It has been more than one and half year (17 months) since I formally started my DPhil project.  My research concern has not been changed but the analytic tools (including concepts and methods) have been shifted a bit.  The concerns on nationalism is clearly pushed a little bit into the background, and the concerns on Internet governance on cultural, political (and thus historical) content in Chinese-written Internet should be much more tangible and clear.  Simply put, I may tend to believe at this moment that the indepedent variable is governance rather than nationalism.  Or it is just because I start more from the empirical evidence that can be collected and analyzed on the case of Chinese-written encyclopedia and less on the theoretical debate on the nature of China’s nationalism online, which is too entrenched in the politics and international relationship literatre.

I thus mark this mental milestone by changing the short biography of myself, and leaving the old biography as below:

As a doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, Han-teng studies how nationalisms are and should be negotiated over Chinese version of Wikipedia. Hence by doing this research, he manages to bridge two fields of study –one nationalism in Chinese studies, another governance principles in Internet studies. Both fields in itself are multi-disciplinary already, hence he needs your help from your own perspective, so that he can make his research coherent and yet connected.

His broader interests, developed during his previous work at Open Source Software Foundry, include peer/collaborative knowledge production and Internet policies from East Asian context. Drawing from his research project on Chinese version of Wikipedia, he experiments how far the 21st century Internet governance could go when facing the 20th century nationalisms. Your help is needed in your judgement on whether Internet governance can prevail.

He holds an MSc degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering and an MA degree in Journalism, both from the National Taiwan University. His master thesis in Journalism is an account of Taiwanese popular-culture nationalism in the 90s. He also holds a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering and a BA degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the National Taiwan University.

Research interests

Wikipedia, Chinese Nationalism, Taiwanese Nationalism

Links

• Hanteng’s OII blog
• Hanteng’s Personal Blog (Mainly in Chinese)
• Hanteng’s Chinese Wikipedia Page

Selected publications

• Liao, H.-T. (2006) Towards creative da-tong: An alternative notion of Creative Industries for China. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9:395-406.
• Liao, H.-T. (2004) From Commemorations to Carnivals: On Emergent Popular-Culture Nationalism in Taiwan [in Chinese, English abstract available] (Dissertation for MA Journalism: University of Taiwan).
• Liao, H.-T. (2003) From Commemorations to Carnivals: A Media Event Analysis of 1994-2003 New Year Eve Party. Chinese Journal of Communication Research 3:37-82.