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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.
22 - Time travel
Posted on March 9, 2007
The change to daylight saving time coming up this weekend, three weeks
earlier than in past years, caught me by surprise, although it shouldn't have
if I had been playing attention to resources such as this website about
Daylight Saving Time.
Well, I like the idea that we humans are just like
sunflowers. Still,
I think I'll stick with the social constructionist view so memorably expressed
by Clifford Geertz in his classic "Person,
time, and conduct in Bali" (and see also column #9 below.)
I thought about time this week not just in relation to "springing forward"
but also in relation to news stories. One of the pluses of the internet is
the ability it gives us to move around in time quickly and easily. Thus only a
click or two away we can find time lines, primers, and backgrounders about any
news story that may hit the headlines one day. News sites do such a good job
of linking to these background and related stories, that I am growing
accustomed to this way of reading. So now print newspapers are beginning to
seem very temporally one-dimensional to me.
Of course "stories" chug along quietly long before and long after they
emerge on the front page, or even the inside pages, of our newspapers. So when
East Timor emerged momentarily in the news this week after a hiatus, I wanted
to get a sense of what has been happening during the interval when it was
_not_ a "story." By visiting the
east-timor-studies
list on Yahoo! Groups, one can piece together some of what goes on in
between "newsworthy" events. This educational list (which I first mentioned
in my column #10, dated September 22, 2006; see below) now has over 360
members (you have to join in order to read) and continues to feature an
unusual diversity of sources and viewpoints as well as four languages (English
Portuguese, Indonesian, and Tetun). (For people who like to get things in
their mailboxes, it's worth remembering that visiting the website itself
yields otherwise-overlooked benefits. In this case, the benefits include
documentation, photos, maps, dictionaries as well as all the postings
themselves and -- especially valuable for catching up -- the ability to search
the archives by subject.)
For covering longer periods of time, I recently discovered a new resource
created by Google called News
Archive Search. It enables you to search articles in the News Archive and
to make use of a flexible Timeline (flexible in the sense that it can be
expanded and contracted). I discovered that one could travel further back in
time than I expected, now that periodicals and newspapers from long before the
internet have now been scanned and archived. With this tool, you could see
how (what is now) East Timor was covered in (some of) the media back in the
early part of the 20th century, and maybe earlier.
So many ways to think about time . . . and don't forget to change your
clocks on Saturday night.
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast Asian Studies
Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on March 9,
2007
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