Dr. William Noseworthy-"De-coding Vietnam: On the Data and Metadata of Vietnamese Studies"

How do we understand Vietnam and the broader field of Vietnamese Studies? Do we consider the process of knowledge production as a combination of fields and studies or as the result of the labor, intellectual and physical, that builds from the ground up? How do we access this knowledge? How are we coding and decoding as an act of translation to the audiences of our students, campus communities, diaspora communities, and the broader public? This talk interrogates the process of knowledge production in the field of Vietnamese Studies from the perspective of libraries and archives. It considers approaches in digital humanities, analog humanities, and the treatment of metadata as a discrete category of analysis. In the case of digital humanities, we will explore how to rethink the nature of the “literature review” while exploring strategies of mapping and statistical analysis of evidence that is decidedly qualitative. In the case of analog humanities, we will discuss how to gather a sense of the silences in narratives and how silence speaks. In the case of treating metadata as a discrete category of analysis we will discuss how the process can inform, and also potentially distract from, the core principles and needs of a collection. Through relaying a transparent intellectual journey regarding discussions on primary sources, libraries, archives, and digital collections, this talk argues in favor of increased awareness into the process of coding and decoding as an integral piece to the puzzle of cultural translation.

Dr. Billy Noseworthy is a historian of Southeast Asia, Asia, and the World. In addition to his position with Cornell University Library, he maintains a visiting appointment as a Lecturer of World History with McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. From his early training in Vietnamese Studies, he branched out into Cham and Cambodia Studies across the years of his dissertation, which he completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the History of Southeast Asia, while writing in substantial depth on the history of Cham communities in Vietnam and Cambodia. A champion of interdisciplinary collaboration, examples of his numerous publications can be found in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Cogent Social Sciences, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He is also the founding host of Kampung Jams on WRFI, a community radio station available along the southern tier of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York and online at WRFI.org. To date, Kampung Jams is one of the only live radio shows with a comprehensive regionally centered theme, sharing classic and contemporary Southeast Asian music that is produced in the United States. At Cornell, he manages monograph acquisitions of Vietnamese language materials to the tune of approximately one thousand new titles per year and the metadata behind Cornell’s massive collection of Vietnamese language materials (est. 70-100k total titles).