Thoughts on research, and saved by Scribd

When scholars from the year 2058 look back on the current state of academic research and the dissemination of knowledge, they surely will marvel at the fact that so much of it remained oriented toward printed words on paper.

It is a surprising situation. Never mind that nearly all educated members of early 21st century society are already familiar with the World Wide Web, the most extensive and accessible publishing and communications tool ever invented. Despite this, many facets of the academic world remain firmly planted in the ways of the early 20th century. Whether it's writing a term paper or conducting a major research project, the fruits of students' and scholars' efforts usually end up as printed sheets of paper destined for a professor's mailbox, a filing cabinet or a university library. Even a doctoral dissertation that takes years to complete is probably going to exist as a paper hard copy in just one or two locations. The insights contained in it may never be read by more than a handful of people.

This is not to suggest that academics are Luddites. Far from it -- most students and educators are very familiar with email, search engines, online databases, and Microsoft Word. But even if students use software programs to make and distribute a term paper or thesis proposal, electronic copies hardly ever venture beyond the hard drives of the students who created them, or the inboxes of the professors who received and graded them. On occasion, high-level research will be deemed good enough for a wider audience, but all too often these works remain restricted to books or journal articles that can only be seen in university libraries or expensive, password-protected databases. Fifty years from now, the scholars of the future will marvel at all of the ideas, hypotheses, evidence, analysis that were expressed but were only shared with a limited slice of humanity, despite the ubiquity of the Web and the many software tools at our disposal to share them with a much wider audience. This system will not only be viewed as inefficient, it will be regarded as isolating researchers from potential sources of knowledge and preventing them from making discoveries and improving our understanding of the world around us.

But there is hope. I have mentioned initiatives at MIT, Berkeley, and elsewhere that are attempting to leverage the power of the Web to spread knowledge more widely (see Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard and UC Berkeley's free lectures on YouTube). Harvard Extended itself represents my own personal effort to share my experiences, observations, and research findings with a wider audience, and has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations -- Google Analytics tells me that more than 3,000 visits to Harvard Extended have taken place in the past 30 days, and nearly 85,000 visits have occurred since I first started using the tool in May of 2006.

Still, I want to do more. My blogging on Harvard Extended will come to an end in the next week, and it bothers me that the class papers I worked so hard on over the years do not have a permanent online home. Collectively, they took many hundreds of hours to research and write, and were shaped by my interactions with Extension School instructors, including members of Harvard's faculty. What a waste if they were to be resigned to a box of old papers in my basement, or a file directory on my hard drive. When I was still a student at the Extension School, I posted some of them to a fas.harvard.edu Web server. Unfortunately, I lost my FAS computing privileges when I graduated earlier this year, but I think I've found an alternate solution: Scribd.

Scribd is kind of like the YouTube of electronic documents. Registered users can upload their PDF or Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and random .txt scribblings. Anyone with a Flash-enabled Web browser can view them, or even embed them on their own websites, just like you can do with YouTube videos. The database is searchable and indexed by Google, meaning that people anywhere can readily find specific documents, if they use the right search terms.

So, I've taken a half-dozen papers and uploaded them to Scribd. The idea is to share them with my readers on Harvard Extended, and anyone else who finds them interesting. I've linked them below, and embedded one of them in this post -- my final research paper for HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext). You can read them in your Web browser, or download a PDF copy, but I've disabled text and Word exports to discourage plagiarism. Here are the papers, starting with the research proposal I prepared as part of my proseminar back in the winter of 2003:

Defining a Territorial Sea: China's South China Sea Policy in the 1950s and its 1958 Declaration on the Territorial Sea (research proposal)

• January 2004. Harvard DCE/SSCI E-100B (Graduate Research Methods and Scholarly Writing in Social Sciences), Joe and Doug Bond, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

Historical Nationalism: How Interpretation of China's Past is Used to Build Unity in the Present

• August 2004. Harvard DCE/Archaeology S-171 (Archaeology of the Silk Road), Irene Good, Peabody Museum, Harvard University

China's Emerging Overseas Chinese Policy in the Late 1970s and Implications for Ethnic Chinese Communities in Vietnam and Kampuchea

• May 2005. Hist E-1834 (Chinese Emigration in Modern Times), Professor Philip Kuhn, Harvard University

Evaluating Official Attitudes Toward Post-Mao Chinese Film Through a Quantitative Lens

• August 2006. History S-1855 (Film and History in Postwar Japan and Post-Mao China), Prof. Charles Hayford, Visiting Scholar, History, Northwestern University

Proposal for a Thesis in the Field of History in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Liberal Arts Degree

• February 2006. Prof. Donald Ostrowski and Prof. Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University

The Rise of the Press in Late Imperial China

• November 2007. HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext), Matthew Battles, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I am also embedding the last paper I ever completed for the Extension School in January of this year, which was also for Battles' excellent survey class. It's quite fitting that it should end up here, as the class discussed the history of the written language from the time of the Sumerians through Gutenberg's printing revolution and finally the beginning of the current publishing revolution taking place on the Web. I took things a step further, and looked at emerging Web-based software technologies and photorealistic 3D environments. It's entitled Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web:

Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web

One thing that's missing from this small collection of papers is the most important paper of my Extension School career: my thesis (title: Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993). There's are several reasons I have not included it here. While Scribd is a very easy way to host documents, one thing that Scribd does not have is a vetting process or a reputation for reliability. The contents of an academic journal will have been vetted by experts and editors, and quality will be high. On Scribd, anybody can publish anything without it being vetted by anyone, and quality is mixed. For academic papers published on Scribd, the good appears alongside the bad. You'll find astounding creative works and rigorously designed research projects, as well as limp efforts at scholarly writing and even deliberate misinformation. Users can flag offensive content and copyright violations, but the process is flawed and leaves a lot of bad content on Scribd's servers. Interesting or quality content can also be highlighted by readers and illuminated with comments, but this system is imprecise in that it does not differentiate the praise from a 15-year-old kid trying to finish his homework and a 60-year-old university professor who stumbles upon a great paper on Scribd through a search on Google.

You'll have to take my word that all of the above papers were submitted to Harvard faculty or Extension School instructors for review, and all received excellent grades. However, the weaknesses in the Scribd system have convinced me to hold off on reposting my thesis on scribd.com. I want it to have the largest possible impact on my field, and I don't believe it will have that impact if posted to Scribd. Instead, I am holding out hope for a Harvard-sponsored solution. Nearly two years ago, I petitioned the Extension School to archive masters theses in the same electronic database used for doctoral dissertations at Harvard, ProQuest UMI (Update: My thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). While this is a closed database that can only be accessed through university library systems, it is restricted to vetted, accepted research from university masters and doctoral programs. It is widely used in academic circles -- in fact, the literature review in my thesis referenced several dissertations that I had located in the ProQuest UMI database. I hope that someday my own thesis might also be useful to future scholars of modern Chinese history, Cold War history, and Chinese media studies, if Harvard decides to extend this resource to ALM theses from the Extension School.

Random thesis notes

I've updated a post from last year that described the completion of my thesis, and thanked various faculty and family who helped me during the long research and writing process.

Besides adding the final grade report from Prof. Johnston (my thesis director), I also removed the broken link to the archived PDF version of the thesis. It had been stored on my personal FAS Web account, but that expired in April and I have yet to find an alternate solution. I've considered Scribd, or hosting it my own, but would much prefer a database that's associated with the University, and can be used by other scholars studying Chinese media and foreign policy during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.

Update 3/15/2009: My thesis is now available via UMI/ProQuest's widely used academic database. You can read it here. Information about how it came about can be read here.

Caps, gowns, and batons

I went to the Coop this evening to pick up my cap and gown for Commencement. The gown rental is $75, but we get to keep the cap and tassle. I am getting up very early on Thursday morning -- we have to be on site at seven in the morning, meaning I will probably leave my home at around 6:30 in the morning. I'm taking a cab -- parking in and around Harvard Square will be very difficult as tens of thousands of grads and guests descend upon Harvard Yard.

After getting my regalia, I attended a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club for ALM Liberal Arts concentrators. Maybe 40 or 50 of us were there, and it was nice to see some old friends and talk with other 2008 grads whom I had never met. More than a few people had traveled from out of town to be here for Commencement on Thursday, and it was interesting to hear their stories.

ALM program heads also revealed the names of the ALM prize winners. There are a few prizes that ALM Liberal Arts concentrators are eligible for, on the basis of high GPAs or outstanding theses, including The Thomas Small Prize and the Crite Prize (see descriptions and the list of 2006 winners here). It was fascinating listening to the titles and descriptions of some of the thesis work, especially among the ALM biology and biotech concentrators. Their thesis directors -- most of whom are Harvard Medical School Professors -- had very high praise for their work. A few will apparently see their work published in a journal or other format, which says a lot about the quality of the biology and biotechnology programs.

There was also one ALM/humanities concentrator who wrote a thesis on Shakespeare's plays that questioned the conclusions of a book written by a top Shakespeare scholar and Harvard faculty member. Her thesis director? The very same faculty member! He was hard, but the result was a top-notch thesis that won the Dean's Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Humanities.

I didn't win a prize, but my 3.96 GPA resulted in another honor: I was recognized as one of two Class Marshals for the ALM/Liberal Arts class of 2008. We have some special responsibilities, and will even be wielding batons during the morning and afternoon ceremonies. So you there -- back in line!

Tomorrow is another reception, my first for the Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA). I know one of the HEAA officers and recent grads, but it will be great to meet others who have graduated from the ALB and ALM programs.

2008 ALM Thesis Forum

Sorry for the late notice about this, but I only just found out that the second annual thesis forum is taking place this week, from May 27 to the 29th. It's at Hilles, and the thesis presentations are grouped by concentration: Humanities on Tuesday night, biology and social sciences on Wednesday night, and professional concentrations on Thursday. Names, titles of presentations, and other details are here.

I participated in the first thesis forum last year, and really enjoyed it -- it was an opportunity to discuss my research with a wider audience, and also hear about what other ALM candidates and graduates had been working on. I won't be able to attend this year -- I'm traveling this week -- but I encourage other ALM students to check it out.

The downside of picking a "hot" thesis topic

Chris over at the Mission Control ALM blog shares some of the challenges of picking a "hot" thesis topic. Chris' thesis will explore issues related to contractors in the Iraq war. While these issues have been in the headlines in recent months, and there's tons of journal articles, books, and primary sources to reference, the challenge is finding an original topic that hasn't been explored:

I see now that I picked a topic that had some research difficulties built into it. If you choose a subject that's current, hot, and much-written about, it's that much harder to sift through what's out there and find a thread that hasn't been worked on or needs more done on it. First, start with an avalanche of materials -- primary source and secondary. Then, skim through it and see what hasn't been covered. Next, come up with an idea that is both insightful and substantive, that can be explored, and for which you can find solid evidence.

I had a different sort of challenge for my thesis -- identifying existing research for an obscure topic, and whittling down the focus to something manageable and testable. Primary sources weren't a problem (I used thousands of articles from the Xinhua News Agency) but there wasn't much recent literature on the foreign policy issues involved -- in fact, the two sources that I tested my data against were a journal article from the late 1980s and a book from the early 1990s. And while the computer content analysis literature is quite extensive, I was unable to find any specific studies that were based on Xinhua's English-language service.

I suppose a safe middle ground between my approach and Chris' approach would be finding a topic that's not too hot, but has enough existing, recent literature behind that points to a clear path for new research.

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

A.B.T.

A few years back, I had a discussion with one of the ALM administrators about the graduation rate for the ALM program. He revealed that the all-time graduation rate was just 52% for the liberal arts concentrators (i.e., excluding the IT and professional ALMs such as journalism, biotechnology, management, and museum studies, which are not liberal arts degrees).

There are a couple of issues raised by this figure. First, while the graduation rate may seem unusually low, it's in line with the national average for graduate programs, says the Extension School. Second, it does not include the many people who take lots of graduate-level classes at the Extension School with the intention of officially entering the ALM program, but never matriculate, either because the proseminar is too difficult or they move away/stop classes before they have a chance to matriculate.

Of those students who do matriculate, but still don't graduate, there's an additional factor that comes into play: ABT status. They've completed all of the required coursework, including the proseminar, field courses, writing-intensive classes, and electives, and only have one hurdle to go: The thesis. Until they get that out of the way, they are "A.B.T.", or "all but thesis" (not to be confused with A.B.D., which refers to doctoral candidates who haven't completed their dissertations).

The thesis is what makes the master's program at the Extension School so special. It entails serious research that can take years to complete, and lets students work closely with some of the top academic experts in the world in their respective fields of study -- Harvard professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Medical School, etc. The thesis goes beyond what many "traditional," full-time masters' programs require, including those at Harvard's other graduate schools (for instance, this Master of Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education only requires eight classes; there is no thesis). Approved ALM theses have been turned into journal articles, have been used as stepping stones for advanced degrees (at Harvard and elsewhere) and careers in academia.

As I've discussed many times on this blog, the ALM thesis is a huge challenge -- not just an intellectual challenge, but also a management challenge that requires tremendous organizational skills and lots of time.

It's also mostly self-directed. Students have to conduct the initial research inquiries, choose topics, and compose thesis proposals on their own, and follow the guidance of the research advisor and thesis director in terms of conducting additional research and developing the thesis itself. If a student procrastinates, fails to complete a certain step, or doesn't hear back from his or her TD in a timely manner, the thesis will die -- no one is going to do the work for the student, or constantly nag the professor on his or her behalf.

It therefore doesn't surprise me that so many ALM candidates fail to receive their degrees. Moving away or stopping classes are possible reasons, but I think the thesis requirement is a tough hurdle for many people. If a student is ABT for too long, his or her ALM candidacy will come to an end. Not only is there a five-year requirement for completing the degree, but also there is a nine-month window to write the thesis itself.

I've known two people who matriculated into the ALM program but never finished. Both were ABTs. The first was a Literature and Creative Writing concentrator who finished all of her coursework, and couldn't decide on a thesis topic. After a few years, she didn't really feel interested anymore. Later, she took another Harvard Extension School class relating to legal issues, and decided that this topic area was more intellectually rewarding. However, she moved away before she could take any more law or government classes, and the five-year limit eventually expired. The other ABT has also fought procrastination, but has an incredibly demanding job that places very real limits on the amount of time and effort that can be devoted to thesis research.

I can relate to both situations. If I had lost my passion for Chinese history, media, and computer-aided research, getting started on my thesis would have been difficult, and completing it would have been nearly impossible. And if I had my current job -- a new position that requires 10-hour workdays and frequent travel -- when I started my thesis research back in 2005, it's highly unlikely I could have completed it, without burning myself out or putting serious strains on my family.

Research advice

Some solid advice for grad students considering major academic research projects:

1) Use graduate school to tech up. You'll have time to learn how save the world later, when you're actually in it. Learn all of the theoretical, statistical and other difficult-to-acquire skills you can while in grad school, because you won't have the time later on. You, your cause, and your job prospects will be well-served by the technical skills you build.

2) Hang in there. In the first year of any grad program you will encounter a lot of required material that will feel too theoretical, too divorced from social change, and (occasionally) like too much nonsense. Much of it is good for you (see point 1), even if it doesn't feel like it at the time. After a year of metrics and micro theory, I was ready to run to the real world to do what I thought I really wanted to do. The best advice I ever got (from one of my pre-PhD advisers) was, "Shut up and hang in there; by your second to third year you will discover all the people doing interesting applied work soon enough and be free to work on whatever you want by your third year." He was right.

3) Take chances. The second best piece of advice I ever received came from my dissertation chair, shortly after my oral examinations committee told me that my prospectus was poorly thought out, uneconomic, and overly risky. They were 100% right, and I benefitted from hearing it (although at the time I was miserable). Where I think they were wrong is that they told me to abandon my plans for risky and expensive field work. They favored the less risky route that could get me to a completed dissertation faster. My chair's response: "Hey, if you really want to do this, why not? Give it a shot. If it doesn't pan out after three months, then come back and work on something else. Worst case scenario: you lose a few thousand dollars and a summer, but you have a great experience." I plan to give the same advice to my students.

4) But minimize your risks by being prepared. Don't embark on a big project, especially field work, without a solid hypothesis, research design, and plan. Think through the theory beforehand. Write down your assumptions, your logic, and your econometric regressions before you collect data. Especially write out your regressions. I am still guilty of rushing to the field too quickly, and am continually reminded of the costs.

The author (Chris Blattman, an assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale) has six additional pieces of advice. The post is intended for people considering economics-related research as part of a PhD program, but some of the tips can be applied to what ALM students are doing at the Extension School. Tip #4, above, seems especially relevant -- in my proseminar and in the ALM thesis writers' workshops, other students would sometimes propose complicated paper-based surveys, or ask extremely broad research questions (e.g., "does religion encourage war?"). Fortunately, the ALM program has processes intended to help candidates find realistic, solid research topics -- namely, the proseminar and the thesis proposal.

(Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the link)

Related entries:

• Gary North on the Ph.D. "Glut"


• Thesis proposal: Start, write, throw away, rewrite


• ALM thesis writers' meeting/Revisiting Vietnam?


• Writing an ALM thesis: Solo effort, a personal marathon, and finding a sounding board


• Thesis update: Done!

Chinese media, international news, and foreign policy

Today's New York Times has a great article on Chinese media coverage of international news issues and events. The article notes that while domestic Chinese journalism is in the midst of a "golden age," foreign news is generally sourced from a handful of state-run news organizations that have foreign correspondents, including Xinhua/NCNA (新華社). As a result, says the article, Chinese audiences get a heavy dose of propaganda when they read about international events:

News media critics say one result of this lack of vigorous independent reporting is that what most Chinese news readers know of the world closely conforms with government policy and propaganda.

“By and large, China’s international reporting is a mirror of China’s diplomacy,” said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at People’s University in Beijing. “As government mouthpieces, their international reports are linked with the government’s diplomacy. It’s not free, so what we’re really talking about is China’s diplomacy, not its media.”

This is a major problem for China and Chinese audiences, but it can't last, considering the problems Chinese authorities have controlling the Internet and networked communications.

On the other hand, as long-time readers of Harvard Extended know, this media/diplomacy connection in China's state-run press that allows observers to better understand the policies and actions of the Chinese government. Political and military experts have long used Xinhua and other official news sources to fathom internal power struggles (see my description of Beijingology), and I used a computer content analysis of Xinhua content from 1977 to 1993 to gauge Chinese policies toward Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era.

In any case, the NYT article is a good introduction to the topic of international news censorship in China. To learn more about domestic news in China and the challenges Chinese reporters face, I recommend reading some of the reports filed by Edward Cody of the Washington Post over the past few years.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Hedge fund uses Harvard Extension School distance education class as backup training

Spotted in my Google blog search RSS feed: David Kane of Kane Capital Management -- a company that operates a hedge fund -- requires summer interns from Williams College to have a solid grounding in statistics. If they are unable to take the appropriate course at Williams, he has them take Government E-2001 ("a course [that] gives you the tools to build statistical models and useful in real social science research") through the Extension School's distance education offerings. He pays, too.

This is one example of how distance education at Harvard has potential applications beyond enabling Extension School students to take coursework online. Some of these high-quality classes can be used for workforce education in certain fields. Conceivably, these classes could also be used as substitute for-credit at other colleges or universities that don't offer such courses, offer them infrequently, or need to serve students who are not on campus because of a disability, military service, overseas study, etc.

The class that Kane refers to looks quite interesting. While Government E-2001 is "recommended" for government concentrators, it is not required, and I have the feeling that a lot of Extension School students aiming for a government ALM shy away from taking it, considering they already have one difficult requirement to get out of the way (the graduate proseminar) and the fact it involves a subject that so many social sciences concentrators dread -- math. In my experience, very few people who are ALM Government or History concentrators like math or attempt to use quantitative methodologies in their theses. Others may not realize until it is too late that they want to use statistical analysis, instead of more traditional qualitative approaches.


In hindsight, I wish I'd taken this class (or one like it) before I started my thesis, which used a quantitative methodology to study Chinese foreign policy during the Deng Xiaoping era. While I had studied computer content analysis schemes during my graduate proseminar in 2003, I didn't have any training in statistics when I started my research in 2005 -- I basically had to do a lot of extra reading on my own, and get advice from my thesis director and a few others in order to develop my models and analyze the data.

Thesis printing

Last week, I picked up my printed and bound thesis from the bindery. The Harvard Extension School recommends two binderies, Wells Bindery in Waltham and another in Chelsea. I used Wells, because it is quite close to where I live. It's located off High Street in Waltham, within walking distance of Moody St. (NOTE: the company has shut down and the building has been demolished since this post was written).

It was interesting to see the facility. It's old -- the building, much of the printing equipment, the office furniture and even the frosted glass doors appear date from the first half of the 20th century. There are a few computer terminals lying around, but other than that, stepping into Wells is like stepping back in time 50 years.

In many ways, it's not surprising. The technologies used for binding books rely on many of the same materials -- paper, cardboard, and glue -- that have been used for centuries. And while the president of the company told me that the early years of the Internet age led to a tough business climate, things have since turned around. Several parts of the operations rely heavily on digital technologies, including submission of draft materials (in PDF format), credit-card processing, and of course, communication with clients (via email and the company website). Wells now has customers from across the country.

Even if the publication of scholarly theses drops away in the decades to come, Wells still has a solid customer base serving libraries and doing custom restorations and reproductions -- such a project might involve recreating a high school yearbook, or making a duplicate 19th-century embossed book cover, I was told.

The cost of printing and binding my thesis was actually quite reasonable. Three copies using high-quality paper (100% rag) and even some color pages (to handle the charts) cost less than $150 total. One copy has already been submitted to the Extension School ALM office, and I dropped off another in the mailbox of my thesis director. The third is in my bookshelf at home, and the document exists electronically on my personal Harvard website until I graduate (click here to download a copy -- it's the hyperlinked title).

Writing an ALM thesis: Solo effort, a personal marathon, and finding a sounding board

As I described earlier in the week, there is another ALM thesis blog in progress. The other student -- a government concentrator -- is in the early stages of thesis research, but made a few statements about the personal issues involved in writing a thesis. Here is an excerpt from the "Thesis Blueprint" entry:

There is no blueprint. There is a general thesis manual. There is an advisor. There is something of a ‘broad stroke’ roadmap but the specific focus, effort, and persistence is all on the student. A solo effort throughout the early phases — reading, searching, pondering, narrowing down.

But doing a thesis isn’t only about academics; it’s also about emotions. A personal marathon. Frustration, excitement, confusion, hope, uncertainty. Did I mention doubt? So there are two parallel experiences in the thesis: the academic one and the personal one. My personal blueprint: have someone close to you who will act as a sounding board, emotional conduit, a grounding force, a reality check. Academic friends who take the same classes or professors, live nearby, hang out at Pete's Coffee and share gossip — they are the support system we lack because as older grad. students, most of us have busy lives, quite separate from both Harvard Square and Extension.

I totally agree with several points that the writer makes. The ALM thesis really is a solo effort. We're on our own 99% of the time, without peer feedback and peer pressure. We are really responsible for keeping ourselves motivated -- we don't have departmental affiliations and the regular contact with fellow grad students and professors that exist at other graduate-level programs. It is kind of like a "personal marathon," albeit one in slow-motion.

However, I would like to say that the blueprint you use doesn't have to include "someone close to you who will act as a sounding board, emotional conduit, a grounding force, a reality check." It's great if you have someone like that who is willing and able to take that role, but I would like to note that you can get by without a friend or family member to serve as a sounding board.

That said, some feedback is useful, and important. I turned to this blog, and the ALM thesis writers' group to serve as my feedback loop.

Check out the rest of the Mission Control blog, on the Harvard Law School blogging site.

Another ALM thesis is progress

If you want to see what an early-stage ALM thesis research project looks like, you should check out the "Mission Control" blog that an ALM/Government concentrator operates over on the Harvard Law School blogging engine.

The last two entries -- Learning from others - read the theses in Grossman and First Thesis Writers Group Meeting -- remind me so much of what I was dealing with 18 months ago. This ALM student has some solid advice for anyone else getting ready to launch their thesis research, or for anyone interested in researching the use of military contractors/hired guns in Iraq -- a particularly hot topic considering the horrific incident involving Blackwater a few weeks ago.

Tool, math rock, and the Fibonacci Sequence

Courtesy of Daniel Miessler's blog comes this YouTube video, featuring the music of one of my favorite heavy rock bands, Tool, and a suggestion that the one of the tracks on Lateralus was composed with the Fibonacci Sequence in mind:

The author of the YouTube video is not the first person to make this connection. I never thought about the meter used in the lyrics, but I have heard the band's music called "math rock" before. I first started getting into Tool about seven or eight years ago, and I probably conducted half of my thesis research while listening to Lateralus and 10,000 Days. At 10:30 in the evening, when I was plowing through scores of database searches and manually updating my spreadsheets, having Tool playing in the background could keep me going for another hour or two. The music was methodical, ethereal, and strangely comforting. The ritual I developed required me to keep studying until the last song on the album (either Faaip De Oaid on Lateralus or Viginti Tres on 10,000 Days) had faded. Then I could shut down the computer and go to sleep ... or put on some classical music and keep going.

While I'm on the topic, here's a playlist of the albums I regularly listened to while working on the thesis -- as well as music that I found impossible to study to.

Thesis update: Done!

I can't believe it. I'm done. Done! Here's how it went down. My thesis director, Professor Alastair Iain Johnston, signed off in the late spring. I then had to go through a few formatting revisions with my Extension School research advisor, Dr. Donald Ostrowski. That took the better part of the summer, in part because he has a lot of other work to do, and I was in Asia for State of Play and a family trip to Taiwan for two weeks in August. Finally, I got back the paper drafts at the beginning of September. I input the few remaining corrections -- adding a few missing periods in footnotes, and correcting some minor spacing issues -- and then sent the PDF file to Wells Bindery in Waltham, one of the binderies that Harvard uses for thesis and dissertation work. The hard copies won't be ready for a few weeks, but the content is final. Here's the complete text of the final grade report, written by Prof. Johnston:

This is a first-rate thesis. Lamont worked extraordinarily hard to develop a range of sophisticated quantitative content analysis methods in order to test their usefulness in adjudicated academic debates about the nature of Chinese foreign policy. In particular he used these methods to test whether Chinese diplomacy toward Vietnam from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War was based on anti-Soviet motivations or based on distinct concerns about Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia. Lamont did an excellent job of seeking out and using information about content analysis techniques from a number of top experts on content analysis at Harvard and elsewhere. he showed a great deal of creativity in playing around and perfecting the methods and he also demonstrated acute sensitivity to the analytical downsides of these methods.

I've temporarily archived it at the following location: Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993 I hope to identify a permanent electronic archiving solution in the next few months (Update: The thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). A bound copy will be sent to the Extension School as well, and I assume it will either be filed in Grossman Library or the Archives. There are a lot of people who I'd like to acknowledge here, in addition to Prof. Johnston and Dr. Ostrowski. Here are some brief summaries of how they contributed to my research: Drs. Doug and Joe Bond of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs: The "Bond brothers" taught my graduate proseminar in 2003, and introduced me to modern mass media content analysis techniques. Sally Hadden, Associate Professor of History and Courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University and a Harvard Summer School instructor in the history of the Old South: She taught me how to prepare high-quality précis, which have been hugely useful in documenting the literature used in my research and cited in my thesis. Philip Kuhn, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations: I took two classes with Prof. Kuhn that relate to modern Chinese history (China in Modern Times in 2003, and Modern Chinese Emigration in 2005), and he was the first Harvard instructor to evaluate a CCA that I had designed on my own based on NCNA/Xinhua data. Will Lowe, formerly of the Weatherhead Institute's Identity Project, and now of the University of Nottingham: I never spoke with Will in person, but I have communicated with him by email several times. His free, open-source text analysis program, Yoshikoder, was one of the three software tools that proved instrumental to my research (the others were Excel and LexisNexis Academic, but I don't know who to thank for those!) There are two other constituencies I'd like to thank here. One is my family, including my parents. But my wife deserves an extra-special thanks. I'll excerpt from the dedication that appears on page viii of my thesis, which sums up the sense of appreciation -- and love -- I have for her:

I would like to thank my wife Nicole, who has been the most patient and supportive witness to my academic journey over the past four years. There have been hundreds of nights and weekends that I have spent in my study, conducting research or writing, time that I otherwise could have spent with her and our two small children, yet she never once protested. I hope that I can reciprocate some day, but in the meantime, I would like to dedicate this thesis to her.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you. When I started Harvard Extended back in May of 2005, I had no idea that it would attract so much interest: The hundreds of pages on this blog have been viewed more than 100,000 times (my counter reads 85,891, but I didn't activate it until April 2006, nearly one year after I started it). Thousands of people have seen it. Many have been drive-bys or lurkers, but some of you have left comments or sent emails to give support. I've even met a few of you in person. The words of encouragement have been important, but knowing that I have had this audience has been a strong motivator as well. I would have done the thesis without the blog, but I probably would have been much slower if it hadn't been for all of you looking over my virtual shoulder. Regular updates were required, and this really forced me to consider the progress of my thesis and research on a weekly or monthly basis, and plan the next steps, even if I wanted to procrastinate or take a break from my studies. So thank you, thank you, thank you! I'll continue to maintain this blog for my next (and last) Extension School class: Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext. It starts tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Thesis Update: Formatting horrors, and the Extension School's electronic archiving problem

I'm so close to the end of my thesis, I can practically smell the hardcover binding!

To recap, in April got the final sign-off from my thesis director. I made a few minor changes that he had suggested (most of the major changes had been implemented in earlier drafts, as I described in March) and then printed up a copy to hand in to the Extension School's ALM research advisor. Late April was a bad time to do this, as there was a crush of '07 grads who had submitted their theses around that time, and needed to get them corrected and bound in time for Commencement. I could wait, however -- I am not graduating until next year, and my official deadline for completing the thesis doesn't arrive until the end of July.

As I expected, when I received the printed copy back from the ALM office with the proofreader's marks in late June, there were only a few minor issues that had to be taken care of. I had followed the ALM Thesis Guide and Chicago Manual of Style very closely, and the mistakes included things like missing periods in footnotes, too many spaces between headings and the first paragraph of text, front matter page numbering issues, and a missing list of figures.

While most of them were easy to fix, I had a devil of a time with the page numbers. The Mac version of Microsoft Word I am using at home doesn't display page numbers in the footer (required for the front matter), and it took me hours to figure out a workaround -- one potential fix is listed here, but in the end I had to transfer the file to my work laptop -- a Windows machine which doesn't have this problem -- and generate a PDF. For some reason, transferring the file to Windows caused several paragraphs and footnotes to break earlier, which resulted in all of the chapter II and III page numbers shifting around. This in turn resulted in my list of figures and manual page references being made obsolete, which forced me to go through the entire document to correct most page number references.

A third problem was the inability to suppress the page number on the first page of new chapters and the appendices, as required in the ALM thesis format. There is no MS Word command I am aware of that can take care of this problem, so I had to manually create little white squares to place over each verboten page number.

But I finally got all of this taken care of late on Sunday night, and exported my PDF to my USB drive. It's now early Monday morning, and I will take the file to Office Depot tomorrow for printing, and then ship both paper versions back to the ALM office for the final review. Assuming everything is OK, my last step will be to take the file to the bindery for printing, and then submit the bound thesis to the Harvard Extension School. Then I can celebrate.

Actually, there will be one additional step related to my thesis, but it's something I don't need to do. It's something I want to do: getting a copy submitted to UMI/ProQuest or some other electronic database, so the global scholarly community can access it. I lobbied the Extension School to make electronic database submissions part of the thesis publication process, as is apparently the case with GSAS History Department research. I was told the Harvard Extension School program doesn't have the resources to make this happen. That's a major problem, in my opinion -- if the only place people can access ALM theses is in the Grossman Library, then the impact of Extension School research upon our respective disciplines will remain limited.

(See all of my thesis updates from 2005 to the present)

Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"

As part of my thesis presentation on Wednesday evening, I mentioned "Beijingology," a qualitative methodology used by China-watchers to identify and analyze shifts in official policy. It involves examining documents issued by the central government -- including state-run media reports -- to look for hints of change. Such hints may be the use of a certain word or the reappearance/disappearance of a certain official who is known for promoting a specific policy. Roger Garside, a British writer who lived in Beijing in the late 1970s, did not use the term Beijingology (or Pekingology) but he did note that local Beijing residents and foreign residents used such techniques to fathom CCP power struggles and government policy shifts:

"Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for." -- [Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China after Mao (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 3.]

Edward Cody, the Washington Post's China-based correspondent, has employed Beijingology to describe a supposed internal political debate.

A little background is in order, for those Harvard Extended readers who may not be familiar with the political situation in China. In a nutshell, Communism is dead, and market forces rule China, yet its leaders -- the Chinese Communist Party and its members -- still cling to the notion of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Or do they? Cody cites two commentaries published in official media (The People's Daily) as signs that the facade is cracking, but loyalists can still be found to promote the status quo:

"The path of democratic socialism is not able to save China," said Xin Xiangyang of the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Only the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics can make China flourish."

The commentaries, by contesting the idea that democracy would be good for China, suggested some within the party are pushing for political reforms to match the dramatic economic loosening that has taken place during the past 25 years.

Any sign of doctrinal differences has become particularly sensitive as leaders maneuver for advantage before the 17th Party Congress next fall, when President Hu Jintao hopes to cement his hold on power and anoint possible successors in the party hierarchy. In particular, analysts here said, he is expected to name his own loyalists to positions of power to replace the holdover proteges of former president Jiang Zemin.

In what was seen as a manifestation of the maneuvering, Shao Hua, the widow of Mao Zedong's late son Mao Anqing, published a front-page article in the May 18 People's Daily heaping praise on Jiang for what she described as warm-hearted concern for the legendary Chinese leader's descendants. Political observers in Beijing saw the article as noteworthy because, amid the effusive praise for Jiang, it never mentioned Hu.

Whether on doctrine or personnel, most differences of opinion within the party have remained private, forcing analysts to look for meaning in such indirect indications of what is happening behind closed doors. But a pair of essays in party-sanctioned intellectual publications early this year -- one by Xie Tao, a former Renmin University vice president, and another by Zhou Ruijun, a former People's Daily editor -- openly called for democratic reforms as the best way forward for China. Xie specifically referred to Northern Europe's democratic socialist systems as a source of inspiration.

I tried to find the English versions of the commentary on the People's Daily website, but was unsuccessful. However, I was able to find out more about one of the academics who wrote the commentaries in question, Xin Xiangyan. According to this article, Xin is a research fellow at CASS specializing in Marxism, and promotes a "socialist core value system," which "consist[s] of Marxism, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, patriotism, the spirit of reform and innovation and the socialist sense of honor and disgrace."


Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Five reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

ALM Thesis Forum recap

The ALM Thesis Forum wrapped up this week. I spoke on the second night (social sciences), but I also attended the first night, which featured the creative writing and literature concentrators. I was unfortunately unable to attend the third night of the forum (IT concentrators).

What was so special about the forum? For everyone in the audience, the thesis forum was a chance to see results of the candidates' research and learn about the different methodologies, processes, obstacles, and special opportunities that came into play. For me, it was the opportunity to share my research with a new audience and meet the other students who have been going through the same challenges I have over the past two years. The fact that three other social sciences theses were China-focused also made it special (but I am kind of biased on that point!)

For those readers who are in the early stages of their thesis research, consider registering for next year's forum when the notice goes out. The format is casual -- it's really up to the individual speakers to decide what they want to present and how they want to present it. Some people read from a script, while others talked from memory or used powerpoint slides as a reference. Many people had visuals to share, such as charts and photographs. Most presentations were about 15-20 minutes long, with an additional five-minute question and answer session. The audience was receptive, and not too large -- I'd say about 50 people showed up on the first two nights.

For students who have recently started the ALM program, and haven't really planned their theses, the forum is a great opportunity to learn about some of the research possibilities and various ways to approach your research questions.

Many thanks to HESA and the Harvard Extension School for putting this together!

Thesis update: Conditional approval!

Earlier this week my thesis director conditionally approved my thesis. This is big news for me; it means the content and structure are basically final (I still have to add a brief explanation in one part of chapter 3, eliminate one of the appendices, and perform a handful of other minor tweaks).

After I have made the edits, it's off to the copy shop to print up a draft for the ALM research director at the Extension School to review. He'll be looking for formatting problems, but I am not too worried about this -- I referenced the Chicago Manual of Style and ALM Thesis Guide throughout the writing process, and don't think I'm too far off the mark.

When the thesis is finally approved and bound, I'll post a copy on Harvard Extended. I have also been lobbying the Extension School to submit ALM theses to UMI/ProQuest or other electronic databases, so the global scholarly community can access them, but it seems that the program doesn't have the resources to make this happen. It's a shame -- if the only place people can access ALM theses is in the Grossman Library, then the impact of Extension School research upon our respective disciplines will remain limited.

The ALM thesis forum

There's a great project underway at the Harvard Extension School to organize an ALM thesis forum. This is a live event in which students working on their theses can give presentations or readings to an audience consisting of other students, their thesis directors and advisors, family, friends, and any other interested members of the Harvard community. There will be several nights of presentations in late May, organized according to concentration. It's a great opportunity, and I intend to give a presentation to discuss my own research into Chinese foreign policy views of Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping era, based on a computer content analysis of New China News Agency reports.

If you have gone through the formal thesis registration process and are now working on your thesis (or recently completed it) you should have received messages from the Extension School or HESA's ALM liaison Jim Brennan. Contact them if you are interested in finding out more information.

Thesis update: Almost finished

I can't believe it. I am almost done with my thesis. Or at least substantially done. I finished the second draft two nights ago, and managed to incorporate practically every suggestion that my thesis director had made after reading the first draft. They included:

• Working on the transitions between chapters, which often meant summarizing what I was doing overall or intended to do in the next chapter


• Being more forceful about the advantages of quantitative techniques


• Greatly reducing the data dump which plagued my first draft. I basically combined chapters three (results) and four (analysis), and eliminated a lot of the descriptions of the results -- now there are only 12 figures, compared to nearly 30 in the first draft.


• Adding seven appendices to the end of the document


• Creating a TOC, biography, acknowledgements, and other front matter

I also completed a lot of the formatting requirements dictated by the ALM Thesis Guide. These rules are very specific ("The left-hand margin should be 1 1/2 inches, to accomodate the binding. The top, bottom, and right-hand margins shold be one inch (except on pages with new chapter headings or other major headings, requiring a 1 1/2 inch top margin"). The formatting rules are sometimes quite frustrating, as they entail using advanced functions of Microsoft Word that are neither intuitive nor precise. An example is the table of contents; you can try to do it on your own and then be stymied by changing the layout and watching all of your chapters shift over a few pages, requiring going through every item on the TOC and updating the numbers. Or you can do it Microsoft's way, and apply heading styles (heading 1, heading 2, etc.). Adjusting styles in Word is a nightmare, but at least the TOC can be automagically generated.

The second draft of the thesis took about three weeks to rewrite and reformat, working 2-3 hours nearly every night, and a few more hours every weekend afternoon. I haven't been keeping track, but surely I've spent more than 1,000 hours on the research and writing phases of the thesis. The second draft I sent my thesis director is 22,301 words long, and comes in at 105 pages. It's not a done deal, because he still may ask for more changes, and it has to go back to the Extension School for final proofreading, but I am almost there -- I can feel it!