Eric, I’d really encourage you to take a look at readings in critical race studies and to take a course in Asian American Studies here at Penn! It’s a small but growing program, and I personally feel as though the theories and concepts you’d read in that classroom setting would help you better understand race through a critical lens, rather than…[Read more]

I’m glad you wrote about how these digital ‘distant reading’ tools ultimately bring us back to ‘close reading.’ I’m still trying to reconcile this paradox. What is the true utility of digital tools when we end up just doing what we already are used to doing (close reading) with information in the humanities? It is my thought that distant reading…[Read more]

I had the exact same thought today in class with regards to a project centering upon race and potentially xenophobia too. Visiting ESP last week, I was surprised to find out that there were a handful of Chinese inmates in ESP during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which outlawed all forms of immigration from China. The ESP stated…[Read more]

Something that came up for me while reading your post was, “Is it a bad thing if archives aren’t digitized at all?” This same question came up for me while working with the Haviland papers themselves. Given the condition of the second volume that Professor Trettien showed us, I am inclined to think that an attempt to digitize that day book would…[Read more]

I definitely shared this “fear of technology” after our class discussion this afternoon. However, my own further reflection made me fear, in a sense, how perhaps the threats of technology and what you’ve called “direct fear of military repression” are not mutually exclusive and do intersect. The American government invests a ridiculous amount of…[Read more]