Roots and Branches

Tracing changes in 16th century forests, in three maps

Having spent six years (or more) researching forests and land rights in Ming-Qing China, it’s strange that I never spent much time with the Huizhou cadasters. Well, I finally pulled them out last December.

Decolonization, the Game

I taught Modern East Asia for the second time this year. Really fun class to teach. The thing that struck me the second time around was how essentially every situation in post-World War II Asia had a wide range of political possibilities, including large groups of moderates and…

Tradition and turmoil in South China in the ninth and tenth centuries

The aristocratic houses of the Jin 晉(265–420 CE) through the Tang 唐 (618–906) Dynasties in China participated in an exclusive court culture where pedigree and cultural refinement were the primary means to claim…

Footprint of the Capitals, Part 1

Thanks to some very productive periods at Max Planck in Berlin and at Yale, I’ve had a chance to do some new work. This is building into a chapter where I consider the shifts in wood requisitions in the Ming and Qing. The pocket version of the argument is this: the Ming…

A Game that we cannot “Game,” or Algorithms in RL

There is growing concern about the problems that “Big Data” poses to free, democratic society, and rightly so.

There are all kinds of problems caused by bad data, and by the misuse of data. Biases in the data…

Humanities [Research] in the 21st Century

An exploration in 3 paradoxes

There is a great deal of thinking going on about the state of the academy in the 21st century. As many of you — my core readership of 9 (by latest stats) — know well, I occasionally…