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.
# 30 - YouTubing
Indonesia & Timor Leste
Posted on July 26, 2007
Yesterday I started wondering what YouTube
has about Indonesia and Timor Leste. Clearly this was because of the
CNN/YouTube debate among the Democratic presidential candidates in the
U.S. I had never looked at YouTube, except when someone sent me a specific
link, so I thought it was about time I explored it a bit.
At first glance, there is so much there, it's difficult to know how to even
begin to separate the wheat from the chaff. Try searching for something you
already have first-hand knowledge of and see how it's been treated. Try to
identify the User who posted the video clip (if they have a web site or blog,
then it's easier to figure out who they are and what they are up to -- more on
this later). You can also look at the Ratings, the View Count, and the Comments
to get some sense of what's been posted (although these may well reflect
popularity more than quality). Consider the way YouTube groups clips together
under both Related and More from This User . All this helps to contextualize
the clip. Using such clues as these still makes for time-consuming browsing,
but the browsing can be productive in several ways.
First, you could certainly use YouTube as a source of primary data, for example
about what tourists, travelers, and/or locals pay attention to. It provides
insight into the mindset of people who accept YouTube's invitation to "Broadcast
Yourself." And sometimes you can find things that you wished you had thought
of filming yourself when you had the chance! And YouTube can give you evocative
background sound; thus, as I wrote this, I was listening to the sound track of
a Toraja funeral that someone had posted.
But playing around with YouTube brings to mind my big pet peeve: we need
to know more about the who-when-where-why-how of any "text." After all, in the
classroom, when we assign readings or films, we point out their social contexts
(who wrote it? who was he or she? what's the perspective? for what
audience? for what purposes? when? where? how did this text come to be? etc
etc). Even when we read an article in a magazine, we look at the author's blurb
to find out the profession, the discipline, the affiliation, the intellectual
and/or political orientation of the author. So too on the net, we need to find
out about the creators/posters. Why don't we ask the same questions of the
information found on the Internet that we do of print?
A sense of authorship and acknowledgments -- that's what is so often missing
when people use the web The term "acknowledgments" comes from
to acknowledge,
and that's the note I'll end this on. This is the 30th and last in this series
of updates, and I'm calling it quits for now. I'd like to thank several people
for making this experiment in writing about the Internet possible and
enjoyable: Antara Kita editor, Gene Ammarell, for letting me try it, and
suggesting the name "What's up on the Web?;" my husband, Van Dusenbery, for
pointing out interesting articles in the paper about the net; webmaster Masudul
Biswas, who cheerfully and without fail uploaded my postings no matter when, or
from where, they arrived; and John MacDougall, whose incredible pioneering
online work was the inspiration for this little effort. Thank you, terima kasih,
and obrigada to all and for more translation tools, click
here
Previous Columns:
Click on title to read -
# 29 - Information, communication, people (July 16, 2007)
# 28 - Anniversary (June 15, 2007)
# 27 - Public journalism: "The Story" (May 18, 2007)
# 26 - INSIDE INDONESIA wants you to write! (May 4, 2007)
# 25 - "Struggle for the soul of Islam" Documentary (April 20, 2007)
# 24 - April Fool's Day (April 6, 2007)
# 23 - New AAS website (March 21, 2007)
# 22 - Time travel (March 9, 2007)
# 21- Works by Sobron Aidit (Feb 22, 2007)
# 20- Winter medley (Feb 9,2007)
#19 - Virtual visuals (Jan 26, 2007)
#18 - Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Jan 12, 2007)
# 17 - Timor blogs (Dec 29, 2006)
# 16 - More on ethnic groups (Dec 15, 2006)
#15 - A quest for "peoples and cultures" (Dec 1, 2006)
# 14 - So much searching, so little time (Nov 17, 2006)
# 13 - Simplicity, take two (Nov 3, 2006)
# 12 - International Crisis Group (Oct 20, 2006)
# 11 - Browsing magazines (Oct 5, 2006)
#10 - Young east-timor studies list (Sep 22, 2006)
# 9 - Clifford Geertz bibliography (Sep 8, 2006)
# 8 - Summer searching (August 24, 2006)
# 7 -
Easy bilingualism
(July 18, 2006)
# 6 -
Learning Indonesian
(July 6, 2006)
# 5 -
Wikipedia
(June 22, 2006)
#4 -"On
the net" in _Inside Indonesia_
(June 8, 2006)
#3 -
Searchrolls
(May 25, 2006)
#2 -
Search InsideTM
(May 12, 2006)
#1 -
Simplicity
(April 26, 2006)
Online Resources
*
Simplicity is John MacDougall's blog coordinating a "knowledge workers'
network" for doing research about Indonesia and so forth.Here are links to
John's earlier sites as well: the open, public Yahoo group
indonesian-studies; the Research Site
covering Indonesia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world and American society (for
a user's guide to the Research Site link, click
here); and the
Apakabar Database, an archive of postings about Indonesia and East
Timor between 1990 and 2002 (for a short history of the 'apakabar' list, click
here).
* Website for the Southeast
Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP)
.
* Click on the
Access Indonesia Project for the latest news about Indonesia and East Timor.
*AGORA offers students and academics
free or low-cost access to scientific literature. The AGORA (Access to Global
Online Research in Agriculture) initiative provides access to more than 400 key
journals in food, nutrition, agriculture and related biological, environmental
and social sciences.
*
According to its
editors, "The Indonesian Nature Conservation newsLetter (INCL) is a non-profit
internet e-mail list for announcements and news about topics related to nature
conservation in Indonesia. Messages appear in digest format and are sent out
once a week in both English and bahasa Indonesia, text or HMTL format (English
and bahasa Indonesia editions differ and are not just translations). To (un)subscribe,
or if you have questions or contributions for inclusion for the English edition,
send an email to Ed Colijn (colijn@redcube.nl).
For contributions for the bahasa Indonesia edition send an email to Muchamad
Muchtar (ngo-move@indo.net.id)."
* A
Guide to Obtaining Official Letter, Permits, and other Documents in order to
carry out Research in Indonesia. Note regarding decentralization and research
permits: Because national security is not subject to
decentralization, LIPI's authority for granting permission to carry out research
in Indonesia has not changed.
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast
Asian Studies Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on
July
26, 2007