Anyone who has visited my flash blog about the need to transform Asian Studies for the digital age (Content Asian Studies) or who has read my piece in the Mekong Review on the decline of Asian Studies knows that I think a lot about the changes that are taking place in the world today (the rise of the Internet, the decline of the Humanities, etc.) and how those changes affect those of us who work in the field of Asian Studies.
Simply put, it is obvious that we are experiencing an enormous shift in how knowledge is produced and disseminated and in the kinds of knowledge that are deemed important for people to survive and thrive in the world today. And as I have been saying over and over for many years now, in this transformation, the field of Asian Studies is generally not faring well.
We can see this in various “declining numbers” – from enrollments in courses and programs to job openings – and that is a topic I’ve written about before. However, we can also see this through an examination of how Asian Studies “performs” on the Internet, and that is a topic that I have only recently started to examine.
As I discussed in the previous post, I’ve been looking at how webpages are evaluated and ranked by search engines, such as Google. A key factor that search engines take into account is the number of websites that link to a given webpage. Links are seen as a kind of “vote of confidence,” and the more links that a page receives, the more “authoritative” it is viewed by a search engine, the higher it appears in search results, etc.
That said, it is of course much more complicated than that. Some types of web pages, like .edu and .gov pages are inherently considered more authoritative by search engines, so links from those pages will boost a site’s ranking more than say links from personal websites.
Further, search engines now also recognize that it is possible to “buy” links (or for a site to get hacked for the purpose of linking to other sites), and so they view the number of referring domains that links come from as a more accurate indicator of a website’s authority.
But putting this issue of ranking aside, I would argue that simply looking at how many referring domains link to a given organization’s website can give us a sense of how active that organization is online. And given how important it is to have an online presence these days, this is a statistic that can give us a sense of the degree to which an organization is actively engaged.
So to examine this I decided to run the websites of Asian Studies centers around the globe through a tool (Majestic.com) that provides information about links (or “backlinks” as they are also called) and referring domains, and that ranks websites by the number of links that they receive (“citation flow”) as well as how authoritative sites are (“trust flow”) based on the number and quality of the links they receive.
To do this, I first conducted a Google search for “Asian Studies centers.” Google took into consideration my current geographic location and listed first the Institute of Asian Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (and the way that this geographic calculation by Google affects how we perceive reality is another important topic. . .).
Then after that it listed a webpage that contains lists of Asian Studies centers from around the world. This webpage comes from the website of the US-based Association of Asian Studies, the largest Asian Studies organization in the world.
I clicked on the list of centers that focus on Southeast Asia, and in just viewing this list alone, I immediately discovered that this webpage is badly outdated.
The list of North American sites contained the same major Southeast Asian Studies centers that have been around for decades, and indeed, they are all still around, albeit some of them have changed the URLs of their websites, and some of the links on the AAS website are therefore broken.
As for the rest of the world, however, much has changed since this AAS webpage was created.
First of all, nothing that AAS lists for Australia still exists in the form listed here, and that of course means that the links here don’t work.
For better or for worse, universities in Australia have responded to the transformations taking place in the world today by taking action, in the form of either eliminating or “restructuring” programs. There is thus, for instance, no longer a Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Monash University. Instead, there is now a Monash Asia Institute. Similar changes have taken place at other universities in Australia.
As for Asia. . . is it really the case that Kyoto and NUS are the only places that have centers focusing on Southeast Asia?. . . Nothing in China? What about Thailand? Vietnam? Wait, aren’t I writing this right now from an institute of Asian Studies in the middle of Southeast Asia that produces a good deal of scholarship on Southeast Asia?
The same goes for Europe. I was very surprised, for instance, to not find the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden listed here, as it is, I would argue, the most dynamic Asian Studies organization in the world today. Its effort to globalize Asian Studies and to create networks with scholars in Africa and Latin America (regions of the world that Asian countries like China and Korea are now deeply invested) is truly a cutting-edge endeavor.
Giving AAS the benefit of the doubt, I guessed that IIAS must be mentioned in the list of “general Asia” centers. But in checking, I found that this is not the case. Instead, the closest thing there is a broken link to the School of Asian, African, and American Indian Studies at Leiden University, a school which as far as I can tell does not exist anymore.
So having begun my examination of the online condition of Asian Studies centers by consulting this top-ranked webpage from the Association of Asian Studies, the first thing that I could see, even before checking any numbers, is that this AAS webpage is way out of date.
That’s not a good sign for AAS, and by extension, for Asian Studies in the US where AAS is the main Asian Studies organization. It points to a lack of attention to the Internet, the key means by which humankind now obtains information.
But putting that aside for now, let’s look at some numbers.
From Majestic.com, we can get the above numbers about the AAS website. I’m going to focus on the following: “trust flow,” “citation flow” and the number of referring domains. “Topical trust flow” is also interesting, as it indicates how authoritative the website is in certain niche fields.
Trust and citation flow tell us what search engines think of the website, and that’s important because it relates to “visibility.” The higher those numbers are, the higher a page will appear in search results, the more likely someone will see that webpage, etc.
Meanwhile, I would argue that the number of referring domains can give us a sense of how active an organization is online. If an academic site is getting linked to by many domains, then that is a sign that it is active online, and by extension it can also point to how active the organization is in general.
It’s difficult to get a sense of what the above numbers mean without some comparison. So let’s compare the AAS website with the website of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, a center that has been at the forefront of encouraging the history profession to change and adapt to the Digital Revolution.
What we can see here is that all of the numbers for this center’s website are much higher than those for the AAS website. That the “trust flow” number is much higher than that for the AAS website has a lot to do with the top two items in the “topical trust flow” category. News sources and educational sources are considered authoritative, and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is getting linked a lot by such sources.
Why is that? Well we can’t say for sure, but my guess would be that it is because people in those fields see the work that this center is undertaking as valuable for the world that we live in today.
Let’s now turn to a Southeast Asian Studies center.
The Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University has a long and respected history, and that is widely recognized by scholars in the field. Search engines, however, do not necessarily view its website all that highly.
It makes sense that its numbers would be less than those of the AAS wesite, as the range of activities that the Southeast Asia Program engages in is much smaller, but that only 31 referring domains are detected linking to the Cornell site does suggest that this program is not very active online.
That said, were we to look at the numbers for all of the Southeast Asian Studies centers in North America, we would find that the Cornell site is pretty average, and that some centers/programs actually have far fewer referring domains linking to their sites.
How about Le Minh Khai’s SEAsian History Blog? We can see that it is active online in that it has 10 times more domains linking to it than the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell. However, search engines view it as less authoritative because its links are not coming from authoritative sources like .edu webpages.
Finally, let’s turn to the IIAS, the center that AAS does not place in its list of Asian Studies centers around the globe.
Its numbers are very similar to those of AAS. This is impressive as the IIAS is a much younger organization (1993) than AAS (1948/1956), and yet online it stands shoulder to shoulder with its older counterpart.
What can explain this? And what does this all mean?
What search engines are documenting is a lack of dynamism on the websites of most Asian Studies centers (IIAS being an exception). We need to ask ourselves why this is the case. Are webpages inadequate at representing reality? Is the field of Asian Studies actually much more dynamic than the Internet suggests? If so, how do we know that?
Or alternately, is it the case that the above numbers accurately document the state of the field of Asian Studies?
I’ll leave these questions for others to ponder, but I think that there is no denying that in the twenty-first century, human reality and cyber reality are closely interconnected. The above information should lead people to wonder what is happening in the human world of Asian Studies and the degree to which the current cyber reality may or may not reflect and affect that.
UPDATE
A couple of days after posting this, someone from AAS contacted me to inform me that AAS is in the process of updating its website, with a new version scheduled to be launched in 2019, and that this post made people at AAS realize that in the interim it would be best to simply take down the outdated information about Asian Studies centers around the globe.
That’s good to know and I’m very glad to hear that! That said, in pointing out the problems with a particular page on the AAS website, my intent was not to single out AAS as an exception to a norm, but to suggest that such webpages are unfortunately quite normal in the online world of Asian Studies, and that the metrics concerning Asian Studies websites as a whole point in that direction.
To be fair, the world of online communication is new to all of us, and we are all learning as time moves forward. My intent in writing the above post is to try to get people to think about what is required to not be left behind by the changing times. Having updated information on websites is of course very important, but online communication now requires much more than that.
On another note though, I found that the outdated information on that AAS webpage was actually very informative in the way that it revealed what has (or has not) changed at the institutional level in the field of Asian Studies around the globe in the past 20 years, and in the way that this can make us think about what those changes (or lack thereof) actually mean.
Further, I’m particularly interested in how those changes (or lack thereof) intersect with the Internet. What is the relationship between what a search engine sees in an organization’s website and the actual condition of that organization? In the field of Asian Studies, does the appraisal that search engines make of Asian Studies websites have any (long term) impact on the actual organizations that host those websites? How can we know this? Should we be trying to do something? If so, what? Should we even care? These are the types of questions that the above post seeks to ask.