Some more play with ChatGPT

This evening, my wife and I were playing with ChatGPT to see how it translates from Japanese and Chinese. I remembered that I had once translated a passage about rhetoric from Tseng Yueh-nung, the first president of Tunghai University. It's written in a more literary style (although it is fairly understandable if you read modern Chinese), so I wanted to test ChatGPT on it. Here are the results:

Me: Translate: 希臘羅馬政治即臻全盛，日中則昃。於是道德淪亡，人懷自競之心，挾數任術，以獵取功名而致富貴。雄辯學 (rhetoric)，逐為必修之科。整體教育反失去重心，一時消極與失望，詭詐與荒瑩，籠罩全歐，不可救藥，如是者數百年。

ChatGPT: During the heyday of Greek and Roman politics, the situation in China and Japan was declining. As a result, morality decayed, and people harbored a sense of rivalry, employing any number of schemes to hunt for fame, wealth, and status. The study of rhetoric became a mandatory subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, enveloping all of Europe for hundreds of years, with no hope of recovery.

Me (somewhat rudely): 日中則昃 doesn't have anything to do with Japan and China. It's talking about the sun at its zenith declining.

ChatGPT: You are correct, I apologize for the mistake. "日中則昃" is a Chinese idiom that means "the sun is at its zenith and then begins to decline," and it has nothing to do with Japan and China as I previously stated. Here's the corrected translation:

At the height of Greek and Roman politics, the sun was at its zenith and then began to decline, just as the morality of society began to decline. People became competitive, using various means to pursue fame and fortune. The study of eloquence and rhetoric became a required subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to a period of passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, that enveloped all of Europe for several hundred years, and seemed irreparable.

I think it did a decent job on the revised translation. It makes the comparison between the sun's decline and the decline of morality in society more obvious with "just as," which is not (I don't think) in the Chinese original (於是 is more like "therefore" or "as a result," not "just as"). So it's taking an implicit comparison and making it explicit. 

We tried ChatGPT with 陋室銘 by 劉禹錫. My wife got a similar kind of situation with the last line, "孔子云：「何陋之有？」", which it translated as something like "What does it matter if it's humble as long as I am at peace?" I generated 10 translations but never got that version. Here's what I got for the last sentence:

1.  Confucius said, "What does it matter if the room is humble?"
2. Confucius said: "What does it matter that the room is simple?"
3. Confucius said, "What does it matter if it's humble?"
4. Confucius said, "How humble it is, yet how significant!" [Hmmm... this one is interesting...]
5. Confucius said, "What humble abodes can also have admirable qualities?" [Hmmm...]
6. Confucius said, "How can a humble abode be considered inferior?"
7. Confucius said, "What does being shabby matter?"
8. Confucius said, "What is humble can also be distinguished."
9. Confucius said, "What does it matter that it is humble?"
10. Confucius said, "What is humble about it?" [I think ChatGPT was getting tired here...]

I looked for some English translations online. This one by Abby Lu notes that "Confucius actually said: ‘What is ugly about the home of a gentleman?’, the latter of which the author cut out of humility." (子曰：君子居之，何陋之有？). See also this translation (an interesting website, by the way!). 

Anyway, I'm getting off-track now, and I should go to bed so I can get back to my book review tomorrow. My book review is coming along well, by the way (thanks for asking); I think I'll be able to get a good draft of it done by Friday. 

Some slight changes of plan

I'm a bit behind on my book review; I had hoped to finish it by the end of the month, but my allergies have been bothering me a lot lately, which has slowed my work down. I'm still hoping to finish it by the end of next week. 

After that, I had originally planned to read Xiaoye You's new book, but I just got the syllabus for the RSA Summer Institute seminar that I'm participating in on decolonizing comparative rhetorics. We're going to be reading about 19 articles/chapters of various lengths, most of which I haven't read before, so I'd better get a start on that work. I also need to write a short bio statement and resurrect a work-in-progress to get it in good enough shape that I'm not embarrassed to share it. (That's due May 18; coincidentally, the most recent draft of my paper is dated May 18, 2021...)

So once I get that book review draft done, I'll try to write a few notes here on the articles I'm reading for this seminar. We'll see how that goes. 

Grading done; now to get to work...

I just finished my grading, so now (well, probably tomorrow) I'll get to work to get an early start on my fellowship leave. First I have to write a book review, which will first involve reading the book! I hope to get all that done by the end of April. Then I'll be getting into the other pile of books and articles that I need to read. 

I've been thinking that to keep myself honest, I should make some notes on my readings here, sort of like what I was doing for my dissertation on my old Kun zhi ji blog (which, surprisingly, still exists!). I never got much feedback on my notes in that blog, though Kerim Friedman once responded to a post about "the literacy crisis in postwar Taiwan," And William Starosta responded to a post about two of his articles on intercultural rhetoric that I had been reading. 

So... I guess if you see me writing some notes on your book or article, feel free to respond. I would appreciate your thoughts, questions, corrections, and/or praise (ahem), all of which will keep me honest in this task I'm setting up for myself. 

Some notes on Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》

楊翠, 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》，蔚藍文化， 2016。 Yang Tsui, Never Give Up: Yang Kui's Resistance, Labor, and Writing. Azure Books, 2016.

I finished reading this book on April 3 (I always write the date that I finished a book on the cover page, just to remind myself). Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to write or even think about it because of end-of-the-semester grading that I'm buried in. I'll try now to write down some notes on some of the points from the book that stood out for me. This will be very impressionistic for now; perhaps I'll come back to some of these in some later posts if there's interest. 

In more-or less chronological order, here's some of what I remember from the book without looking at it (this is a good exercise, by the way):

• Yang Kui's idea of countering Japanese “history” with his own writing;
• The variety of genres he worked in, including some that it seems he invented (I’m thinking here of his 報告文學 (literary reportage) and 街頭劇 (street performance/plays), etc.);
• His arguments during the early postwar years (before he went to prison in Green Island) with mainlanders (Yang Tsui calls them "authors who came from China" [中國來台作家]) who dismissed the idea of a “Taiwanese” literature;
• His friendships with other mainlanders, like the philosopher Xu Fuguan (徐復觀) and the novelist Chiang Kuei (姜貴), who visited Yang at his Tunghai Garden, where he lived after he got out of prison;
• His relationship with his wife Ye Tao (葉陶) and his granddaughter Yang Tsui (and how Yang Tsui writes about their relationship);
• His insistence on sticking on principles, even when at times it plunged his family (even deeper) into poverty; 
• The writing and editing work he did in prison on Green Island

My initial reaction to Yang Tsui's portrayal of Yang Kui's incarceration on Green Island--the earlier parts of her depiction of his writing and publishing in the prison's poster-newspaper (壁報) New Life (新生活), his writing and production of plays, etc.-- was that not only was his time in prison very productive for him, but that it was arguably pretty enjoyable. He didn’t have to worry about family responsibilities, for instance, and could focus on creative work. Yang Tsui also mentions times when Ye Tao and their second son Yang Jian (楊建) were able to visit him for up to half a month. 

But then after reading through all that and thinking that Green Island wasn’t so bad, I was brought up short by Yang Tsui's description of the difficulties his family experienced during that time--the trouble they had keeping body and soul together (exacerbated by Yang’s requests--even demands--for money to buy him medicine), for instance, and the social stigma of having a husband/father in prison. On Yang’s side of things, he tried to communicate with his family through letters, but there was a limit to how much he was allowed to write (300 characters per letter) , so evidently a lot of letters didn’t get sent. In fact, at one point he was punished by not being allowed to write anything to his family for three months (p. 216). Yang Tsui describes his letters to his family, which appear to have been kept in his "New Life Notebooks" (新生筆記簿), as him trying to be a father by instructing his children. Yang Tsui characterizes him as a "Green Island Teacher Chang" (綠島張老師; "Teacher Chang" is an organization in Taiwan devoted to youth counseling).

I found myself wanting to know more about Ye Tao, who is portrayed--during the Japanese period in particular--as being a more outgoing and vocal person than Yang, one who gave speeches and taught, while Yang was more a quiet writerly type of person. She kind of disappears into the background later on, always standing behind him and taking on a supporting role, though it’s clear that she tried to hold the family together while he was in prison. 

After Ye Tao died when Yang and his family had been living at Tunghai Garden, his children all moved away to have their own lives. For some reason, they allowed Yang Kui to take care of his young granddaughter Yang Tsui, something that she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed (though she blames herself as much as she blames him for the troubles they had). Later in life, when she was in college, she wanted to help him write his biography (she was majoring in history at Fu Jen University at the time), but seemed not to be able to get to that when he was alive. 

I enjoyed reading about the life of Yang Kui from the point of view of his granddaughter. I'm not sure how I'd characterize this book--perhaps part biography, part memoir. Yang Tsui spent much of her childhood living with her grandfather at his 東海花園 (Tunghai Garden) home near Tunghai University, and later in her book, she writes about that experience in third-person voice, perhaps to distance her current self from the stubborn and ungrateful person she portrays her childhood self as being. Later on, after she tells of Yang Kui's death in 1985, Yang Tsui attaches a postcript called "Confessions of a Garden Girl" (花園女孩懺情錄), in which she describes (this time in the first person) her last few years with Yang Kui, including when she was a senior at Fu-Jen and lived with him in a house in the hills belonging to a friend of his. She moved out with the excuse that she needed to live closer to the university so she could study more for graduate school entrance exams instead of spending a lot of time commuting. She seems to blame this decision for her grandfather's death. 

In a sense, then, this book acts as a kind of penance for Yang Tsui, as she suggests in this postscript when she writes that "this book is an inscription of more than 30 years of penance" (這本書，銘刻著超過三十年的精神苦行).   

There's a lot more I could say about this book, and I will try to dig into some of those topics I listed above at some point if I get a chance. I think Yang Kui is someone I'm going to have to research in more depth.

Wrapping up another semester; beginning something new

I have about a week left of the semester, so I've been doing a lot of reading/commenting on student work recently. I have a draft of my blog post on Yang Tsui's book about her grandfather, Yang Kui, but it's not in any shape yet to meet its public. Maybe I'll have some time to work on it tomorrow.

Some good news is that my application for a Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Fellowship (a one-semester leave--a "sabbatical" by any other name) was approved, so I'll be spending the fall reading and (hopefully) writing a lot about comparative rhetoric and Taiwan history, literature, rhetoric, in order to work on an article and design a comparative rhetoric course. By coincidence, in my first-year writing course this afternoon we were doing some reflective writing about this past semester for the sake of a final reflective piece I'm asking them to write--a letter to their future selves giving themselves advice, warning, encouragement for future writing tasks. I was doing "loop writing" (focused freewriting) on some prompts provided by Elbow and Belanoff in their 1989 book, A Community of Writers. One of the prompts was about the physical aspects of writing, and I wrote this:

Physical: One of the things I’m going to have to think about as I work this summer and into next semester is how I’m going to do the physical work of writing. I’m always taken by Jonathan Spence’s acknowledgements in The Search for Modern China where he thanks the staff of a pizza place near Yale, where he would work on his book. I wonder how he did it. There was a Twitter thread that mentioned that he wrote on legal pads, but I also wonder if he brought books or archival photocopies, etc. with him. I remember when I was working on my dissertation, sometimes I would bring photocopies of archival documents with me to McDonald’s or Starbucks or Dante [a café] or wherever, and I would have a spiral-ring notebook in which I’d write ideas down, sometimes just copying stuff from the archival docs. I used different colors for the quotes vs. for my own ideas. At some point I suppose that I probably would then copy some of that stuff to my computer. Nowadays I don’t imagine doing that kind of thing, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try that out. I have a lot of books that I have to read for this “sabbatical.” Maybe some of the days when I go out to work (whether it be a coffee shop or a library), I can just take one or two of the books I want to work on and a notebook in which I can take notes and write out my ideas longhand. I haven’t done that in so long. I don’t think I’ve done that kind of work since I finished my dissertation back in 2011. I don’t necessarily have to do this every time I go out (I didn’t do it every time back then, even), but maybe some days I can ditch the computer. (Wish I could ditch my cellphone too, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea.) The purpose for this would be, hopefully, to get me to concentrate on my reading and writing rather than spending a lot of energy fighting the urge to check my email or Twitter or something else or to look up something on the internet that ends up taking me down a rabbit hole. ... Yeah. I guess I’ll invest in notebook and try this out.

So I am copying this here in part to remind myself of this and to ask all of my reader to remind me about this idea: try writing longhand sometimes. Get away from the computer. (Here's a link to my post about Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements.)

Two new books in the former native speaker's library; writing plans

I received my copies of Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China and Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's (eds.) Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so that's exciting. You's book promises to take a "decolonial and transnational approach" to the study of rhetoric in ancient China, so I think I'll be bumping that book to the front of my readings in preparation for the "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics" RSA Summer Institute seminar I mentioned I'll be participating in this May. 

But first I want to finish reading Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), after which I'll write some notes here about that. It's quite a moving (and sometimes frustrating) biography of Yang Kui (or Yang K'uei, if you prefer), and it has me thinking a lot about Yang as rhetor and rhetorician. I'll try writing up something about Yang Tsui's depiction of him in that light.

Julean H. Arnold, Education in Formosa (1908)

Arnold, Julean H. Education in Formosa. Bulletin, No. 5. Whole Number 388, United States Bureau of Education, Department of the Interior, 1908.

Came across this document while spelunking through the web for sources about Candidius, the seventeenth-century Dutch missionary to Formosa. (I did find some good sources on him, by the way.) Anyway, this relatively short bulletin (about 70 pp.) was written by Arnold, the American consul at Tamsui (淡水) at the time,* and was of interest to the US government, according to the letter of transmittal, because 

educational campaign of the Japanese Government in Formosa, which he describes with careful attention to essential details, offers a significant parallel to the educational campaign which our Government is conducting, at no great distance  from Formosa and under somewhat similar conditions, in the Philippine Islands.

The text is a bit hard to read--it's not a great copy, but a transcription of the preface might give some idea of the tone of the document:

With Japan and America entering the ranks of the colonizing powers, the question of colonial education becomes particularly important, especially so in view of the fact that education in both Japan and America occupies a commanding position. It is rather significant that the two great Pacific powers should have become colonizing nations within three years of each other.

It is the purpose of this monograph to set forth the results of Japan's efforts to establish an educational system in Formosa, her first colonial possession. In order that we may fully understand the nature of the problem with which she has to contend, I have attempted to describe somewhat fully the work of her predecessors in the island, the Dutch and the Chinese. Thus the monograph has naturally resolved itself into a history of education in Formosa. While I have touched upon the subject of education in both China and Japan, I have made no effort to describe conditions as they obtain in those countries. For such a description, the reader is referred to Mr. Robert E. Lewis's admirable book, The Educational Conquest of the Far East.

For much of my material I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Rev. William Campbell's work, entitled "Formosa Under the Dutch," and to the official publications of the Formosan government. I am especially indebted to Mr. Mochiji, director of education in Formosa, and to Mr. Ogawa, his very able assistant, for their extreme kindness in affording me every possible opportunity to study conditions at first hand.

JULEAN H. ARNOLD.

AMERICAN CONSULATE.

Tamsui (Daitotei), Formosa

I'd also note that this book is cited in E. Patricia Tsurumi's Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945.

*The author also produced a booklet entitled The Peoples Of Formosa, which was published in1909 by the Smithsonian. A footnote on the first page of the booklet describes it as part of a report originally sent by Arnold to teh State Department, translating a report to the Japanese government by "Mr. Oshima, Superintendent of Police of the Japanese Government of Formosa ... on the management of savage affairs during the fiscal year 1907." Arnold's papers are available at the Hoover Institution Archives.

Taiwan Studies Workshop at the University of Tübingen (Oct 2023): proposal deadline May 31

Copying this from the NATSA website to keep in mind:

Taiwan as Pioneer workshop

at the ERCCT, University of Tübingen, Germany

4-6 October 2023

The Taiwan as Pioneer (TAP) project at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany, will hold a workshop for Ph.D. candidates, postdocs and established scholars, from October 4-6, 2023. The workshop will be conducted in English and Chinese. The main topic for the workshop is "Innovative methodologies and new perspectives on Taiwan studies." Other paper submissions pertaining to the fields of Taiwan society and culture are also highly welcomed, but we ask participants to highlight and discuss their methodological choices in more detail than in a regular presentation.

This established format of the workshop provides participants with the opportunity to:

• present their research to an international audience of peers

• engage in scholarly exchange on theory and methodology

• get to know Tübingen, the ERCCT and Tübingen University

• join the TAP network

• the possibility to contribute to TAP’s Handbook of methodologies for Taiwan Studies

Travel expenses and accommodation will be covered by TAP:

• Participants from Germany: travel fees up to 200 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Europe: travel fees up to 500 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Asia (and Taiwanese people and Taiwanese studies reserchers in North America): travel fees up to 1,400 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

Successful applicants are requested to submit a 6000 words (TNR 12, single line spacing, does not include reference list) research paper after the workshop (by 12-31-2023) for online publication on the TAP website at the University of Tübingen. The possibility that this paper could become a chapter of the Handbook can be discussed in more detail.

To apply, please send your CV and an outline of your research project (max 2500 words) until May 31, 2023 to:

Dr. Amélie Keyser-Verreault, Ph.D.

TAP project lead at the ERCCT

Mail: amelie.keyser-verreault@uni.tuebingen.de

Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 30th.

About TAP: The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has awarded a grant to four post-doc researchers to conduct the joint research program TAP (Taiwan as a Pioneer) for a duration of four years. TAP is an interdisciplinary and supra-regional postdoctoral joint project for the promotion, structural strengthening and networking of Taiwan research in Sinology. The research focuses on Taiwan's role as an innovator in the dynamics of global megatrends. The inter-institutional network between the universities of Trier, Tübingen and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, funded by the BMBF, is to create intra- and interdisciplinary structures over the next four years (02.2022 - 01.2026), by means of which Taiwan research can be sustainably anchored in the German science location. For more information, please see:

https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/faecher/chinese-studies/translate-to-englisch-tap-taiwan-als-pionier

About the TAP network:

https://uni-tuebingen.de/einrichtungen/zentrale-einrichtungen/european-research-center-on-contemporary-taiwan/activities/taiwan-as-a-pioneer/

ChatGPT's suggestions about my list of comparative rhetoric readings

Just a footnote the previous post: after I finished it, I plugged the comparative rhetoric readings into ChatGPT to get its response to how to organize those readings. It didn't complain as much about the diversity of topics, but it just spat out the list in a different order. I asked it how it decided on the order, and it gave me the following response:

I organized the list of articles and books in a way that provides a coherent flow of ideas and themes. I began by grouping together articles that have similar themes or authors, and then arranged them in a way that makes sense chronologically or thematically.

I started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation." Then, I moved on to articles that focus on decolonization and pluriversal rhetorics, such as Cushman et al.'s "Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric" and Johnson and Endres' "Decolonizing Settler Public Address."

Next, I included articles that examine non-Western rhetorical traditions, such as Lipson and Binkley's "Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics," Lu's "Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" and "The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong," and Tomasi's "Rhetoric in Modern Japan." I also included articles that discuss the development of comparative rhetoric and its future, such as Mao's "Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border" and "Thinking beyond Aristotle" and Wang's "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms."

Finally, I included articles that explore other related themes such as posthumanism, hybridity, and materialist approaches to activism. The order of the articles and books is not set in stone, and it could be adjusted based on the reader's interests and needs.

This is interesting to me for two reasons: how it says it decided how to organize the sources (sounds pretty reasonable) and the fact that it basically appears to be reflecting on its process. For the fun of it, I asked it what it learned from the process, and it said,

As an AI language model, I do not learn in the same way that humans do. However, I can tell you that organizing sources in a systematic and coherent way helps to make information more accessible and easier to understand. By categorizing sources and grouping them together, it becomes easier to identify patterns, compare and contrast different viewpoints, and draw more informed conclusions. Additionally, organizing sources can help to identify gaps in knowledge or areas where further research may be needed. Overall, a well-organized set of sources can facilitate the research process and ultimately lead to more robust and accurate conclusions.

Well, that's sort of a relief... 

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky...

I've quoted this poem a couple of times already. One of the many things that I have trouble with is deciding what book to read next. Sometimes I just grab something off the shelf that looks interesting. Sometimes I choose something that I've had for a very long time because I feel guilty that I've neglected it (hi, John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800!). Sometimes I choose something written in Chinese because I feel guilty that I haven't read a book in Chinese for a long time (hi, Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》!). Sometimes I choose a biography or a work of fiction because I find them easier to read than a more scholarly or theoretical work, and sometimes I choose a more scholarly or theoretical work because I feel guilty that I'm making life too easy for myself by reading something that isn't torture to get through. (My Calvinist feelings of total depravity even motivate my reading choices, it seems.)

But I've got a long list of readings that I've given myself for that proposed semester leave that I mentioned (no word on that yet), and I'm trying to decide the order of the readings. One way might be just to jump from one book to another than seems relevant based on what I learn from the first book. Another might be to look through the books to find themes that connect them, sort of like writing a syllabus for myself. I haven't found any good answers on the internet yet (probably because I'm not using the right search terms). Maybe I should ask ChatGPT?

OK, here's what I asked the old Chatter:

I have a lot of books that I need to read for a research project. They're on a variety of topics, some more closely related to each other than others. How should I decide the order to read them in?

And they said,

When deciding the order to read your books for a research project, it's important to keep in mind your goals and priorities for the project. Here are some steps you can take to decide the order: 

1. Identify the most important books: Take a look at all the books you have and identify the ones that are most important to your research. These may be the ones that are most closely related to your topic or the ones that are most highly recommended. 

2. Create categories: Once you've identified the most important books, try to categorize them based on their topic or theme. This can help you to see how the books relate to each other and which ones should be read together.

3. Prioritize: Decide which categories of books are most important for your research and prioritize them. This can help you to focus your reading and ensure that you're getting the most important information first.

4. Balance: As you decide the order in which to read your books, try to balance the categories so that you're not reading too many on one topic before moving on to another. This can help you to stay engaged and avoid burnout.

5. Make a plan: Once you've decided on the order in which to read your books, create a reading plan. This can help you to stay on track and ensure that you're making progress towards your research goals. You can also adjust your plan as needed based on your progress and any new information you learn.

Overall, by identifying the most important books, categorizing them, prioritizing, balancing, and making a plan, you can create an effective reading order that helps you achieve your research goals. 

Hmmm... all in all, not bad advice. (Wonder where they're getting it from?) It sounds basically like what I said about writing a syllabus for myself, though. (With the possible exception of the point about "balance".)

I'm going to try something more specific, though. I'm going to feed my reading list into ChatGPT and see what it suggests about that... Wait a second...

Well, it didn't know quite how to answer that: "Wow, that's quite a list of books! Since the topics of the books are quite diverse, it's difficult to suggest a specific order for you to read them in." It did give suggestions about how to read some of the books, though. Back to the drawing board...

Watching "The #Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities"

Spring break has started, but I have a lot of stuff to do. But first I want to watch Jeffrey Wasserstrom's talk on the the "#Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities" from Feb. 15. I like his historical take on transnational activism. This is the description of the talk:

As a distinctively twenty-first century phenomenon, #MilkTeaAlliance refers to struggles from Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma to Taiwan against the increasing power of the Chinese Communist Party. The campaign is empowered by social media, but region-wide cross-border collaboration among activists and exiles is not without precedents. This talk will explore the similarities and differences between #MilkTeaAlliance and its historical predecessors, and reflects on the limits of social science analysis that fails to go beyond geographical borders. The staying power and the future influences will also be assessed.

Wasserstrom talks about Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (梁啟超), who has shown up in some of my recent reading. He compares Liang to Thai student activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, who has, like Liang, translated some works about democracy from the West (and, in Netiwit's case, from Hong Kong and China). 

A couple of more books in the former native speaker's collection

Last week I submitted a proposal for a one-semester leave to do some research to simultaneously work on an article and develop an undergraduate course on comparative rhetoric. I won't find out whether I receive the leave until April, but I decided to start (continue, actually) buying some of the books that I hope to be reading then. Some of the books are specifically about comparative rhetoric and some are about various aspects of Taiwanese society, history, and communication. The latter group are mostly for the article I'm working on. The last few days I've received two books:

• Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lexington Books, 2017.
  This book looks promising as a communication studies-focused look at sajiao (撒嬌) beyond the common understanding of it as a communication practice used primarily by women to sound cute or to persuade their (usually male) partners. This book "won the Outstanding Book Award in the International and Intercultural Communication Division in the annual convention of National Communication Association in 2018."
  
  
• Richard Madsen, Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan. University of California Press, 2007.
  I heard about this one through Twitter and thought that I read it to get a sense of how Buddhism and Daoism might have affected rhetorical practices in Taiwan's process of democratization. I've seen reviews from sociologists that praise the book, but I've also seen more critical reviews from scholars in religious studies who argue that Madsen misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Taiwanese Buddhism and Daoism. 

Whether I get the leave or not, I'm looking forward to reading these (and other) books. But now it's back to grading...

Practice with Chat GPT

 

Books, books, books

I have been really busy this month ever since the semester started, but I have to squeeze in at least one note or I'll feel like even more of a failure than I currently feel... (!)

Just received my copy of Ian Rowen's new book, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2022). My wife keeps asking what he means by "many Taiwans," so I guess I'd better read this book sooner or later. (Fortunately, it's rather short at less than 200 pp.)

First, though I need to finish Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), which I started reading on the commuter rail at the beginning of the semester. I find myself wishing the train ride were longer (and quieter!) so I could read more each trip. 

I'm trying to decide if I should buy the paperback or the ebook version of Chiang Kuo-yu's (蔣闊宇) 《全島總罷工》(前衛, 2020). I read an interview between Chiang and Itamar Waksman, and it seems like it's discussing another important piece of Taiwanese social movement history that I should learn more about. I'm leaning toward buying the ebook because it's cheaper (especially considering postage), but for some reason ebooks aren't as convenient for me. I've bought several of them and don't even know what's become of them...