrow to do some writing, or maybe I'll do a little now (25 minutes, perhaps?). 

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Four); Lessons from an old Mandarin textbook for Taiwan

Well, at this rate I'm not going to get this paper done any time soon. Today I spent more time reading than writing. (OK, so that's an understatement. These are actually the first four sentences I've written today!) 😭

On the bright side, this evening I came across a new website (via Twitter) that contains a lot of digitized historical books from Taiwan: it's called the Taiwan eBook Database, and it's from the National Central Library in Taiwan. So far it contains over 32,000 books from 1900-1950 or so, and it's free, so that's a good thing! It doesn't seem possible to download the ebooks, but you can view them online.

Given my interests, I was digging around for some Guoyu textbooks and came across one from undated book entitled 《臺灣暫用小學國語課本甲編》 (roughly, Temporary Elementary Mandarin Textbook for Taiwan, First Edition). The first couple of lessons are interesting:

第一課  臺灣人                            

Lesson One: Taiwanese

我是臺灣人                           

I am Taiwanese

你是臺灣人                 

 You are Taiwanese

他是臺灣人 

He is Taiwanese

我們都是臺灣人 

We are all Taiwanese

第二課  中國人 

Lesson Two: Chinese

我們的祖宗  是福建人  是廣東人 

Our ancestors are Fujianese. are Cantonese

福建人  廣東人  臺灣人  都是中國人 

Fujianese. Cantonese Taiwanese all are Chinese 

They kind of threw me off with the first unit, but then they were back to my expectations with Unit 2. Later on, in Unit 16, they get to 中華民國 and tell us that everyone has a name, and schools have their names too, and so do nations. 

爸爸說  我們的國名是中華民國   我們應該記住我們的國名 

Father says  Our country's name is the Republic of China  We should remember our country's name.

Unit 17 is about the beautiful flag, Unit 18 is about Sun Yat-sen, Unit 19 is about commemorating Sun, Unit 20 is about how a young Sun Yat-sen dealt with foreigners who made fun of his queue. 

But I think my "favorite" part is in Unit 24:

第二十四課   日本侵略中國

 Lesson 24  Japan Invades China

老師站在地圖旁邊   拿著一幅圖給大家看 

Teacher stands next to the map holding a picture for everyone to see

上面畫著一片秋海棠葉   又畫著一條毛蟲 

On the picture are a begonia leaf and a caterpillar

老師說  這裡秋海棠葉的位置  正式地圖上中國的位置 

Teacher says  The location of this begonia leaf is where China is on the map

這裡毛蟲的位置   正式地圖上日本的位置 

The location of the caterpillar is where Japan is on the map

這裡畫著毛蟲爬去吃秋海棠葉  就是表明從前日本想侵略中國 

In this picture the caterpillar is climbing up to eat the begonia leaf. This shows that Japan wanted to invade China before

From there, the rest of the book is about the war between China and Japan. It's an interesting read...

[Update, 6/4/21: I found an interesting post on an "extinct" blog, "活水來冊房," about the postwar "Mandarin fever" in Taiwan: "台灣戰後國語熱"--it includes some images of this book, but it appears to be a different edition than the one in the NCL? There's also a book entitled《文白之爭──語文;教育;國族的百年戰場》that mentions this textbook. I also came across an article entitled "戰後臺灣山地教育教科書初探（1951~1958）" that explores an Indigenous perspective on some of the units in this textbook.

Here's another edition of the book. And another.]

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Three)

I made some progress on my paper today, adding material, moving things around, rephrasing stuff, tightening up arguments, and so forth. I also read an article that I had come across about censorship in the early years after "the glorious retrocession" of Taiwan. The article is "Censorship and Publication Control in Early Post-War Taiwan: Procedures and Practices," by Táňa Dluhošová, published in Journal of Current Chinese Affairs in 2018. It was part of a special issue co-edited by Dluhošová and Isabelle Cheng on "The Making and Operation of Everyday Authoritarianism in Taiwan during the Cold War." An interesting article!

I'm also working on reading the book I mentioned yesterday. Haven't gotten very far on it (because I've been busy writing!), but making progress.

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Two)

I spent some time today going over my paper, taking notes on Google Keep, and adding some ideas and quotes to my draft. My plan is to work on the body of the paper and then decide on whether I want to go back to my original introduction (if it seems to fit) or write another introduction that fits better. 

I mentioned looking for a statistic a few days ago--I found a usable one today in a book I've had for a while. A long time ago, someone asked me if I read all the books I was buying. I believe my reply was that I read some of them all the way through, but some of them I just dip into for research purposes. This time was a case of dipping into a book I've never read for a statistic. (The book was Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan, edited by Edwin A. Winckler and Susan Greenhalgh, if you're interested.)

Speaking of actually reading books that I've had for years, I've decided that I'll (finally) read John Robert Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 next. I bought the book at Cave's Books in Taichung over 20 years ago (it's a Taiwanese Southern Materials edition rather than the Stanford UP edition), dragged it to Syracuse with me, then back to Taiwan in 2002, and then to Boston in 2011. (It should probably have its own frequent flyer card.) Some people were talking about it on Twitter last week, and I thought, "I have that book!" I'm a little embarrassed to admit I haven't read it yet, so I'm going to make up for lost time...