More new books in the former native speaker's library

...in increasing order of how excited I am to have gotten them:

• Communication and Global Society, ed. Guo-Ming Chen and William J. Starosta (NY: Peter Lang, 2000)
  Several chapters in this collection look interesting, including Hui-Ching Chang's "Reconfiguring the Global Society: 'Greater China' as Emerging Community" and Starosta and Chen's "Listening Across Diversity in Global Society".
  


• The Voice of Asia, by James A. Michener (NY: Random House, 1951)
  As I mentioned earlier, this book was discussed in Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism. I don't think she mentioned, though, that Michener has a section on Formosa that includes five short chapters: "Indian Summer in Formosa" (a chat with Y.P. Tom, a Chinese C-47 pilot), "The Governor's Mansion" (a chat with Edith Wu, the wife of K. C. Wu, Governor of Formosa), "The Hard Way" (a chat with Liu Ping, a political science student at Taiwan University), "The Tank Commanders" (a chat with "four young fellows, tough, straight and aching for a fight"), and a chapter called "Observations". I'll talk more about this later, but right now I'll just make the observation that Michener's interviewees were all Mainlanders with a burning desire to reconquer the mainland. He evidently didn't talk with any Taiwanese or anyone who had a doubt that the KMT could reconquer the mainland (with the help of the U.S., that is). (A note of thanks, by the way, to my brother and sister-in-law, who sent the book to me, and to Ainsworth Books, who did a great job of packing the book when they sent it to my brother and s-i-l!)
  
  [Update: The K. C. Wu mentioned above also figured in Fires of the Dragon. Henry Liu interviewed Wu as part of his biography of Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK). Kaplan describes him as someone who "attempted to nurture a genuine democracy on the island" and notes that, "after watching CCK's agents spread a reign of terror across the island, [Wu] finally broke with the Chiang regime and fled to America" in 1954 (192). Ironically, Michener's chapter about Edith Wu ends with her apologizing for some unfinished work on the governor's house. She says, "'We've omitted some of the little finishings. After all, we do not think of this as our permanent home'" (97). But if she expected they would be moving to Savannah, Georgia Evanston, Illinois within four years, she didn't let Michener know.]
  


• A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953)
  Sneider is more well-known for his book Teahouse of the August Moon, which was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando (as an Okinawan!). As Keelung Hong commented at a talk at Berkeley in 2003,

  Hollywood did not evidence the same interest in A Pail of Oysters as in his other books. Although well-reviewed, it was not a popular success. Even more than Formosa Betrayed, copies of A Pail of Oysters have disappeared from most libraries, probably on instructions issued to the student spies paid by the KMT to monitor Taiwanese on US college campuses.

  (Note: Hong's speech is worth reading in its entirety.) I noticed (without surprise) that the libraries in Taiwan don't have any copies of the English original, only of the Chinese translation that was published in 2003. This book was mentioned by a couple of people I interviewed; they said they had read it before they came to Taiwan. (A website related to Taipei American School's 50th anniversary recalls the book being "passed around the foreign community in a Catcher in the Rye book jacket".) I'm really eager to start reading this one.
  

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Communication and Global Society] [Taiwan] [The Voice of Asia]

Looking for a book...

I'm looking for a copy of Robert B. Kaplan's The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a Functional Theory of Rhetoric. Language and the Teacher: A Series in Applied Linguistics 8. (Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development, 1972).

According to NBI (Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information database), there are no copies of this book in any library on the island. I've also checked several online bookstores and have come up with nothing. Anyone have a spare copy lying around?

[Anatomy of Rhetoric] [books] [contrastive rhetoric] [Robert B. Kaplan]

Scott will probably enjoy this one...

OBTAIN A PROSPEROUS FUTURE, MONEY-EARNING POWER, AND THE PRESTIGE THAT COMES WITH HAVING THE CAREER POSITION YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF. DIPLOMA FROM PRESTIGIOUS NON-ACCREDITED UNVERSITIES BASED ON YOUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE.
/*If you qualify, no required tests, classes, books or examinations.*/ *
*
*Confidentiality Assured
*
*1-xxx-yyy-zzzz*
24 hours a day, 7 days a week including Sundays and Holidays

Not just prestigious, these universities are also non-accredited! What more could you ask for?

(via a colleague)

Bold Plum: with the Guerillas in China's War against Japan

I was looking up the name of Michael Lindsay after finishing Philip West's Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916-1952 this morning. West mentions Lindsay, who taught at Yenching, and Lindsay's sympathy for the Communists. The reason I was interested in Linsday was that he was mentioned by name when R.O.C. (Taiwan) Minister of Education Cheng Tianfang (程天放) expressed to the founders of Tunghai his concern that they make sure they didn't hire any Communists or "fellow travelers" as faculty.

Anyway, I came across this website advertising a new book by Hsiao Li Lindsay, Michael Linsday's widow. The website has a 2006 copyright and says the book is coming soon. I checked Amazon, but the book isn't listed yet. Looks interesting, though!

[books] [Bold Plum] [Hsiao Li Lindsay] [Michael Lindsay] [Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations]

Violation from other parties, official notification from -----!

Dear ----- Member,

This email is to inform you, that we are upgrading our ways of security and your account may have been compromised by other parties.

Our terms and conditions you agreed to state that your account must always be under your control or those you designate at all times. We have noticed some
unusual activity in our research due upgrading related that your account indicates that other parties may have access and or control of your details in your account.

These parties have been involved with money laundering, illegal drugs, terrorism and various Federal Title 18 violations.

Your will need to re-enter some imformations about your account for advanced verification and to let us know that your are aware of this violation and due this way we can stop the outside parties.

We won't require your ATM PIN number for this operation!

Please follow this link to complete your security verification and protect your account :

Update your account now.

Please be aware, if you don't upgrade your account this will lead to money loss and we will have no other liability for your account or any transactions that may have occurred lately.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter .

Sincerely,
© 2006 -----

Bank name deleted. The original link (which I've also deleted) leads, of course, up a phishing line. I don't usually post the spam I get, but this time I couldn't resist...

CFP: Rhetorics of Social Formation

Received this through the CFP mailing list.

Rhetorics of Social Formation

University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
19 - 20 January 2007

The Centre for Rhetorics & Hermeneutics and the New Testament Rhetoric Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is pleased to announce Rhetorics of Social Formation, the sixth in a series of highly successful international conferences exploring rhetorical theory in the context of pressing public issues.

This conference will examine the role of rhetoric in creating, elaborating, and sustaining social formation and small group communication - how is group identity formed? How must it change in order to meet new and unforeseen contexts? How does it social formation break down? How are new group identities formed from out of old? How are conflicting identities of members of multiple, if casual, group identities negotiated? What can we learn from groups whose success is seen by their growth and longetivity?

The organizers start with the premise that much of group identity and the devices that support that identity, including belief systems and ideologies, are derived from rhetorical constructs and represent the convergence of arguments meant to describe and explain realities as experienced by the group.

We invite papers that either illustrate or challenge that premise, using theoretical models and/or analytical methods, etc., from the disciplinary perspective of the presenter. All disciplines are welcome, including biblical studies, anthropology, ethnology, rhetoric, culture criticism, public sphere, and other social sciences and the humanities. We have traditionally provided a unique space for dialogue and cross-, inter- and transdisciplinary exchange.

We welcome papers examining the phenomenon of group and social formation from any area and any part of the world. Additionally, we welcome papers that deal with the formation of the gospel tradition and the emergence of diverse early Jesus and Christian communities. Proposals should be no more than 500 words long, and must include identification of institutional affiliation of the applicant, or, in the case of independent scholars, a brief resume.

In the past we have had presenters from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Columbia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the USA. As in the past, we strongly encourage foreign scholars to continue to submit proposals.

Each presenter must submit their paper several weeks in advance. The programmatic assumption of our dialogues is that every participant has read the submitted works prior to arriving on site. Each presenter is given 10 minutes to offer a summary of your paper, and we then dedicate 45-50 minutes of unmoderated, roundtable discussion regarding the implications and contributions of your work. In this way, we are unique in both the care with which we approach your work and the ways in which your work is brought into conversation with others.

Proposals are due to the organizers by 1 May 2006 (though the date is not firm). For more information, please go to www.ars-rhetorica.net.

Sounds interesting--and they're looking for scholars from outside the U.S....

Nice site on semiotics

Just came across a great website called "Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler. It's been up for over 10 years, but I only came across it today. The web is a big place!

Just to let you know I don't just buy books...

I finished reading Cold War Orientalism this morning. I found the book to be both interesting on its own terms and helpful to my thinking about my dissertation project. It introduced me to what Klein argues were some of the dominant Cold War era discourses in the U.S. regarding U.S.-Asian relations, both in terms of external relations and in terms of the assimilation of Asians within the U.S. The latter Klein sees as a way for the U.S. to demonstrate to Asia its good intentions during the Cold War era competition for the 'heart' of Asia. (I'm not sure how much Klein sees this as a primary motive for the middlebrow intellectuals' treatment of Asian Americans in their work.)

As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea that middlebrow intellectuals--and the government--in the U.S. encouraged Americans to develop a sense of empathy for the people of Asia provides a useful connection (or counterpoint) to the kind of empathy that development scholars like Daniel Lerner argued was necessary for people in Third World countries. Lerner argued that empathy was necessary for people in undeveloped countries so that they could learn to imagine ways of living that were different from their own. This would provide motivation for the integration of the various groups (tribes, clans) into the "imagined community" (not Lerner's term, of course!) of the nation and for the integration of the new nations into the global community (a community that excluded Communist countries, of course). The kind of empathy that Americans needed to develop, according to Klein, was something that would enable Americans to avoid the accusations of imperialism that were made against other Western powers.

Klein's chapter "How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism" gives a good example of the discourse of empathy that she describes. She argues that Michener positions himself as "a 'listening man'" who does not privilege his own voice in the book but rather privileges the voices of the people he interviews. "Michener presents himself and his interviewees as leaping governments and engaging in direct communication with each other," she writes (132). Michener's portrayal of himself as a listener is an embodiment of the "curious and open-minded American presence in Asia" (133) that was part of the ideal of an empathetic America.

I also like the fact that although Klein does critique what she analyzes (pointing out, for instance, how Michener's work feeds into "the liberal critique of racism as individual prejudice [that] proliferated in the late 1940s and 1950s" [134]), she also tries to read these texts sympathetically, as well. She argues, for instance, that "it would be a mistake to dismiss Michener's liberalism as only a mystification of neocolonial expansion" (135). She prefers to see the texts and the discourses in which they participated as more complicated than that--as having more than one kind of effect on or relationship to the U.S.'s role in Asia.

[Update: I should also mention that I finished Fires of the Dragon early last week. It was quite an enlightening read. It was a fast read, too--I guess because of its narrative style.]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [empathy] [James Michener] [The Voice of Asia]

Adventures in Mandarin pronunciation

The former native Chinese speaker has complained recently that my mispronunciation of several tones in Mandarin is beginning to affect her pronunciation. Most egregious of my mistakes is my frequent reference to the "kitchen waste container" (廚餘桶 chu2 yu2 tong3) as the chu3 yu2 tong3 (楚瑜桶, perhaps named in honor of James Soong?).

Two recent opinion pieces on culture and democracy

Two interesting articles with somewhat different perspectives on the relationship of culture to democracy:

• "Democratization: One View from Kuwait" by Dr. Samar Rashdan Al-Roomi, Kuwait Arab Times (via Intermittent Clarity)
  
• "Democracy Isn't 'Western': Cultural determinists should look beyond Ancient Greece" by Dr. Amartya Sen, Opinion Journal (from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page) (via The Blogora)

[culture] [democracy]

CFP: Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Received this through the CFP mailing list. It looks like an interesting project and would, I think, benefit from an international perspective.

Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Tomas R. Giberson, Ph.D. Oakland University, Michigan
Gregory A. Giberson, Ph.D. Salisbury University, Maryland

We are seeking proposals for papers to be included in an edited collection investigating the various ways the academic economy drives the purposes, processes, and outcomes valued from Academics, individually and collectively. We suggest that our behavior as academics is governed not only by our dedication to our individual disciplines and our specific specialties but also is influenced and often determined by varying professional, intellectual, social, and political factors. These factors differ by the size, prominence, and mission of our individual institutions, our tenure status, as well as the expectations of our colleagues, students, administrators, and local communities. The competing and often contradictory demands placed upon us are often at odds with the traditional notions of liberal education that persist as traditional performative façade, an idealization of the academy existing primarily in the lore, rituals, and mission statements of most colleges and universities but not always in the products faculty are expected to produce. As Jean François Lyotard observed in The Postmodern Condition, "The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it?" (51) Indeed, the "value" of higher education has taken on new meaning, which often contradicts its traditional goals: critical and intellectual development, and civic engagement.

Members of all disciplines are invited to share thoughts, observations, and experiences in each of the three traditional areas of academic work: teaching, scholarship, and service. We also encourage submissions that address the implications of the meta economy-the interaction of these three areas on individual and systemic behavior. Historically, these three areas of the academic "job" are thought of as responsibilities defined in job descriptions and position postings. However, teaching, scholarship, and service have become commodities-outcomes that enable academics to advance their careers and achieve prominence among peers and administrators, who bestow the ultimate commodity for individual faculty members, tenure and promotion. As commodities, these become not the production of individual scholars and teachers, but units of value to be held, traded, and bargained with by universities, corporations, publishers, and degree holders to promote, trade, and sell.

Examples of questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to:

Scholarship

• How has the commodification of knowledge influenced the research you engage in and the scholarship you produce?
• How is your behavior as a scholar influenced by the "number" and/or "quality" of publications required for tenure?
• How is your scholarly production consumed by the university and other institutions and individuals and how does that influence you as a professional academic?
• How has the increasing pressure to secure external funding through grants and the like impacted what and how you conduct research and scholarly inquiry?
• How does the pressure of publication affect the pedagogy within graduate and undergraduate education?

Teaching

• How does/did your perception of the professional implications of student evaluations influence your teaching in pursuit of tenure?
• How has your teaching been affected by the expectations of students, peers, and administrators?
• How are your teaching strategies influenced by the number of classes/students you teach in a given semester?
• How is your pedagogy influenced by the mission of your institution?
• How has your teaching been influenced by other external factors, local or otherwise?

Service

• How do service requirements influence your work as a teacher and/or scholar?
• How are service requirements for faculty accounted for in terms of tenure and promotion by the institution?
• How do service requirements influence your behavior in productive and non-productive committees?
• How do service commitments on the part of untenured faculty affect their bid for tenure?

Other

• How are the actions of your institution influenced by national rankings in teaching and research?
• How do federal, state, institutional, and unit-level budgets affect your behavior as an academic?
• How has the academic economy forced you to compromise your personal and professional goals?
• How have increasing expectations for productivity and assessment across generations influenced your relationship with other faculty?

Given the sensitivity of the topics addressed, we will accept submissions from authors who prefer their work to be published anonymously, particularly for aubmissions from untenured faculty. However, your submission must include a brief description of your institution, department, and your placement within the tenure process, along with reasons why using your name with your submission would cause problems. We hope that tenured faculty will want their names attached to their submission.

We are seeking proposals of 500 words or less for chapters between 3,000 and 7,000 words. We welcome submissions from faculty, administrators and staff. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2006.

For questions or to submit a proposal: knowledge_economy@hotmail.com

***************************
Greg Giberson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Director of Freshman Composition
Director of the Eastern Shore Writing Project
Department of English
Salisbury University
410-677-5003
***************************

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Even though I'm only halfway through Cold War Orientalism right now, the post office still operates (to the extent that it operates) and two more books have found their way from various places in the U.S. (via Alibris) to my mailbox.

• Fires of the Dragon: Politics, Murder, and the Kuomintang, by David E. Kaplan (NY: Atheneum, 1992)
  This book was, I believe, recommended or listed in a posting by Michael Turton a while back. I found an inexpensive copy and got it while I could (had an e-coupon, which helped). The interesting thing about the hardback copy that I've got is that it has an American flag sticker taped to the spine and another sticker on the first page with an American flag and the name "COLONEL ELMER C. MARTIN" written below. He might have been the Elmer C. Martin, Sr. who passed away in 2000. Colonel Martin took good care of this book--it's in perfect shape.
  
  
• Transforming Agriculture in Taiwan: The Experience of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, by Joseph A. Yager (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988)
  This one looked interesting because it's based on unpublished archival documents and covers the entire period, 1948-1979, when this US-ROC joint development agency was in operation.

[books] [Taiwan]

They have contests about these kinds of things?!

From a Times of India report:

MANGALORE: The Marathon Lecturer stopped at 11.30 am on Sunday, clocking 98 hours and beating the earlier world record of 88 hours for non-stop teaching.

Towards the end, the strain on Annaiah Ramesh had begun to show, and he had to be stopped by his mother and the guide. Ramesh, lecturer from the department of applied botany, Mangalore University, was in the quest of Guinness Book of Records, and began his lecture on Wednesday morning.

He wanted to clock in 101 hours, but spotting his incoherent speech, his mother Kamalamma and guide Y Srinivasa Reddy from the department of sericulture, Mysore University, and others convinced him to stop as he had already gone past the record.

According to the article, "Ramesh is fine, but disoriented due to lack of sleep." But what about his students??

[via]

CFP: Book collection about second-language writing across contexts

Would be nice to have some submissions to this book from Taiwan...

Also of interest: a conference on second-language writing at Tamkang University

Call for Papers—Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts

We invite contributions for an edited collection, Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts, which attempts to close existing gaps in international conversations among second language writing scholars in elementary and secondary schools, two-year colleges, post-secondary institutions, and community programs. Much current scholarship on second language writing comes out of post-secondary institutions in the United States. This volume attempts to build bridges between this context and other sites of second language writing research, theory, and pedagogy.

We anticipate contributions to five major sections:

• Exploring Boundaries: Disciplinary Realms for Second Language Writing
• Understanding Contexts: The Current Status of Second Language Writing
• Posing Questions: Sites of Inquiry in Second Language Writing
• Supporting Collaboration: Projects that Cross Contextual Boundaries
• Identifying Resources: Annotated Bibliographies on Second Language Writing in Context

Contributions might focus on, but are not limited to:

• The current status of second language writing pedagogies, research, or theories in a specific context
• Institutional locations of second language writing instruction and research in relation to disciplinary boundaries
• What second language writing scholars would like to learn from their colleagues working in other contexts
• Underrepresented sites of second language writing scholarship
• Questions developing out of teaching or researching second language writing in a specific context
• Reports of in-progress or completed research that crosses contextual boundaries for second language writing
• Reports of in-progress or completed projects that reflect collaborations among scholars working in different contexts
• Suggestions for initiating and supporting collaborations among scholars working in different contexts

All contributions should be accessible to readers who are new to the field of second language writing or who primarily work in a related field. Given the volume’s focus on contexts, authors also should include descriptions of their own institutional contexts.

We request that submissions not exceed 20 manuscript pages (including a list of references, tables and figures, and appendices). Please follow the manuscript preparation guidelines outlined in the 5th edition of the APA Manual. We plan to send each manuscript out for external review to help us assess its quality and to generate feedback for revision.

Please send submissions to Jessie Moore Kapper (jkapper@elon.edu)—as Microsoft Word (.doc) or rich text format (.rtf) files—by June 30, 2006. Any questions also should be directed to jkapper@elon.edu.

Co-Editors:
Jessie Moore Kapper, Elon University, and Elizabeth Patton, Purdue University

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Just received my copy of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 by Christina Klein. I got the hardback edition for US$9.95 through the University of California Press website's sale. (Other books should be coming soon.)

Klein's book looks really interesting and useful to me. I'll probably post some goodies on my dissertation blog soon. [here] For now I want to quote something from the beginning of the book, where Klein is analyzing a scene from the play/movie The King and I. Klein argues that although the setting for the play is the late 19th century, it really spoke to American concerns with their relationship to Asia during the Cold War period. She argues that the sentimental relationship of Anna to the Siamese is "an idealized self-representation of the middlebrow artists and intellectuals" Klein discusses in her book. Klein illustrates this by analyzing two things going on in the scene that culminates in the "Getting to Know You" singalong:

At one level the scene produces a hierarchical relation between West and East: Anna is an adult who dispenses knowledge, and her students are ignorant children subordinate to her authority. When Anna replaces the old Siamese map with the new English one, she replaces the local and implicitly inferior knowledge of the Siamese with a metropolitan and implicitly superior knowledge derived from European models. In the best Orientalist fashion, she denies the Siamese the ability to represent themselves and insists that they can only know themselves through a Western and literally Eurocentric system of knowledge. But something else is going on here as well: Anna is more interested in forging connections between East and West than she is in demarcating racial and cultural differences. ... She presents a world in which East and West can be understood as related to one another outside the coercive ties of empire. A shared history of political independence, as well as small size, implicitly connects England and Siam. Anna animates this vision of interconnectedness by infusing it with emotion: as she sings "Getting to Know You," she translates the map's geography lesson into a playful song about the intimate bonds of friendship that can reach across national and cultural divides. More important, Anna opens up a way for the children to participate in the forging of these emotional--and international--ties when she invites them to sing along. ... By the end of the number the hierarchical differences that structured the scene at the outset ... are looser, although they do not disappear entirely. (11-12)

I must admit that when I have watched the movie The King and I in the past, I never looked at the "Getting to Know You" scene from this kind of perspective. But Klein's point about Anna's encouraging the students to sing along with her puts a new twist on the lyrics of the song. If we just think about Anna's point of view--when she's singing--lines like "Telling you my dreams, / Getting to feel that you're with me" sound as though her main concern is with having her students identify with her. But when the students sing, the point of view changes and now they're telling her their dreams. Thus there's at some level the expectation of an intercultural interchange going on here, despite the hierarchical relations between Anna and the Siamese children. I am struck by this because it complicates the notion of the cultural imperialism of Anna's actions.

Later in the book Klein engages in an in-depth analysis of the play and movie, concluding that

Anna's loving instruction establishes an exemplary hegemonic relationship: it achieves its goals through sentiment rather than through physical force and by inculcating a desire on the part of its objects to behave in a certain way. It suggests power exercised not through political or military control, but through relations of exchange and influence. Anna's influence, like American-guided modernization, results in local leaders governing themselves but always according to Anna's precepts. (215)

I should note that Klein stresses the "ideal" nature of the images of Anna and of the United States here. She isn't suggesting that this is what actually happened. (Certainly Taiwan's experience during the postwar years is enough to illustrate how tenuous the connection was between this image and the reality of U.S. influence in Asia.)

Anyway, I'm glad I found this book--and grateful to Rex at the Savage Minds blog who mentioned the U. of California Press book sale!

[I should add here--for people who are wondering why I'd go to the trouble of buying this book rather than getting it out of the library--according to Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information Network, no library in Taiwan owns this book... *sigh*]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [The King and I]

Homework and college students

This news is a little old, but a report in last Saturday's Taiwan News cites a study that found that "[m]ore than half of Taiwan's university freshmen spend less than one hour per day studying outside of the classroom" and "the situation is similar among college seniors".

The article also mentions that "more than 40 percent of seniors at state-run universities and colleges are working part-time, a much higher figure than their counterparts at private universities and colleges." This is interesting, continues the article, because it "contradicts a commonly held belief that students at private universities and colleges which charge a higher tuition are more likely to work on the side while pursuing their studies."

A China Times article that was reprinted on the National Science Council's website adds that the survey was done by over 40 educational researchers and was given to over 40,000 first-, second-, and third-year university students. The study was conducted by Peng Sunming (彭森明) as part of a larger study commissioned by the National Science Council.

[higher education] [National Science Council] [Taiwan]

International writing conference "pre-call"

Received this via H-Rhetor:

Save the Dates February 22, 23, &24, 2008

2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research Theme: Writing Research Across Borders

This is an exciting time where research on writing is having many births, rebirths, and growing spurts in many nations and with focus on many levels of schooling and development across the lifespan. At the 2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research we hope to foster dialogues across different writing research traditions, located in different national, disciplinary, and programmatic venues. We are currently making preliminary plans to hold the conference on Friday through Sunday February 22-24, 2008. We are in the process of inviting a premier panel of plenary and featured speakers to represent the diversity of writing research in the world and to symbolically invite further broad participation from researchers of all nations interested in all age levels, institutional settings, and disciplinary approaches.

This conference follows on the successes of the 2002 and 2005 Santa Barbara Conferences on Writing Research, with the themes of "Writing as A Human Activity" and "Writing Research in the Making." Further information about this current conference and the previous ones is available at

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf08/ [My note: this link doesn't work yet] [Now it does...]

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf05/

Later this spring watch for our full announcement and call for proposals. If you have any questions contact us at
writing@education.ucsb.edu

For the Organizing committee

Charles Bazerman
Sheridan Blau
Rober Krut
Susan McLeod
Paul Rogers
Amanda Stansell

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this, and will pass on what I hear. Would be nice to have some folks from Taiwan there!

Beautiful warm spring day...

In the span of less than two hours--between about 10:15 and 11:50--we saw three 2-car accidents and two 3-car accidents on Taichung Harbor Rd. Nothing serious enough to need an ambulance, but their cars are all going to need some body work. (If I were Michael Turton I'd probably have pictures of 'em, but unfortunately, you'll have to use your imagination.) Beautiful day. Drive carefully.

Hmmm....

Haven't felt one of those in a while... (Guess I'm not usually sitting in the office when they come.)

The View from Taiwan: Bias and the International Media

Michael Turton has a great rhetorical analysis/critique of a USA Today article about Taiwan/China/US relations, reflecting on the biased manner in which these relations are portrayed in the U.S. media.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write about Taiwan (or anything else, perhaps) without some sort of bias, but I agree with Michael that the international press tends not to write articles that are fair to Taiwan. And, of course, I feel strongly that being fair to Taiwan is pretty important. China, for some reason, gets cut a lot of slack in the press. As Michael demonstrates, articles often end up blaming the victim for the PRC's actions and statements. Guess they don't want to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people"...

Marjorie Bly of Penghu

Earlier this evening I caught a story on the TV news about Pres. Chen's visit to Marjorie Bly, a retired American nurse who is in a Penghu hospital. The reason that I mention this is that I only first heard of her very recently when I was going through some archival documents for my disseration and she was mentioned in a letter from the late 1950s. It was quite an interesting coincidence.

Bly, whose Chinese name is 白寶珠 (Bai Baozhu, which means "White Precious Pearl"), has lived in Taiwan since 1952 (most of those years in Penghu), helping people with leprosy. She is 87 years old and is in failing health, and the president's visit was to express the country's appreciation for her love and care for people with leprosy. A Chinese-language story about Chen's visit to Bly is available here (thanks, Linda!). Another Chinese-language story that covers Bly's 50 years in Taiwan is here. There's an English-language story from 2002 that reports on a fund raised to help her in her retirement and to continue to help people with leprosy. And here is an English story on her receipt of permanent residency in honor of her work in Taiwan.

[Update, 3/11/06: David Bly has included and linked to more information on his blog, including a Taiwan News article that I hadn't noticed. (For some reason, the TN article--actually a Central News Agency release--gets Marjorie Bly's name mixed up, calling her "Bly Marjorie Ingeleiv"...)]

"這就是中國人所說的人情味..."

Last night we went to "Tea Work" on Wenxin Road for dinner. Walking into the restaurant, we spotted a cute little baby (maybe a year old) sitting in a high chair at a table across from the cashier. He was playing with his mother's wallet while she and a friend chatted. A few minutes later, as I took our order to the cashier, he held his mother's credit card out to me, as if to say, "沒關係,你拿去用!別客氣!"

我實在太感動了!年輕人,你好大方! (I didn't take his offer, of course...)

In news about Wikipedia...

From BBC News:

Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said.

The article goes on to report that

Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.

On the other hand, the article cites Wikipedia as saying that "its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were 'beneficial and helpful'."

I suppose there's some degree of transparency to the Wikipedia's articles if you're willing to go to the trouble of figuring out who made particular changes, as the Wikipedia folks did here.

Journal of Public Deliberation

A few months ago I noted an article and an editorial in the Taiwan News regarding the possibilities for deliberative democracy in Taiwan. Tangentially related to that, today I came across the Journal of Public Deliberation. It doesn't have any articles about Taiwan (yet), but it looks interesting. And it's Open Access, through the Berkeley Electronic Press, which means your library doesn't have to pay companies like Elsevier tons of money to read it... (Wow! How many issues have I touched on in this short post?)

[Update, 2/10/05: Schenectady Synecdoche suggests asking the editors of JPD to set up an RSS feed. Sounds like a good idea! (I wanted to say this on SS's post, but her blog evidently doesn't like my comments: it tells me "Your comment was denied for questionable content." Hmmm... it's not like I cussed or anything...)]

[deliberative democracy] [Open Access journals] [public deliberation]

Puppy pics found over the holidays

When we were back home over the CNY holidays, I came across a few pics of Mei-mei from about 11 years ago. Thought I'd share a couple of 'em with y'all...

When I get time, I'll add a picture of her from her "awkward teenage years"...

A guest post from Mei-mei

New books in the former native speaker's library, CNY prep edition

The former native Chinese speaker and I went to Bookman Books (書林) downtown this afternoon so she could look for a book for her monsters. I managed to find some books that I can take with me to the in-laws' this weekend and read while they play majiang:

• The Hidden Dimension, by Edward T. Hall
• Beyond Culture, also by Edward T. Hall
• Communication Between Cultures, 5th ed., by Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter

See a theme here? Yeah, I'm thinking about the ICC course I'll probably offer again next fall. The third book is a possible textbook for that course. I've been using a reading packet the last few times I've taught this course, but now I'm thinking a textbook might be a better way to go about it so students don't just get my idiosyncratic view of the field. (Instead, they'll get 2 other people's idiosynctratic view.) I've got some time to look it over and decide if I want to use it. Also ordered an inspection copy of Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach by James W. Neuliep. That one's a Sage book, though, and the problem with Sage books is that they're so doggone expensive. The quoted price for Neuliep's book is US$59.95--close to NT$2000. If I used that book, I would definitely not have any students. At least the Samovar and Porter book is only around NT$400 (with a discount), which students will still probably scream about since the course is only a semester long. (On the other hand, they usually pay NT$2000 or so for their Norton anthologies that they use for a year...)

The first two books are ones I should have read a long time ago, but didn't have time for until--well, actually, I still don't have time for them. But I'll make time to read them before next fall.

(This website has some information about proxemics, which is the theme of The Hidden Dimension.)

[Edward T. Hall] [intercultural communication]

Photo of the former native speaker at work...

Courtesy of the Simpsomaker--or is it the "Simpomaker"? (Note: I had to do a "PrtSc" to get a copy of the image--which is why the cursor is still showing...)

Seomtihng to sohw sutdnets nxet smeseter

Got this (forwarded) from ERG:

Cna yuo raed tihs? i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rsceearh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs rpsoet it.

It doesn't always seem to follow the rule it mentions ("the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae"), and a missing apostrophe in a contraction makes one word hard to read, but still...

8 years ago today...

Back in 1997, I wrote about the first Chinese New Year that I spent with my then-future in-laws, but the only version left of that story is archived here...

In response to this:*

'Are you guilty?' said Winston.

'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit -- never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.

"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."

--from 1984

[Update, 12/27/05: Well, now that (as everyone probably knows), the student in question has admitted to lying, I guess we should all let down our guards and realize that the wiretapping and other domestic spying activities the U.S. government is conducting couldn't possibly endanger the freedoms of patriotic Americans. After all, Colin Powell says it's OK...]

A must-read from the latest Written Communication

At the top of my list of articles to read:

Lillis, Theresa, and Mary Jane Curry. "Professional Academic Writing by Multilingual Scholars: Interactions With Literacy Brokers in the Production of English-Medium Texts." Written Communication 23.1 (2006): 3-35.

Authors' Abstract:

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, "literacy brokers," who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications—articles written and published in English-medium international journals—by focusing on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.

[academic publishing] [literary brokers] [multilingual scholars]

Update; upcoming vacation

A few items:

• The writing workshop with Charles Bazerman on Dec. 3 went really well. There were over 100 people attending. Dr. Bazerman's talks on the history of literacy and of social organization and on assessment were well-received, as were the panels on text-type in teaching and assessment. I hope that we'll be able to do something like this again in the future. (And as Dr. Bazerman himself said, we don't necessarily need to have a big scholar from the U.S. to come in order to have such a conference. Though it was nice to have him here!)
• Saturday the 10th I went to Tainan to give a talk to Dr. Clyde Warden's IMBA class on using secondary sources in research. The IMBA program at National Cheng Kung University has students from many countries (I met some from Taiwan, New Zealand, the U.S., and Cambodia) and conducts its classes in English. Some students seemed to have done quite a bit of research before and some hadn't, so I tried to aim my talk to those with less experience. I was happily surprised to see Robert, a former student from Tunghai who's now in the IMBA program. Quite a coincidence to run into him!
  
• Both Chuck and Clyde talked to me about my dissertation, encouraging me to "finish it!" So I'm going to try to work harder on it, cutting out some of the less necessary distractions in life. (Though there seem to be more and more necessary distractions...) One of the LNDs for me is blogging, so I'm going to be taking what I hope is an extended vacation from the blogging life (contingent upon my ability to control myself!). I hope to be back at some point in the next few months with some good news about my dissertation...
  

House of flying kitchen tiles, or The former native speaker's kitchen self-destructs! 2

In this episode of the continuing story of the slow demise of the former native speaker's kitchen, we see the former native Chinese speaker making lunch, oblivious to the kitchen's murderous intent...

Suddenly, she hears creaking sounds. Before she can do anything, pieces of tile fly toward her, pointing their sharp edges at her...

Fortunately, her slow-moving but loyal companion Bing Xiang (冰箱) blocks the ceramic shards of death, saving her life.

The gruesome aftermath (caution: not for those with weak stomachs!):






To view the first episode in this series, click here. Note that this sequel has come out less than a year after the first episode. Take that, Sam Raimi!

Actually, the real story is the FNCS heard the noises and quickly got the camera to take shots as the tiles flew off the wall. (Unfortunately, the battery was dead, so she had to wait until it recharged to take pics of the aftermath...) But why ruin a good story with the truth?

Plagiarism and the Chinese news media

ESWN has helpfully translated an article from MediaChina.net on the prevalence of plagiarism in news organizations in China.

Light-pole thievery in the ol' hometown

(Well, actually I grew up in Baltimore County. But it was close to the city! Anyway...) This article in the New York Times caught my attention: "Light Poles Are Vanishing, and Baltimore's Police Are Baffled":

Thieves are sawing down aluminum light poles. Some 130 have vanished from Baltimore's streets in the last several weeks, the authorities say, presumably sold for scrap metal. But so far the case of the pilfered poles has stumped the police, and left many local residents wondering just how someone manages to make off with what would seem to be a conspicuous street fixture.

The poles, which weigh about 250 pounds apiece, have been snatched during the day and in the middle of the night, from two-lane blacktop roads and from parkways with three lanes on either side of grass median strips, in poor areas and in some of the city's most affluent neighborhoods. Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.

Things like this happen in Taiwan, also. Every time a typhoon is coming, someone discovers that some industrious thieves have stolen the steel water gates that are needed to help prevent flooding. But it's amazing to me the trouble the Baltimore thieves are going to to take these light poles. As the Times reports,

The culprits seem to have pole-snatching down to a model of precision and efficiency, city officials say. They appear to have gone so far as dressing up as utility crews, the police say, and placing orange traffic cones around the poles about to be felled, to avoid arousing suspicion among motorists.

(My question here is, if the police know that the thieves have done this, why haven't they caught anyone yet?)

(Thanks to MJ for the New York Times reference.)

Abstract for my part of Dec. 3's panel on writing instruction

Earlier I mentioned that my department is hosting a workshop on writing instruction on December 3. I'm on a panel about text-type in teaching and will talk about teaching students to use reference materials such as different kinds of subject dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and handbooks when they're doing research. I want to post the abstract for my part of the panel and make a few comments about what I'll talk about. Here's the abstract:

Tunghai sophomore English majors are required to take an introductory course in research methods. Some of the more important ideas that I hope students in that course will think about concern how they understand themselves as users of (English-language) texts and how they understand how the texts they are using have been designed to function. I will use basic reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias to serve as an example to discuss orienting students to texts that are nominally of the same genre. In Research Methods, students look at how surface differences (such as textual conventions like the use of complete sentences vs. fragments, use of headings, bold typeface, and italics) among various reference materials can inform them of those materials' different purposes and audiences. I hope that this focus will help students become more conscious users of reference materials (in particular) and of texts (in general).

In my 10-minute talk, I want to take people through some of the experiences I had teaching the research methods course and coming to an awareness of what students needed in order to be able to use reference sources. I remember at first, years ago, when I gave students an exercise summarizing subject encyclopedia and subject dictionary articles related to their research topics, some of them would have a lot of trouble figuring out the main idea of the article. There turned out to be several reasons for this trouble, one of which was that the articles didn't always organize information in the same way. Articles in some reference works start out immediately with a brief explanation of exactly what the concept is. (Sometimes the brief explanation is all they have.) Others begin with a "funnel"-like introduction--moving from general to particular in ways similar to how students are often taught to write English essay introductions. (David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is like this, for instance.) The variations in the organization of articles disrupted student expectations about how to identify the main idea(s). So part of what I found I needed to do was help students put aside those expectations.

Another related issue I will discuss concerns helping students see typographical conventions such as bolding, italicization, capitalization, and the use of different fonts as information rather than decoration. The idea that those surface features (what Paul Prior calls "typographical cuing systems") mean something was something I took for granted until I taught people and worked with people who didn't take it for granted. (This reminds me of Prior's story in Writing/Disciplinarity about an Indonesian undergraduate in one of his classes who had copied down a call number from the index but didn't know what to do with it. Prior's point is he considered libraries "transparent spaces" until then. What he considered "basic" knowledge was not so basic to the student who perhaps had never before used a library with an open-stacks system.) So one of the in-class activities I initiated involved looking closely at various dictionary entries on the same word, comparing and contrasting the information that different dictionaries presented about that word. (This exercise is similar to one that Roy Flannagan had us do in his graduate class in Milton back in the early 1990s, except, of course, we worked with different versions of a poem by Milton.) From there we could begin to discuss purposes and audiences for reference works and begin to see how compilers of those works find ways to condense different kinds of information in different ways for those audiences and purposes. Finally, we would look at the Oxford English Dictionary (which I think English majors should work with at least once before they graduate--if it's available, of course) in its physical and virtual forms. We worked on understanding the types and forms of information that the OED provides. The students' final assignment in this sequence was an exercise in "decompressing" the information in an OED entry and writing a brief "study" of a word based on that entry.

I hope that students were able to take out of these activities the idea that reading and using information in English requires attention to, and interpretation of the "typographical cuing systems" as well as the ability to read "through" the words to get at the meaning. I have some sense that many were able to do this. I think it also can help create an atmosphere in which learning how to use the MLA citation system is tied to communicative purposes rather than being merely an exercise in formalistic correctness.

Anyway, that's basically what I'm going to talk about on Dec. 3. If you're in the area, stop by! (Not just to hear me talk, though! More interesting people than I will be on hand!)

[EFL writing] [teaching research methods] [writing conference]

The celebrations continue...

The former native speaker just found out that his brother, a.k.a. "the former blogger" (heh... he's gonna kill me for that) won, along with a coworker, the Creativity and Innovation Award at his place of work. He works at Vanderbilt University's Peabody Library. Congratulations, Chris!

A weekend of celebrations

Friday was the former native Chinese speaker's birthday (she heard that Michael Turton's wife was born on Nov. 11 and just wanted to get in on a good thing, I guess). But she had to work on Friday night so we waited till Saturday to celebrate. I made reservations to go to a fancy shmansy hotel restaurant for a seafood dinner. She really wanted to have some Alaskan King Crab. When we got there, after braving Taichung's Saturday night traffic, we found out that what they had available was 'Alaskan King Crab Surprise'--the suprise being that we were supposed to have ordered 3 days in advance and that the AKC would have cost NT$9000... So I guess we were lucky not to have gotten the AKC. Anyway, we did have a decent meal of prawns and lobster, though if we had known... if their website had given any indication... *sigh*

And today (well, actually, Nov. 13) is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary! (How 'bout you, Michael? Anyone in your family having an anniversary today? heh heh...) My parents like to say they were married on Nov. 13; 13 months later my brother was born, and 13 months after that I was born. Good thing we're not superstitious...

Workshop on writing instruction in an EFL context

The Tunghai FLLD will be hosting a workshop entitled "Situating Writing Instruction in an EFL Context: A Conversation with Charles Bazerman" on December 3. Information about the workshop can be found here. Charles Bazerman (as the workshop's website says)

is an influential scholar in the field of Writing Across the Curriculum and has lectured in many countries about writing theory and practice.

He has authored and co-edited such books as Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of The Experimental Article in Science (1988), What Writing Does and How It Does It (with Paul Prior, 2004), and Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum (with Joseph Little, Lisa Bethel, Teri Chavkin, Danielle Fouquette, and Janet Garufis, 2005).

He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA).

Dr. Bazerman's website contains a bibliography of his works and online versions of many of his essays.

[Charles Bazerman] [EFL writing] [writing conference]

Where are the interculturalists?

Kerim over at Savage Minds bemoans the lack of linguistic anthropologists among the interviewees written up in a Forbes special issue on communicating. Virtually rolling his eyes, he groans, "When they wanted an article on 'cross-cultural communication' they went to a zoologist!"

I'm feeling similarly after skimming through the articles--but I'm wondering where the scholars in intercultural communication are--or the speech comm. people in general. Or a token rhetorician. I mean, the topic is communication...

Don't ...

You'd think ...

I mean ...

Oh, never mind.

[intercultural communication]

Bourdieu_boy on Hero

Bourdieu_boy has a smart analysis of Zhang Yimou's Hero that I've been meaning to link to. One quote in particular, that compares Hero to Crouching Tiger, stood out for me:

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon spoke from the margins of the Chinese-speaking world, from the diaspora, Chinese-America, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan, and from this position addressed both the rest of the world and mainland China itself. Hero has stepped up to speak from the centre in an indignant register, aiming to be more spectacular, more impressive and more successful than its marginal rival. Hero can be understood as an emphatic and wholly deliberate response by mainland cultural producers to both the globalization of Chinese culture and the presumption of other "Chinas" to speak for China.

I remember when Crouching Tiger came out, I looked somewhat condescendingly upon its "Chineseness." So this piece is something of an antidote to my previous chauvinism. (What right would I have to be a Chinese cultural chauvinist, anyway?)

[Chinese film] [Lee Ang] [Zhang Yimou]

Another tempting CFP: Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Written Discourse Analysis

Found this at the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication website. The ICIC's Third Annual Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Written Discourse Analysis will be held in June, 2006. I copied the cfp details from their flyer (a Word document... can I just mention that it drives me crazy when folks do that?):

Call for Abstracts

3rd Annual Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric and Written Discourse Analysis

June 7, 2006

8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

Chairs: Ulla Connor (IUPUI) and Alan Hirvela (The Ohio State University)

Papers are invited on topics including (but not limited to):

• Theoretical and Empirical Investigations
  
• Language- and Culture-Specific Studies
  
• Changing Methodologies for Research
  
• Practical Applications
  
• Teaching and Classroom Practices
  
• Writing in School and College
  
• Writing in Business and Professional Settings
  
• Orality and Literacy Connections
  
• Critical Approaches to Contrastive Rhetoric

Deadline for Submission: April 1, 2006
Notice of Acceptance/Rejection: April 15, 2006

Papers should be 20 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words long, typed on a single page. In the upper left-hand corner, place the submitter's name, address, institutional affiliation, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address. Send submissions to:

Ulla Connor
Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication
ICIC Conference on Intercultural Rhetoric & Written Discourse Analysis
620 Union Drive – Union Bldg. Rm. 407
Indianapolis, IN 46202-5170
U.S.A.

For more information:

(317) 274-2555
E-mail: icic@iupui.edu
www.iupui.edu/~icic

Registration Fees (Lunch Included): $70 early registration, $80 onsite registration
$35 student registration, $45 onsite student registration

Sounds interesting...

[cfp] [contrastive rhetoric] [intercultural rhetoric]

Tempting CFP: "Intervention in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Encounters"

Came across this cfp for the 2nd Conference of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies. The deadline is Nov. 30 and the conference date is in July 2006. But I've gotta work on the big D...

Some details about the conference (swiped from the cfp):

Translators, interpreters, and other intercultural communicators and commentators are indispensable mediators in processes involving the movement of people, ideas, technologies, and literatures between different places, cultures, languages, and even times. Their role can, however, also be described as one of intervention, which stresses a more-or-less self-conscious commitment to effecting change and determining outcomes in societal, cultural, economic and other encounters. This, the 2nd Conference of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS), aims to address issues of intervention in interlingual and intercultural encounters, asking, for example, how such intervention can be conceptualised and enacted? And if, following Hermans (2001), such encounters require the speaking subject to position itself in relation to, and at a critical distance from, a source text, does intervention grow as we take up positions that are in direct opposition to source texts? Or does maintaining the status quo not itself sometimes imply complicity with a position that may change the future for others?

Following the success of its inaugural conference in Seoul in 2004, the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies now invites proposals for papers and panels addressing the theme of Intervention in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Encounters. The Conference will welcome contributions in areas where the ethical and ideological dimensions of translation, interpreting and other intercultural practices have traditionally been a focus, as well as in areas where these dimensions have been addressed less explicitly, although they are always present. Contributions in the following areas are thus particularly encouraged:

• Interpreting cultural interfaces

• Translator and interpreter training
• Language survival and nation-building/nationalism/transformation
• Post-colonial acculturation and hybridity
• The translation of literature (adult and children's) as intervention
• Oral literary traditions and folklore as intervention
• Globalisation and localisation in the developed/ing world
• Interpreting and the authentic voice
• Interpreting silences
• Corpus translation/interpreting studies
• Forensic linguistics
• Translation technology
• The crisis of representation in Western theory

Contributions may be approached from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including, but not restricted to: anthropology, corpus-based studies, cultural studies, gender studies, intercultural studies, interpreting studies, linguistics, literary theory, localisation, media studies, pedagogy, postcolonial studies, pragmatics, sociology, translation technology.

The conference will be held at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa and will be truly international in its outlook, while at the same time drawing on South Africa's recent and rich experience of cultural and political transformation.

Well, maybe next time, though I have an idea for a paper on translating silences...

[cfp] [intercultural communication] [translation]

BBC News on Taiwan's work on a Tamiflu copy

BBC News has an article titled "Taiwan to ignore flu drug patent" on its website.

I wrote this commment to BBC:

I don't think the headline "Taiwan to ignore flu drug patent" is an accurate reflection of the situation. The health official you quoted does say that they are in communication with Roche to try to get permission to mass produce. So they're not "ignoring" the patent.

Also, you might mention that Taiwan has never been allowed into the World Health Organization. (This means it probably won't get any WHO assistance if the bird flu attacks the island, just as it didn't get [any real] assistance from WHO when SARS struck.) In the end, we might need to balance the company's right to a patent against the right of the people of Taiwan to live.

Weekend projects

Updated!

• Figure out what went wrong after I upgraded the ZoneAlarm firewall on our desktop computer. Now we can't access the Internet at all on that computer (but I can on this notebook, which is on a wireless network with the desktop). I even removed the firewall from the desktop, but the Internet connection still doesn't work. Help!!!
  [Update, 10/24/05: Still trying to figure this one out. I tried the "complete uninstall" but there are about 3 files I just can't get rid of. Whenever I get on the Web I get Zone Alarm's warning page that they've locked down the Internet service. Then they give me a bunch of instructions that don't work. I'm contemplating a complete reformat of my C drive (!), but will try a few more things before I get to the point...]
  [Update, 10/28/05: Finally got the Zone Alarm completely uninstalled. Didn't have to reformat C drive, either. Evidently I'm not the only person who has problems with Zone Alarm 6.0. 5.0 worked fine for me and I wish I still had a copy of it to reinstall. Now I've got to find a decent firewall program that won't gum up the works again...]
  


• Check in on the online chat that the students in my Intercultural Communication class will be doing (either Friday night or Saturday morning--not sure yet). I'm enjoying that class--got a great bunch of students. (Actually, I've always had a great bunch for that course!)
  [Update, 10/24/05: The chat seemed to go OK. There will probably be another one Tuesday morning for those who couldn't make it on Saturday.]
  


• Respond to the ICC students' comments on our course blog. I'm way behind on that...
  [Update, 10/24/05: Er... uh...]
  


• Put together a poster for the upcoming workshop on the teaching and practice of writing that our department will be hosting (Saturday, Dec. 3). The title of the workshop: "Situating Writing Instruction in an EFL Context: A Conversation with Charles Bazerman". Dr. Bazerman, who is professor of education at UCSB, will present on text type in teaching and on theory and practice of writing assessment and we'll have panel discussions on those topics, too, and how they might be applied in writing instruction in Taiwan universities. (Also, perhaps, on how EFL contexts like Taiwan's can challenge North American understandings about teaching text type and assessing writing.) Should be fun! I also need to get some work done on the website for the workshop. Got a draft up, but I'm not ready to unveil it yet...
  [Update, 10/24/05: We (the former native Chinese speaker and I) got the poster done. Looks good and will be sent to a university English department near you soon! (If you're near a university English department in Taiwan, that is...)]
  


• Continue preparing for dissertation-related interviews that will be coming up in the next few weeks.
  [Update, 10/24/05: Worked a bit on this. Mostly basked in the nice, helpful, and encouraging comments from my advisor, though...]

Babelfish: a new approach to EFL composing?

Recently I've been coming across some English compositions that have me completely dumbfounded. They contain sentences the likes of which I have never seen--grammatical errors and diction problems that are completely new to me (and I've been teaching EFL writing for over 10 years). I am about 90 percent sure that the students writing these compositions are composing in Chinese, then using some sort of translation program (either online or some software) to translate the compositions into English. As you can probably guess, the compositions that come out of such an approach are sometimes pretty bizarre. I'm not going to quote any student writing here, but I'll copy some text that I plan on showing them tomorrow.

I copied a paragraph from one of the stories we read, "The Judge's House" (originally written by Bram Stoker and retold in simplified version by Rosemary Border), into the Babelfish translator. Here's the sentence:

He almost dropped the lamp. He stepped back at once, and the sweat of fear was upon his pale face. His knees shook. His whole body trembled like a leaf. But he was young and brave, and he moved forward again with his lamp.

Then I had the translator turn it into Chinese:

他幾乎投下了燈。他立即跨步, 並且恐懼汗水是在他的蒼白面孔。他的膝蓋震動了。他的整體打顫了像葉子。但他是年輕和勇敢的, 並且他再今後搬走了與他的燈。

The Chinese is a bit odd (OK, it's positively weird). First of all, "dropped" becomes "threw"; then "stepped back" becomes "stepped" (no indication of direction); "the sweat of fear was upon his face" is rendered into very unidiomatic Chinese. A more likely sentence would be something like "他蒼白的面孔上冒出了恐懼的汗水。" (I'm sure someone can come up something better, but...) His knee is now no longer shaking--it's vibrating. And so on... Toward the end, "he moved forward again with his lamp" becomes a sentence about moving out (as in, from one's home) again from this day forward... er... with his lamp.

Just for the fun of it, I used Babelfish to translate the Chinese back into English:

He has nearly thrown down the lamp. He steps immediately the step, and the frightened sweat is in his pale face. His knee vibrated. His whole trembled has liked the leaf. But he is young and brave, and he from now on moved out and his lamp again.

If you're saying, "Huh?", you're right. And this is what I'm seeing: mistakes that I've never seen non-native writers make before. Mistakes that are different--and usually more severe--than they probably would have made had they written it themselves in the first place.

My question about this is, how does this fit into the usual discussions of student writing and academic integrity? I sort of feel that if used correctly, these translation programs aren't much worse than using bilingual dictionaries--if the students can be taught not to depend on them blindly, the programs can help. (I've used them sometimes to help me write stuff in Chinese--but usually I have to do a lot of "repair work" to what gets produced.)

On the other hand, I also have to think that one of my purposes for asking students to write something is for them to practice using the English that they have already learned rather than merely generating English text. Perhaps I need to make that purpose clearer to them...

[Babelfish] [EFL writing] [machine translation]

Abecedaria on Chinese dyslexia

Link here. The author, Suzanne McCarthy, cites C K Leong, a professor who has worked on this topic for quite a number of years. Very interesting.

Uses and abuses of the "impact factor"

Crooked Timber has a post about an article in the latest Chronicle of Higher Ed regarding uses and abuses of the concept of the "impact" factor by journals in or wanting to be in the ISI's listings of "important" journals. (ISI--owned by Thomson--produces the SSCI, SCI, and A&HCI, as we'll recall.) One interesting place in the Chronicle article is where Eugene Garfield, who helped develop the concept of the impact factor, "compares his brainchild to nuclear energy: a force that can help society but can unleash mayhem when it is misused":

"We never predicted that people would turn this into an evaluation tool for giving out grants and funding," says Mr. Garfield.

One abuse of the impact factor is the pressure to self-cite (that is, cite other articles published in the same journal) in order to boost the journal's impact factor. Another problem has to do with the shaky relationship between journals' impact factors and that of the articles published in those journals:

Mr. Garfield and ISI routinely point out the problems of using impact factors for individual papers or people. "That is something we have wrestled with quite a bit here," says Jim Pringle, vice president for development at Thomson Scientific, the division that oversees ISI. "It is a fallacy to think you can say anything about the citation pattern of an article from the citation pattern of a journal."

Such warnings have not helped. In several countries in Europe and Asia, administrators openly use impact factors to evaluate researchers or allocate money:

• In England, hiring panels routinely consider impact factors, says Mr. Nevill.

• According to Spanish law, researchers are rewarded for publishing in journals defined by ISI as prestigious, which in practice has meant in the upper third of the impact-factor listings.

• In China, scientists get cash bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, and graduate students in physics at some universities must place at least two articles in journals with a combined impact factor of 4 to get their Ph.D.'s, says Martin Blume, editor in chief of the American Physical Society, who recently met with scientists in China.

The obsession with impact factors has also seeped into the United States, although less openly. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, says a young faculty member once told him about a policy articulated by her department chair. She was informed that in order to get tenure, scientists should publish in journals with an impact factor above 5.

"We are slaves to the impact factor," says Mr. Frank, whose organization publishes 14 science journals.

Although the article is focused on the sciences, one might wonder if there are similar problems with the abuse of this approach in the social sciences and humanities. (It's not hard to guess what my answer to that would be...)

There's an online discussion hosted by the Chronicle. (Begins at 1 p.m., US Eastern time)

[academic publishing] [gaming the system] [impact factor]

Allergy season

If this keeps up, I'm going to rename this blog "Red Eyes and Runny Nose"... (*sniff*)

A meme I can't resist...

(via Clancy at CultureCat)

For this, you go to Google and type "[your first name] needs"... I got the following:

Jonathan needs to be redeemed, or made completely evil. (They're both tempting...)

Jonathan needs to draw up a business plan to demonstrate to potential backers that his idea is a sound investment.

Jonathan needs to restructure his portfolio.

Jonathan needs to start drinking more beer.

Jonathan needs to leave.

Jonathan needs some help with healthy eating and exercise, so Kathleen casts his little Brother as an aide. (Well, I'll agree with the first part, but I don't have a little brother...)

Jonathan needs to stop by and do some landscaping. (OK, but only if you don't make me mow the lawn.)

Jonathan needs to have the sh*t beat out of him. (And I know who's willing to do it...)

Jonathan needs to refocus his life as well as his career. (That's almost as harsh as the previous one!)

Jonathan needs to be sent to La Paz for an electrocardiogram at an estimated cost of 1,650.00 pesos. (Can't I just do it at the Veteran's Hospital in town?)

What Jonathan needs is some kind of crash course in how to come to grips with what has become of his life. (Best advice so far...)

Jonathan needs to be a man and own up to his own mistakes. (Maybe that's what the crash course would teach me?)

Jonathan needs to learn the definition of a "clean lead."

Jonathan needs to find a pit filled with punji sticks. (And to learn the definition of "punji sticks"...)

Jonathan needs a punch in the face...seriously. (What is it with these people?)

Jonathan needs to be struck down hard because of his actions. (Ouch!)

Jonathan needs some love cuz he's been spurned by an unfeeling Hollywood. (Especially if they're the folks beating the sh*t out of me, punching me in the face, and striking me down hard...)

And finally...

jonathan needs his beauty sleep. (Amen!)

Watch that language...

From today's Liberty Times (自由電子報) comes the story of PHILIP (his name is in all caps throughout the article), a British businessman who got accused by a former employee of "publicly insulting" (公然侮辱) the employee by using the F-word (also all caps--maybe he was shouting) at a meeting. Fortunately for PHILIP, the judge in Taipei declared him not guilty because PHILIP had used the word to describe the employee's watch (the employee was 20 minutes late) and not the employee. Meanwhile, a guard at an apartment building was fined NT$1500 for using the Chinese version of F--K because the court decided he had used it to insult the other party directly. So if you're going to use the word, be careful how you use it!

Al Gore on democracy, the media, and public discourse

Al Gore spoke on Oct. 5 about the "grave danger" that public discourse in the U.S. is in. The transcript is available here.

[Update: Rebecca MacKinnon summarizes Gore's speech.]

[Al Gore] [public discourse] [rhetoric] [USA]

Discussion about rhetoric and the humanities at the Blogora

The Blogora, a rhetoric blog that doesn't often seem to contain posts about rhetoric (at least as far as I can tell), has an interesting post by James Aune where he tosses around some of his views about the relationship of rhetoric to the humanities and social sciences. He has already received two comments, and hopefully will get more feedback for the position paper he's working on. I'm looking forward to seeing what he finally comes up with.

(By the way, I registered for an account--who knows, one of these days I might be brave enough to post a comment there--and was pleasantly surprised to receive my password in the form of an e-mail from the "World Wide Web Owner". Glad to see the ol' owner of the Web is keeping busy sending out passwords to ordinary folks like me...)

[Blogora] [humanities] [rhetoric] [social sciences]

Word verification activated

What Rank said. Except as a rhetorician, I'd like to see some words like "bdelygmia", "insinuatio", or "verborum bombus"...

Big autumn typhoon on its way...

Its name is "Longwang" (龍王) or "Dragon King" and it's got a big ol' dragon eye... It looks like it will be affecting us tomorrow and possibly Monday (which might mean no classes Monday?...)

(picture from the Central Weather Bureau website)

[Update, Oct. 5: Longwang passed through quickly and hardly left any rain in the Taichung area. We had classes on Monday, much to my FENM students' dismay. (We had a quiz that day.)]

[Longwang] [Taiwan] [typhoon] [weather]