A retired NBA basketball player once confessed:
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed."
It sounds like a daunting confession. He concluded:
"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
Who is he?
Michael Jordan, who won 6 NBA Champions, 5 NBA Most Valuable Palyer (MVP), and many more awards and records. The greatest NBA legend of all time.
Wednesday 9 May 2012
Saturday 5 May 2012
Historians old and new
I am not a historian of medical history, let alone on eighteenth-century men-midwives in England. A recent heated debate between a professional (Helen King) and an amateur (Don Shelton) in this field (see references), however, has drawn my serious attention to the ideas history (good or bad), the definition of historians (trained, amateur, or 'new'), and the benefits of the internet (good or bad?).
Qualifications define profession, provide credentials, create authority, and at the same time exclude amateurs. I am a historian because I was trained to be so in a History department while I am not a literary critic because I have never received relevant training in university. History is about evidence and analysis. Evidence proves and/or rejects, more often, and/or sheds light on new analysis. Historians having access to rare documents, for example, and bringing us new understanding about the past are great historians. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced many great historians of this kind when historians in general had had limited accessibility to rare and more often not quite rare documents.
Rareness is sometimes not about rareness in its strictest sense but more about accessibility. Geographical barrier, limited library funding, or even political instability could easily lead historians into dismay at the lack of access to the most common documents or latest research in their related fields let alone really rare documents only held in the British Library or the Library of Congress.
Thanks to the internet, Google Books, Internet Archive and other free online academic resources, in Shelton's words to adopt Thomas Friedman's invention, "levelled the playing field". Millions of rare books have been made freely available in the internet. "Digital resources," Shelton says, "allow any historian to conduct original research by remotely accessing source material which previously required physical access." An eighteenth-century book printed in London and previously only available in a few university libraries in the world, for example, can now be read, full-text searched, and downloaded by a high school history student in Hong Kong.
Suffice to say, historical analysis is more than evidence. A document tells us nothing until a storyteller joins in to speak it out. Our society needs more storytellers than ever before. Google has done the most part of it. Let us, old and new historians, do the job professionally.
--- --- ---
References:
Helen King's "History without Historians? Medical History and the Internet," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2011, pp. 212-221.
Don Shelton's "The Internet and 'New' Historians," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 222-231.
Helen King's "Response to Shelton," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 232-238.
Qualifications define profession, provide credentials, create authority, and at the same time exclude amateurs. I am a historian because I was trained to be so in a History department while I am not a literary critic because I have never received relevant training in university. History is about evidence and analysis. Evidence proves and/or rejects, more often, and/or sheds light on new analysis. Historians having access to rare documents, for example, and bringing us new understanding about the past are great historians. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced many great historians of this kind when historians in general had had limited accessibility to rare and more often not quite rare documents.
Rareness is sometimes not about rareness in its strictest sense but more about accessibility. Geographical barrier, limited library funding, or even political instability could easily lead historians into dismay at the lack of access to the most common documents or latest research in their related fields let alone really rare documents only held in the British Library or the Library of Congress.
Thanks to the internet, Google Books, Internet Archive and other free online academic resources, in Shelton's words to adopt Thomas Friedman's invention, "levelled the playing field". Millions of rare books have been made freely available in the internet. "Digital resources," Shelton says, "allow any historian to conduct original research by remotely accessing source material which previously required physical access." An eighteenth-century book printed in London and previously only available in a few university libraries in the world, for example, can now be read, full-text searched, and downloaded by a high school history student in Hong Kong.
Suffice to say, historical analysis is more than evidence. A document tells us nothing until a storyteller joins in to speak it out. Our society needs more storytellers than ever before. Google has done the most part of it. Let us, old and new historians, do the job professionally.
--- --- ---
References:
Helen King's "History without Historians? Medical History and the Internet," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2011, pp. 212-221.
Don Shelton's "The Internet and 'New' Historians," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 222-231.
Helen King's "Response to Shelton," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, pp. 232-238.
Wednesday 2 May 2012
Recent readings XXIV
Anthony Webster's "The Development of British Commercial and Political Networks in the Straits Settlements 1800 to 1868: The Rise of a Colonial and Regional Economic Identity?" Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2011), pp. 899-929.
Terence Chong's "Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2011), pp. 877-897.
Ray Yep, "'Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong': Emergency Powers, Administration of Justice and the Turbulent Year of 1967," Modern Asian Studies, 2011, 26 pps.
Kristin Burnett, "Race, Disease, and Public Violence: Smallpox and the (Un)Making of Calgary's Chinatown, 1892," Social History of Medicine Advance Access, September 30, 2011, 18pp. "Municipal authorities used racialised ideas about health and cleanliness to discursively create sites of meaning, delineating strict spatial boundaries between the Chinese and non-Chinese community." Soc Hist Med 2012 25: 362-379
Terence Chong's "Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2011), pp. 877-897.
Ray Yep, "'Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong': Emergency Powers, Administration of Justice and the Turbulent Year of 1967," Modern Asian Studies, 2011, 26 pps.
Kristin Burnett, "Race, Disease, and Public Violence: Smallpox and the (Un)Making of Calgary's Chinatown, 1892," Social History of Medicine Advance Access, September 30, 2011, 18pp. "Municipal authorities used racialised ideas about health and cleanliness to discursively create sites of meaning, delineating strict spatial boundaries between the Chinese and non-Chinese community." Soc Hist Med 2012 25: 362-379
Tuesday 1 May 2012
Representing foreign in Modern China
Inspired by a open invitation for a volume on the role of Paris in American Literature but instead of following the track about the American authors' literary ventures in Paris, I am thinking of Britain/America/France/Japan in modern Chinese Literature to consider the ways in which these countries and its peoples were depicted, represented and shaped by Chinese authors.
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