Category: Practice Notes

Confronted by a fate that restricts their lives

~ Michael A. Innes

I know nothing of Korea, other than having a general sense of the roles its politically divided geographies play vis-a-vis US and global security, two subjects that I follow closely.  Occasionally a blockbluster headline will focus the mind. The past few weeks have produced two: a very public and messy political assassination, tracked in near-real time; and revelations of a (formerly) sub-rosa cyber war the US has been waging on North Korea’s nuclear missile program.

Of Korean culture north or south I know even less. I do, however, have a good unstanding of the interplay between language, identity, geography and politics. So a crisp, pithy and intriguing (sorry) TLS piece on  “The Korean Sense of Place“, coming as it does fast on the heels of recent events, leapt off the page. Han Yujoo, the award winning author of The Impossible Fairy Tale, writing on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Mujong (“Heartless”) – “known as the first modern Korean novel”:

I’ve read it many times, and it’s always made me wonder about the linguistic confusion that Korean writers active at the beginning of the twentieth century must have felt. During the Japanese colonial period, from a young age Koreans had to absorb Japanese as the official language, and Korean as their mother tongue, along with Western modern culture; intellectuals, moreover, would have had to study Western languages such as English, French and German. What could their literary language have been like? I’m also interested in the fact that most of the characters who appear in the fiction of the time are unable to find a place for themselves, a destination towards which to direct their energies both physically and psychologically. Such a place fundamentally does not exist.

The senses of place that Han Yujoo teases out of other works of Korean fiction are liminal and interstitial – the invented geographies, countries of the mind and sanctuaries of the soul favored of dissidents, the disaffected and the displaced. “Choe In-hun’s novel The Square (Kwangjang, 1960),” she writes, “also takes the sense of place as its subject. It ends with the protagonist Lee Myeong-jun, feeling unable to go either south or north after the peninsula’s division, choosing a (non-existent) neutral country.” Or: “In more recent Korean fiction, too, movement never appears easy. From the ICF crisis of 1997, the sub-prime disaster of 2007, and the low growth that has continued ever since, to the recent breakdown of national politics, our protagonists are confronted by a fate that restricts their lives.”

“Sense of place” is a term of art among French philosophers, literary theorists, public historians, critical geographers and architectural design specialists.* It’s a notion that’s part of a larger canon of spatial concepts  (like “territory”, “terrain”, “place”, “space”, “location”, “lieux de memoires” and so on) that have migrated between academic disciplines with varying degrees of sophistication and meaning. Those turns of phrase often find their way into pop culture and public discourse. The opposite is also sometimes true:  academia being the fad-oriented beast that it is, elements of pop culture and public discourse sometimes come first, only to be chased by scholars clinging for dear life to contemporary public relevance.

I usually perk up when spatial concepts worm their way into written and verbal expressions of political life, like Presidential and executive speeches, official policy, congressional testimony, diplomatic dispatches and the like. Political scientists and international relations specialists are notorious among critical spatial thinkers for their narrow brutalization of spatial concepts, which – so the criticism goes – has tended to favor measurable, material (ie. physical) aspects of space and place over the subject’s softer, fluffier social dimensions.

In my view, that sort of criticism has itself varied in sophistication, and it’s now at least a few years out of date. Approaches to political science and international relations are just as varied as any other set of academic disciplines, especially when it comes to problems of political communication and international security. Look closely and you’ll find plenty ways in which cultural content like The Korean Sense of Place, and the corpus of Korean fiction its author surveys, is (or should be) relevant to the study of high politics.

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*The volume of work that’s been done on the subject is substantial enough – it’s enormous, really – that the links I’ve provided barely scratch the surface.

What “post-factual news” means for researchers

~ Michael A. Innes

Some semi-random thoughts, as headlines continue to focus on “post-factual” news:

There is a lot in common between what we’re seeing now in Britain and the US, and  researchable “news” in fragile and conflict affected states. The recent Brexit referendum and US Presidential campaigns are just the two, latest and possibly most prominent cases that come to mind wherein the tone and content of open media forces a radical rethink of how researchers can use it.

Fact-free politicians (and their allegedly fact-free constituencies) are just part of an emerging landscape. Analysts are barely able to make sense of the political framing of reality in their attempts to decipher what parties and politicians actually stand for, what they actually think and believe, or how much damage or disruption they actually intend to cause in future. It won’t be any easier for future historians of US and British politics who will have to contend with the morass of today’s media output as they attempt to reconstruct our present reality.

Guerrilla archiving efforts –  undertaken by climate scientists who fear political interence in the US in the form of mass deletions of decades of scientific research –  suggest that the stakes are substantially higher and that the problems associated with it are likely to become much more acute. Wilfully created gaps in current understanding are consequential, with more or less immediate resource, budgetary and policy  implications. By comparison, gaps in the future historical record are a problem for historians, and deciphering and validating the details of past events and developments that can be found in archived yellow press doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

There are some basic reasons why researchers should pay close attention to this. They revolve around the fundamental importance of context, precision and analytical judgement.  The lessons here are a bit more subtle, but they’re worth noting, especially among knowledge workers who rely heavily on “open source intelligence” and among the legions of people whose understanding of research process doesn’t get much more sophisticated than Google or Wikipedia.

It’s a challenge I’ve dealt with in the research and consulting projects I’ve done on guerrilla vernacular communications in West Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere. I had the pleasure and privilege of working for a short time with the late and eminent Africanist, Stephen Ellis, before he left us in 2015. He expressed it best, in his books and in his work. In West Africa, oral culture prevailed and information was more often than not broadcast through cultural filters and images. Stephen always held that sense could still be made of documentary evidence (like local newsprint). These were sources that on the surface of it only transmitted utterly sensational and fantastic details. To use them effectively required a particular sensitivity to meaning – to the truth of a matter – that could only really develop when well supported by deep knowledge and additional, supplementary forms of inquiry.

Media outlets come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are loud and boisterous, while others are more stoic. “Newspapers of record” are a recognized form of the latter.  Some try to report what happened, while others try to convince readers why and how they happened. Media output, in other words, can serve more than one purpose, and only one of them is to provide researchers and analysts with a source of evidence needed to  determine the factual basis of past events: what happened, when it happened, who was involved, what they said about what happened and so on.  Reconstructing past events is a tricky business, and some media environments are so highly politicized – the rhetoric so overheated and contentious – that verifiable facts are almost impossible to discern from the collection of color and misdirection in which they’re embedded. Propaganda in wartime and in crisis environments is especially difficult to parse for verifiable details – here, the “facts” have less to do with manifest content  –  explicitly used words and text – than with the latent meaning that can be teased out of the wider contextual landscape and from more technical meta-data.

Professional blogging and historians

~ Michael A. Innes

I don’t mean blogging for a living. I mean professionals who blog in a way that reflects or showcases their professional activities. One of my favorites is Andrew Lewis’s The Past Sure is Tense. Andrew is a trained historian with a PhD from Queen Mary’s, who plies his trade as a consultant specialising in historical research and archival investigations. I’ve used Andrew for some of my own research projects, which has involved a lot of sniffing through Colonial Office and Foreign Office records.

He’s simply superb: he doesn’t mess about, he has an excellent work ethic, and he knows the many prominent and obscure archival repositories in and around London like no one else. If he has a fault – he doesn’t, really – it’s that he doesn’t know his own worth, which is more a comment on the profession and the sort of rates its consultants charge, especially when compared to the cost of consultants in other sectors.

Andrew’s main website sets out what he does in simple, clear terms. His blog recounts with great personal style some of the gems he sometimes stumbles across in his investigations.

Here’s one, on Orwell:

More treasures from the India Office collections, this time in the form of two brief references to some character called E. A. Blair. In some ways, Eric Arthur Blair is a fiction that will forever be overshadowed by the nom de plume he created for himself, and so being out of reach he is perhaps of more interest. Not that there was much in the way of substance to what I found in the India Office Lists for 1927 and 1928: one, a terse announcement that Blair had joined the service as a district superintendent in Burma on 29 November 1922, the other an equally short note advising of his ‘retirement’ on 12 March 1928. Not that there is any great mystery about this period of the man’s life – it produced two classic essays, and doubtless the references I looked at have been used by his many biographers. But the thrill of seeing it there in black and white, and knowing something of what lay behind his decision (momentous as it turned out) to ‘retire’! This is George Orwell I’m on about – not some Phil Space hack writing to order for the tabloids.

Or this one, on the 21st century historical researcher, in which Andrew notes “how certain ineluctable research problems remain for the historian to wrestle with”:

In between completing recent research commissions for scholars working on Turkish POWs interned in India and Burma in WW1, Iraqi coinage (issued by the Royal Mint – hence the records at TNA) and Greek refugees in the post-WW2 period, I’m currently chipping away at my PhD, trying to render it fit for publication (and not before time given that I finished the thing 20 years ago). The working title of this eagerly awaited masterpiece is ‘Venal Hirelings and Despicable Incendiaries: British West Indian Newspapers During the Struggle for Abolition’, and what strikes me on revisiting the original text is how different it could have been had I been doing the research now. So many new and potentially rich fields of historical enquiry have been opened up by the Internet that it’s difficult to pick any one that would illustrate just how different the experience of the 21st century researcher is to his/her counterpart of a mere 20 years ago. Take the records of Parliament, for example; struggling as I was to get to grips with the Colonial Office stuff at TNA, I never did get around to even approaching this apparently impenetrable mass of material – why! even referencing the report of a nineteenth-century select committee seemed to be an arcane mystery. Thus these invaluable records remained untouched, at least as far as my work was concerned. And what an omission: a few careful searches of the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers website has produced an undreamt of bounty, all of which can be read, sifted and analysed at home and at leisure.

But it’s not that simple, and even though the technocratic mystics out there may not like it there are some things that the Internet can never change: individually and collectively, the documents themselves are still what they always were, and I remain staggered at just how complex and multifarious the records of Parliament and government can be (the two are not the same thing, of course). Even finding a simple verbatim account of what was said in the Commons or Lords on a certain occasion can pose problems: 20 years ago as a callow researcher I would have thought that we would be on safe ground with Hansard, but not so – or at least not for the 1830s. In fact, I have found Hansard to be remarkably inaccurate and have had to resort to other sources in the quest to find what I was looking for: the little-known Mirror of Parliament (on which Dickens – a famously accurate notetaker – worked) or the parliamentary reports that appeared in the press, for instance. However, press reports differ slightly from MoP which differs from Hansard – so which should I use? It goes on and on: access to records has improved to an extent that previous generations would have thought impossible, but certain ineluctable research problems remain for the historian to wrestle with.

I hope Andrew will forgive me for posting these two bits in their entirety. What I want to highlight is that his blog is a great read in its own right, but equally, it’s a model to be emulated. His posts are genuine, personable observations, neither preachy nor impenetrably academic, the substance of them drawn from daily professional practice.