I hereby accept the nomination made by Jim Niessen to a virtual seat on the H-Net Council.
My primary H-Net affiliation is with H-Buddhism. I am a professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Toyo Gakuen University in Tokyo, where I have been teaching courses in Buddhism and other forms of Asian philosophy and religion since my arrival to that institution in 1994. I am also a veteran administrator of mail lists and developer of web resources for online humanities research. In addition to serving as a list editor and review editor (and review writer) on H-Buddhism, I am also the founder of the list, which has now been on H-Net for three years. The list was actually started another three years before that on another server, so we came into H-Net as a full-fledged active list, called the _Buddhist Scholars Information Network_ ("BudSchol") with a few hundred subscribers.[1]
While developing and administering that prior list through a commercial list hosting service, I had been aware for some time of the online academic community that existed on H-Net, and had been thinking about trying to make our group part of this. I was most of all attracted by H-Reviews, as I had made attempts at getting something similar going earlier on my own list, but had difficulties, due to the lack of a well-established system and support apparatus. I had always been convinced that the Internet mailing list was the ideal organ for book reviews, and that if the notion of Internet-published reviews ever took off, it would not be long before reviews in paper journals would lose their position of prominence. I believe we are now seeing this happen.
I am happy to report that on H-Buddhism we now have a flourishing book review tradition. Additionally, the discussion portion of H-Buddhism has a solid stream of traffic, transmitting a lot of useful information, and our reputation in the field of Buddhist Studies has reached the point where one will have a difficult time at this point finding a scholar of Buddhism who is not subscribed. We've got the attention of almost every single person in our field.
I came to H-Net with a fairly solid background in the creation of on-line reference works and web publishing, having administered, since 1995, an extensive web site that features two extensive dictionaries that I have been compiling for decades, as well as a sizeable collection of indexes and online articles.[2] It is in the course of working at the level of underlying code on these web site development projects that I came to understand the extent of the disingenuous and insidious techniques employed by proprietary software creators (and especially one particular company) to try to ensure that users will be forced to work within the confines of their particular product forever. Thus, over the past five years, I have expended considerable energy toward the dual aim of (1) allowing my myself to work free from these proprietary constraints, and (2) to build tools and resources for usage by others which are platform-independent, and in accord with open standards.
Having served as the coordinator of a number of web data development projects, I do realize that one must keep things sufficiently in perspective to acknowledge the reality of what kinds of software most people are actually using, and the limitations most people are bound to experience in terms of their ability to go beyond the constraints of such software, once trapped. Nonetheless, I believe it is our responsibility as academics to be as aware as we can of non-proprietary solutions, and support their implementation wherever it is reasonably possible to do so. As an academic researcher, I take this to be an ethical charge.[3]
Overall, I believe the people who have worked in the planning and development of H-Net over the years have carried out an astoundingly visionary task, and thus I have nothing but praise and admiration for the overall manner in which this system is run.
I think that one of the most important things we must retain awareness of is the general need to maintain the highest level of academic standards as possible, especially as concerns book reviews, and any other prose type of discourse that might flow forth from our system. I believe that H-Net has set some excellent standards, in terms of peer reviewage, accuracy, and fairness of discourse, but we must stay on guard as we grow. While the primacy of H-Net, as an eminently reliable source for edifying humanities information is obvious to most of us who work inside of H-Net, the fact remains that most Internet-based publication still comes far from yielding the academic credit due it. I am sure that our work within H-Net is the greatest single factor in the academic world motivating change in this situation.
I am honored by this nomination, and if I were to be elected as a Council member, I can assure you that I will participate actively in discussions, and offer my own help and suggested solutions in a responsible and timely fashion, gladly devoting my energies to the further growth and development of H-Net.
