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ifocus and Details are Sketchy have posted a bit on some newspaper coverage from the 2007 Clogger Summit. Give it a read!

This past week, I took a couple of days off from my work up on the floodplain to come down to Phnom Penh for the Cambodian Blogger Summit. I had a great time! This event featured two days of presentations and discussions focusing on blogging, ranging from the technical (e.g. an introduction to podcasting) to the more theoretical (e.g. envisioning the role of blogging and the internet in Cambodia in the future). I met a lot of neat folks, and learned a bunch too.

One of the particularly inspiring aspects of the conference was that it crystallized out of the efforts of the Cloggers Team– 5 young Cambodian bloggers who are so motivated about the medium that they developed Personal Information Technology Workshops which they then voluntarily facilitated at 14 universities and high schools. To date, they have taught over 1700 students about blogging, Khmer Unicode and related topics– all on their own time, driven by their own passion. I have immense respect for the DIY spirit of this crew, and am grateful for their efforts. Plus, they put on a great conference.

In light of the fact that part of my reasoning behind this blog is to share some of Cambodia with people abroad, I am going to start pointing you towards other blogs about Cambodia– other people, other themes, other ideas. Check them out– they are a refreshing change from my usual, “How about this fence…” kinds of posts.

As an appetizer, I will refer you to the blogs kept by the members of the Cloggers Team. All Cambodian, all quite different, all fun reads…

Joke 4 Everyone!– He’s got jokes! But he writes in Khmer, so you need unicode installed to read it.

Ms. K.– She’s in the U.S. on a Fulbright, but joined us at the Clogger Summit via the magic of webcam.

DeeDee, Schoolgirl Genius! Khmer Cyberkid– She just graduated high school in Phnom Penh. (Congratulations!)

Someone: a dreamer– Named after a brand of soap, he writes a lot about personal development.

KhmerAK– A self-avowed Phnom Penh geek. Plenty of fun techie topics.

So check them out and see what they have to say. I’ll post more links in the coming weeks and months…

And, thanks to Preetam Rai for making his image of the summit (above) available on Flickr under a Creative Commons 2.0 License!

Over the course of my project here in Cambodia, one activity which has sucked up a lot of time is the accumulation of spatial data, ranging from paper topographic maps to digital orthophotos. These are invaluable for general thinking about land use, as well as developing landscape histories, which are an important aspect of my research project (as well as not getting lost!). One sort of data which I have yet to properly assemble, are locations of government land and fishing concessions to private individuals, companies and communities.

However, a post from Details are Sketchy drew my attention to Alt.Map.Cambodia. There, one can find Google Maps of fishing, mineral and agricultural concessions (like the map above), documents dealing with border negotiations, and more miscellaneous geographic information. An excellent resource!

Alt.Map.Cambodia subsequently pointed me to the Danida-funded Cambodia Atlas project. The website features an interactive Java-powered map of Cambodia, which allows users to modify which information is displayed on a base map of Cambodia (i.e. which layers of the GIS are active). It includes layers for forest cover, UXO and land mines, community fisheries and much more. Fun to play with. According to the site, this is part of the effort to get this data into the public domain, which is a good thing. However, I am not sure if they are making the datasets available for download so that we can actually use them in our own spatial analyses. That would be a really good thing.

Those of you who are on the job might appreciate the recent round-up of software useful to anthropologists (and those of us who poach anthropological methods) over on the anthropology blog, Savage Minds. The post itself is an aggregation of software which was bandied about on the East Asian Anthropology Listserv. Be sure to check the comments, too. It is an interesting list, though it is somewhat skewed towards Windows and Mac users.

I have been looking for software to help me get my work organized. My own system is pretty unsophisticated– in the field I take notes in my locally-procured exercise books. When I first got started a few years back, I was keen on the Rite-in-the-Rain line of field books. However, after a chiding from a committee-member when I included water-proof notebooks as a line item in a proposal budget (at something like $14 each, they just looked fishy in the budget), I shifted to whatever notebooks I could find when I landed wherever I was going. Luckily for me, most of my note-taking currently takes place under houses rather than out in the rain.

I write up notes and brainstorm using a text editor, either Kate on Linux or NoteTabLight on Windows. I am neither a Kate nor a NoteTab advocate– I remain open to other programs. But they are both free, and I just like the cross-platform flexibility of text files.

One of my serious organizational problems right now is my PDF files. After 6 years of study, I have accumulated quite a mess of scientific literature in PDF format. It is, of course, scattered across several locations and with file names spanning several different conventions (as my naming system has changed over the years, I have not retroactively updated the names of older files). Searching for particular articles by title or author is often tricky, and by subject or key-word is nigh on impossible. So now I am looking for a program which will let me tag my PDFs so that I can keep them all in one place, and search by tag. A library manager, if you will. My cursory search has turned up little so far. If I come up with a program I like, I will post about it. If you know of one, I’d appreciate the tip so share it in the comments.

Sadly, my hard copy files suffer from the same problem; though, several moves between apartments and offices have probably left them in even worse condition. But, they are back home. So I cannot worry about them right now.

A month or so ago, I posted about an article discussing some tips for writing about Africa which I had learned about from a post by Maytel.

The article inspired a little venting on my part, but nothing overtly constructive.

Well, as proof that procrastination really can be constructive, Maytel has revisited the problem and prepared some suggestions for writing about Cambodia. Check it out.

Frank Smith and others have recently made available a new Khmer-English online dictionary. It is searchable using either English, Khmer or the International Phonetic Alphabet. The interesting thing is that the dictionary itself is not new, rather it is a synthesis of three existing dictionaries…

These resources are primarily based on the two very different editions of the Cambodian-English Dictionary: Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Kylin Chhor, Lam Kheng Lim, Lim Hak Kheang, and Chen Chun (1977, Catholic University Press), and Cambodian-English Dictionary by Robert K. Headley, Rath Chim, and Ok Soeum (1997, Dunwoody Press, ISBN 0-931745-78-0)

The 1977 edition draws heavily on traditional Cambodian lexicography; in particular, on the monumental Chuon Nath dictionary (see below). With some 20,000 headwords and almost 25,000 subentries, it is notable for its phonemic and grammatical analyses. Headley ‘77 also provides extensive etymological references, with nearly 10,000 Pali and Sanskrit citations, and hundreds more from Thai, Cham, French, Vietnamese, and a dozen other languages.

The 1997 edition contains more than 50,000 entries. It was compiled with an emphasis on the modern languge, particularly modern words, and expressions used in both written and spoken Cambodian. However, it also contains many entries for literary and poetic forms, and can be used to help in reading classic Cambodian texts. It has less etymological information than the ‘77 edition, but include far more usage (e.g. social level) tagging, and more than two thousand example sentences.

Searches in Khmer orthography will also return entries from the Chuon Nath Khmer Dictionary (1966, Buddhist Institute, Phnom Penh). This classic work represents the high point of pre-war Cambodian lexicography.

Khmer language input uses the Khmer Unicode font system. If you have not installed it yet, Windows users should see the KhmerOS site for download and installation instructions. Linux users can track down the language packages in the repositories. In addition to Khmer Unicode font use in particular programs, Khmer translations are maintained for the Kubuntu and openSUSE Linux distributions (maybe others?).

In a seeming last gasp from her supposedly euthanized blog, Maytel points to a really neat essay with great tips about how to write about Africa.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Why is this pertinent? As with Africa, journalists covering Cambodia seem to suffer from the same need to trade in stereotypes, and fascination with timeless peasants (either caught in primordial rice-farming village purity or, struggling in the present day unable to escape the trauma of the Pol Pot Regime). While these certainly do represent certain facets of the country, they overlook a lot.

Doubtless there are plenty of exceptions to this criticism. I try to cast a wide net, but likely miss a lot. I just had to vent a little bit. I am also a little late to the table in this discussion, as the links in Maytel’s post reveal. Check it out for broader coverage of the issue.

My buddy Al just gave me the tip and I have confirmed it…

To the delight of librarically-challenged and/or lazy researchers everywhere, Australian National University’s Press has made some of their titles available online for free download. Additionally, some ANU PhD dissertations are now available online. In my groping, I found little on Cambodia or agriculture, but there are plenty of titles focusing on elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. Well worth some browsing.

I sure hope that more institutions follow suit.

I am not a cellular or a molecular biologist. I appreciate the research (what’s not to love about feedback loops, emergent properties and complex systems?), but I just do not enjoy the process. Nothing personal– I am just not a lab guy. But I am a biologist. As such, I was pretty excited when the gang over at Make blog tuned me in to clips of Harvard University Biovision’s award winning “Inner Life of the Cell” animation. I had seen an earlier example of their work– wonderful imagery of cellular processes, set to music, prompting my wife and I to dust off our molecular biology skills (frankly, her’s needed little dusting), and shout out the names of the structures and processes depicted in the piece. This time their animation has documentary-style narration, which is a nice touch. Elsewhere on the page, there are clips of other processes, lab procedures, as well as commentary on the project itself. Lots of fun things to watch for the biologically inclined, especially if you have bandwidth. I could not find their licensing policies on the website. But I hope that I will be able to put some of this to use next time I have to teach undergrads basic cell biology.

The staff at the Documentation Center of Cambodia , keepers of an enormous archive of documents from the Khmer Rouge period and generally really helpful folks, recently made some of their publications available online in PDF form.  They have generously made this material available for free. 

 If you download the free copies and like what you read, support their generosity and buy hard copies.  You can pick them up at the DC-Cam office in Phnom Penh on Norodom Boulevard near the Independence Monument, as well as at Monument Books.  From overseas, email info@monument-books.com for information on ordering and shipping.  And no, nobody told me to plug the hard copies.  I just think that it is important to support institutions which make their publications available online for free.