Closing Thoughts

‘The geography of a country is not the whole truth. No one can give up his life for a map’

- Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

What Tagore is also saying is that what you have in your hands is really an approximation. This is an on-going attempt to compile a resource guide and design a toolkit for those interested in researching the colonial histories of the Malay Archipelagoes using sources and archival materials that can be found on the Internet. If they appear idiosyncratic, that’s because the resources I have listed down is a reflection of my many curiosities, which take me down many different rabbit holes but also allow me to find interesting connections across bodies of knowledge and fields of study that perhaps are not immediately visible to others.

How this resource guide can be useful for another person beside myself, is that while it is a symbolic map to a highly personal research universe, this expanse is bound to overlap with the curiosities of other people. It is, after all, safe to say that we are ultimately all interested in colonial history of the Malay World. On this basis, you can think of this as a set of coordinates that you could adapt to create a resource map of your own, tailoring it to your needs and interests.

When I first joined the academia as a teaching staff in 2016, I began developing a research interest in 19th century colonial history of the Malay World. Having trained mostly as a historian of 20th century modern art, I was confronted with the challenge of learning how to locate and obtain resources in a topic and period of study that was then almost new to me. I soon realised however that more and more materials and sources related to the colonial period are being digitised and made available for public use by museums, libraries, universities, and other independent initiatives. We have reached a tipping point where, to a certain extent, meaningful research on this topic can be done online.

This is not to say what is online is all there is out there in the archives. Rather than viewing this cynically as an obstruction to genuine research, I choose to recognise the immense contribution of digital repositories and digital humanities to recent historical scholarship. On one end of the spectrum, it has given new significance to public history, challenging us to reimagine who the public of history is at every juncture. On the other, the digital sphere is changing our research paradigm and discovering new values for historical research in many different fields. While this might not always fulfil the rigour and comprehensiveness of academic research, historical materials that be found online today are incredibly diverse, and arguably useful to many different types of research with different goals and audiences in mind – journalistic, educational, creative, social, professional.

Coupled with new hacking tools and knowledge sharing platforms that enable a person without academic institutional subscriptions to scholarly databases the opportunity to access books and articles that were previously behind a pay wall. A millennial researcher today is able to build up an enviable personal digital library and archive, a resource that was historically only the very few could afford.

You might ask where is the ethics in all of this? The ethics is really ensuring that the rapacious enterprises of academic publishing are not able to obstruct a more democratic and unruly spread of ideas and access to knowledge.

Tools and sharing platforms short circuit what is by and large a global academic culture that structures access to knowledge along a global economic divide. Poorly funded public universities in less economically developed countries will not have a comprehensive database subscription that highly ranked endowment-rich private or public institutions in countries that are far more economically developed. More significantly, even the richest university in the world, could not afford to subscribe to every single database out there in the marketplace. This either suggest that the volume of information is too large to be contained by any single institution, OR, more likely that the cost of obtaining these information has become way to exorbitant.

We can imagine a different world. That is not to say that such a world is not already a reality. The informal economy in which knowledge circulates has been the reality of most third world universities for a very long time. What we find in the Internet is merely the first world catching up with a long established tradition of knowledge sharing and hacking. When ideas move, imagination grows – that is how we find our place at home and in the world. For further reflection on why knowledge should shared through democratic means, I encourage you to consider the following article:

• Public Library (an essay)https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27/public_library_an_essay/)

• Why and How to Be(come an Amateur Librarian (https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/why_and_how_to_become_an_amateur_librarian/)

Billions are made in the larger academic publishing industry on the labour of academics who often wrote, edited and put together many of these scholarly publications without additional remunerations. The published output is then fed into a metrics in order to measure research productivity. This means that ideas mean much less than the quantified research output. The numerical value is a significant factor, contributing to an institution’s standing in the university ranking game. Hence, the popular saying ‘publish or perish’ hangs ominously as a career threat within the academic community. Ultimately, this ranking system fosters a university political culture that prioritises an unhealthy competitive corporate vision at the centre of the university’s administrative leadership.

Putting this guide-in-progress together has been a three-year long experience of learning how to use the Internet creatively. Learning to use the Internet for my research on colonial history and creating this guide is a response to find a different research culture against today’s narrowing of pedagogical and research vision. It is also a journey of discovering the knowledge facilitation role I should be playing, as an academic teaching in a public university. This role aims to fulfil the ‘public’ mandate of belonging to a ‘public university’ and explore the mandate’s fullest potential. This guide is one small engagement in that direction.

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Acknowledgements

I like to record my appreciation for the support of the two organisations that I am affiliated with - Malaysia Design Archive and Visual Art Program, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya.

My sincere thanks to Roger Nelson, Deborah Philip, Joe Kidd, Rachel Leow, Annabel Teh Gallop, Adrian Vickers, Zahia Rahmani, Ariff Harizi Radzi, Hafiz Rashid, Chase Caldwell Smith, David Borgonjon, Sugata Ray, Yap Lay Sheng, Zach Ngin, Farah Wardani, Felice Noelle Rodriguez , Ali Alasri, Jason, Lim Sheau Yun, Chua Pei Ying, Lee Cheah Ni, Okui Lala, Mun Kao, Daniel Chong, participants of the 1st-4th workshops, Kisah History Podcast team, the many people who made up ‘Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access’ Facebook group, and dedicated colleagues at the National Library Board of Singapore.

I want to also thank Ruang Kongsi, Penang, and Malay Heritage Centre, Singapore, for inviting me to conduct this workshop, while taking the opportunity to extend my gratitude to Muzium Volunteers, Jabatan Muzium Malaysia, La Salle College of the Arts, Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for reaching out with invitations to conduct the workshop. Sadly, due to the COVID19 global pandemic, I was not able to take up these generous invitations.

Most importantly, thank you to all the hardworking archivists and librarians out there in the world who believe strongly, who laboured tirelessly and who persevered passionately to give the past a future and to make knowledge open.

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The compiler

Hello, my name is Simon Soon. I teach art history in the Visual Art Program at the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya and also volunteer my time to help run Malaysia Design Archive here in Kuala Lumpur. Over the years, I've done research on postwar left-leaning artistic and cultural movements in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, modern batik art, cultural histories of Kuala Lumpur, history of photo studios in Malaysia and Singapore, the Muharram procession in Penang and Aceh, keramat shrines, history of Malay art and aesthetic terminologies.

This resource guide grew out of a year long conversation with colleagues in Department of Art History at SOAS, University of London on 'Constructing Decolonial Art History Of Southeast Asia' in 2017, funded through the Newton-Ungku Omar Fund by the British Academy and the Akademi Sains Malaysia. Much more than critical thinking, I value imaginative scholarships on art and cultural histories that change our understanding of ourselves, the world and our relationships with one another. You can find out more about what I do and what else I'm interested in at my academic profile page. You may get in touch with me by writing to simonsoon AT um DOT edu DOT my.

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This online resource guide is published by the Visual Art Program, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya and Malaysia Design Archive.