This page provides online resources
to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always
welcome!
Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)
What's Up on the Web:
A fortnightly update on
items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and
accessible through links on this page.
#10 - Young east-timor studies list
Those of you who regularly read John MacDougall's Yahoo! Groups Indonesian-studies list have
probably noticed recent announcements about his new list focused on Timor-Leste, most recently
Timor-Leste,learn more about it, which clearly explains the list's approach. Now with over a
thousand postings, east-timor-studies started on June 15, with a message with "hope" in its
subject heading for the url of a blog associated with an orphanage in Timor.
To say that this list is new is only partly true, as John has been following East Timor since 1974.
During the Indonesian occupation, he brought conditions there to the attention of Indonesians
and Americans alike (see the apakabar archive).
Actually, the subject of Timor Leste never disappeared. See the Southeast Asia course on the
Research Site, the Timor-Leste panel, and the Indonesian-studies list itself (in these archives,
there are over three hundred messages from the last three years). Nonetheless, John describes
his current effort as "catching up," which may account in part for its breadth and depth.
But that comprehensiveness is also the result of his deliberately holistic (in the anthropological,
not alternative medicine, sense) approach. That is to say, he seeks out a wide variety of genres
(e.g., blog entries, postings from other lists, news articles, academic papers, policy reports, etc.),
sources (e.g., government, nongovernment, activist, ex-pat, etc.), and media (i.e., maps,
photos, video, and music in addition to text). What holds all this together is the moderator's
conviction that, before we can begin to analyze, we need to see the whole picture.
This holism also motivates the remarkably international and multilingual approach of this project.
English and Indonesian are here, of course, but John has also tapped the increasing number of
online translation resources to access Portuguese-language materials as well. Not assuming
that his readers can read Portuguese, he tells us how to find these tools ourselves. Although he
is not posting any Tetun materials, at least not yet, he provides lots of information about Tetun
and other local languages.
On his Simplicity blog, John indicated recently that he would write his observations about Timor
Leste as time permits. Currently, on the blog there has appeared only one -- currently, the
most recent posting ("No news is no news,"dated August 31), a pessimistic and trenchant
summary of recent events. But he has been making observations on the list in the form of brief
introductory notes to some of the messages he posts. To read these, either keep a lookout for
telling subjects headers such as "rumors" or "spin," for instance, or go to advanced search and
type in "john" under 'message text' only, and then scan to find the roughly 40 such comments
(as of this writing).
And, in general, it is helpful, especially if you have not been reading the messages as they are
posted, to take advantage of the search feature of Yahoo! Groups. It is fast and efficient and
helps you narrow the material down to what you want to look at (or listen to). Use different types
of search terms (e.g., author, key player, topic, media, etc.) so as to move across the many
postings in focused ways.
As with John's other projects and articles, here there is always a strong commitment to
independent learning. Thus he speaks reflexively about how he has gathered this information
-- and how you could, too! He encourages the readers to get engaged in the participatory web.
And, in the process, he introduces ideas that have wider relevance. For instance, who would
have imagined there would be a Tetun version of Wikipedia -- and what others are there? Who
would have thought of creating a searchroll consisting of key think tanks as a way of finding
important reports? Who would have expected that you could listen to folk and popular music
of Timor Leste as you do online fieldwork? And who would have realized how effective it can be
simply to see photographs of local people as you try to figure out what has gone wrong
economically and politically in the country?
So, with John's attention returning to Timor-Leste, we have a welcome new web resource which,
one hopes, will help shed light on a place that has too often been neglected by too many people.
Posted on September 22, 2006
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast Asian Studies
Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on September 8, 2006