• DianHua Dictionary
  A full-featured Chinese-English dictionary for iPhone
  (tags: iphone chinese dictionary 中文 字典 词典 爱疯)
• CC-CEDICT Home [CC-CEDICT WIKI]
  A creative commons Chinese-English dictionary project.
  (tags: chinese dictionary 中文 字典 词典)
• 在线新华字典
  An online Chinese dictionary
  (tags: 字典 chinese dictionary 中文 词典)

Today a colleague showed me that what I had hoped for has come true: There is a full-featured, free, Creative Commons licensed dictionary, and there is a good iPhone application to use with it. The dictionary is CC-CEDICT, and the iPhone app DianHua.

A screenshot of the iPhone application from the DianHua website.

So far (for the last couple of hours) it’s served me well. But I’m quite excited that the dictionary is seemingly relatively good and is also released under a Creative Commons license. That means it’s fair game for developers to use in applications we can’t yet imagine.

The project of building this dictionary, CC-CEDICT, is community-based using the wiki form. It’s wiki has a to-do list, which presently portends the addition of alcohol-related terms and XML terminology.

As with any wiki project, the content is only as good as the contributors. I’ll quote myself paraphrasing my future professor Cass Sunstein’s retelling of the Condorcet Jury Theorem:

The Condorcet Jury Theorem … states in part that in a jury, the probability that the right decision will be reached increases with the size of the jury, but only if the average juror is more likely than not to come up with the right decision on his or her own. If members of a jury are individually less than 50 percent likely get the right answer, then their deliberation magnifies the problem. Groups like these are wrong, Sunstein says, because of prejudices (freedom fries, anyone?), confusion, and incompetence.

But we can do more than hope incompetence, confusion, and prejudice don’t take over this dictionary, and that sufficient community editing keeps madness out of the reasonably robust foundation. We can contribute and edit ourselves! Also, of course, a smart reader of community-generated content knows what to doubt. And with dictionaries, it’s even worth doubting “authoritative” volumes with names like Oxford, Xinhua, and yes, even Webster.

• 壹报 › 红心的故事
  Some back story for the Red Heart China symbol that arose before the Olympics.

• Chinese Internet Research Conference » The Great Firewall as Iron Curtain 2.0: the Implications of China’s Internet most dominant metaphor for U.S. Foreign Policy

Gina Russo at Frog In A Well has an interesting post drawing a tentative parallel between US conservative groups that advocate “the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history” (in the Times‘ summation) and Republican era Chinese textbooks that included instruction on how to be a “good citizen” (好公民).

My sense is both phenomena are interesting, but as Gina points out they may not have much to do with each other. On the US side, I’m more concerned with a “triumphal interpretation” of US history (whose triumph is it?) than I am with the teaching of Greek philosophers and European political theorists. That’s mostly because you can teach these thinkers alongside more recent theorists without damaging anyone. However, if in the example of the history of the North American west courses had to preclude Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest in favor of Frederick Jackson Turner (in pursuit of triumphalism), then students would miss out.

Since I’m presently studying in various ways both the question of “civil society” in China and the formation of a sense of nation in early 20th century China, these textbooks are equally interesting. The behavioral aspects, such as lessons on proper posture and how to stand quietly in line, are especially interesting given the preponderance of civility-promoting (usually 文明 or “civilization” was the watchword) advertising campaigns in Beijing during the year leading up to the Olympics. While I heard little about the “no spitting” regulations that received so much attention in the US press, subway passages frequently featured signs encouraging people to stand, civilized, in line.

A key difference between these two examples might be this: US conservatives seem dissatisfied with changes in their country as articulated by changes in ideology among some academics, whereas some aspects of the Chinese campaigns seem directed against the state of affairs in China in favor of a perceived civilized other. I am not in a position to make that argument regarding the Republican era, but in the contemporary example at least part of the impetus for these campaigns was clearly the desire to make a good impression during the Olympics.

• Library Research Guide for the Regional Studies — East Asia Workshop, Fall 2008
  A remarkable collection of links compiled by East Asia librarians at Harvard University.
  (tags: china japan eastasia research library harvard)

• Chinese Internet Research Conference Call for Papers
  (tags: cfp conference china-internet china)

• John B. Judis: Debt Man Walking: The US, China, Japan and the Foundations for a New Bretton Woods (Japan Focus)

• Jennifer Lind: Memory, Apology, and International Reconciliation (Japan Focus)

• Chinese Nationalism and Its Impact on Brands (China Digital Times)
  (tags: china nationalism marketing ogilvy)
• As Global Recession Threatens, China Pulls Back on Environmental Efforts (Washington Post)
  (tags: china environment)