THE INTERNET AND ASIAN STUDIES Some of you who will read this, will probably have heard of and already know what the Internet is. You will have happily been sending your electronic mail messages around the world, accessing information in far off places through the World Wide Web, and reading up on the latest developments in your subject area or interests through the discussion groups and mailing lists. But, for those of you to whom most of this still means little, I want to give brief description of the Internet and what it can do for you. By Annelies de Deugd Internet is the name of a worldwide network that connects thousands of other computer networks to each other thus offering the possibility for information access and exchange. The Internet is an outgrowth of a network called ARPANET, established about 25 years ago to meet the needs of researchers working in the defence industry in the USA. From the beginning it aimed to be a network free of charge. This means of communication proved very popular and in 1986 the US National Science Foundation established NSFNET to provide more network connections to more research institutions. Nowadays over 20 million computers are connected globally in this network and these form the Internet. What started as an academic network has grown to a worldwide public utility for the general public that offers both information access and a fast, inexpensive means of communication since the free of charge principle still holds true. The Internet has become a sort of digital community with citizens and all kinds of digital amenities. People can find information about almost everything, make contacts, and even form romantic relationships. Losing the face to face element has changed the way people speak to each other on the Internet but this is something with which psychologists can keep themselves occupied for years to come. People can get access to Internet by using computers which are connected to the physical network. This can either be at home via your own PC, modem and phone line, or, most likely, through the computers at the institution at which you work. Most institutions have a local computer network these days and provide access to the Internet in some form or other. I do not want to get into the technical stuff here of how to get connected or the technicalities that make all this communication between computers possible. I will assume you have access to the Internet somewhere, somehow. Depending on your kind of access you can either get on to the Internet through FTP, E-MAIL, TELNET, GOPHER, WAIS, or WORLD WIDE WEB. Now I will discuss all of these topics and give a few examples. FTP: FILE TRANSFER PROGRAM This a computer programme with which allows you to transfer any sort of files between any pair of computers on the Internet. You can use it to load files from your network to your PC and vice versa. Through a version of FTP which is called 'anonymous' FTP you can access FTP sites all over the world that contain files on all kinds of topics. You use a special login name, ANONYMOUS. You will be asked to supply something (for example your e-mail address) that identifies who you are and how you can be reached. After that you are logged in and you can start looking for and copying the files you want. The program allows you to copy these files from the computer that contains the FTP site you are interested in ("the host" computer) to your own PC ("the local" computer). If you have this program at your disposal, you start a FTP session by typing the address of the site you want at the FTP prompt. Example: FTP name.domain.qualified.fully The problem, of course, is how do I know where I can find what I am looking for ? There are several ways of finding out what is out there. There is Yanoff's list which names at least forty sites providing information on various topics available through FTP and the addresses of further archives in which files can be found. The address is: ftp.csd.uvm.edu There is also a database and tool that let you query this database that contains the names of files and directories that are available via anonymous FTP with keywords. All this is called ARCHIE. For this, however, you need an ARCHIE client program. If this ARCHIE client programme is not installed on your computer system, it is a also possible to access this by electronic mail. All you have to do is send an e-mail message to: address: archie@archie.unl.edu subject: (empty) message: help You will get back a short user guide for the e-mail interface to Archie. This brings us to Electronic mail or e-mail. E-MAIL Electronic mail is the possibility to send and receive messages via your computer. Most institutions will have this and your access to it will consists of a login name and password for you to use when you connect to the service that provides the e-mail, an e-mail address, something that looks like this: name@host.domain.country, and you will have a mailbox. When you connect to the e-mail service you will use a programme called a "mailer". There are a lot of different programmes with different facilities depending on the computer system that you use. But most likely one will be provided by your network. All that is needed now to start is the e-mail address of whoever you want to contact and you are on your way. It is possible to attach files and graphics to your messages, the ease with which this goes depending on the mailer programme you use. Sending messages to people is only one of the things you can do with e-mail. You can, as I wrote above, use the Archie database, join mailing lists which are discussion groups that communicate entirely by e-mail for all sorts of interests and topics, and it is also possible to access FTP sites via e-mail. To find out about which mailing lists exists you can send a message to: address: listserv@listserv.net subject: (empty) message: list global You will get back a very large message with all the names of existing lists. To access FTP sites via e-mail you can send a message to: address: ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com subject: (empty) message: help You will get a message back with a command summary, usage notes, and a number of examples of how to do this. Some interesting lists for Asian Studies are: H-ASIA Asian Studies BUDDHIST Buddhist Studies CHINAChinese Studies INDIAIndian Studies NIHONGO Japanese Language Studies TIBET-L Tibet Interest List VIETNET The Vietnamese discussion list To subscribe, send an e-mail to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.NET with the following command in the text (not the subject line) of your message: SUBSCRIBE listname your name Replace 'listname' with the name in the first column of the table, replace 'your name' with your own name. TELNET Telnet is a network programme that you can use to log in to one computer on the Internet from another. Telnet connections are general-purpose. What you can do with it depends on what the remote computer has to offer. Usually you require a login name and password but many sites are public space and have special logins or no logins at all. You need a host name to identify the computer that you want and to connect to it. You activate the Telnet programme and type: for example: telnet edinfo.ed.ac.uk You then will get a welcome screen where you are asked most of the time to give a login and a password. If this is a publicly accessible computer site you might get the login provided or you can just give enter. Once in you can browse around to see what this site offers. Normally you will be able to go on from that site to others on the Internet. Some sites offer the possibility to mail documents to yourself. Through Telnet you can also log in to the Archie sites to look at the files that are kept in the Archie archive. type: telnet archie.unl.edu and log in as archie Telnet can put you in touch with lots of different services, but finding the right one you need takes time. This is where Gopher and World Wide Web come in. GOPHER Gopher is a tool with which you can search the Internet for information, mostly plain text files. It is a cross between FTP and Telnet with menus. The aim is to bring you that information seamlessly. It works either through its own programme, Gopher, which you can install on your computer or, when you use Telnet to connect to a site, you can log in as gopher. If that site supports Gopher then you will get a menu from which you can choose where to go further. for example: telnet rulcri.leidenuniv.nl, log in as gopher Gopher has its own search tool, like Archie, called VERONICA which will help you to find the gopher sites about subjects you are interested in. WIDE AREA INFORMATION SERVER, WAIS WAIS, is an application for performing full-text searches on databases containing indexed documents. There are more than 500 WAIS databases world wide on a variety of topics. The WAIS servers are scattered throughout the Internet. Each WAIS server manages some databases. Again the question, "How do I find what I want?" Through anonymous FTP you can get a listing of WAIS databases at: sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/wais in the file pub/wais/waissources.tar.Z Getting this listing involves decompressing the file. Ask the system manager of the network you are connected with how to do this if you are not familiar with this. You can get the same sort of information also through telnet by connecting to: telnet quake.think.com login wais, no password Gopher and World Wide Web offer gateways to WAIS as well. The gopher site to try is: gopher: tc.umn.edu, choose Other Gopher and Information Servers, entry WAIS-based Information WWW: http://server.wais.com/waisgate-announce.html More about this in the following. WORLD WIDE WEB, WWW WWW is a client/server application similar to Gopher. It will let you retrieve information without having to know where on the Internet that information is stored, and it provides an interface to other Internet applications like Gopher. Telnet, and FTP. The difference is that Gopher is ordered in a tree structure that terminates in dead ends and WWW is set up as a web structure in which there are as few dead ends as possible. The software you need to access this WWW is called a Browser. There are ASCII browsers and graphical browsers. If you have an user interface on your computer like XWindows, Windows, or Macintosh then you can install graphical browsers programmes like Mosaic, Cello, and Netscape with additional viewer and sound programmes. These are the best and allow you to see all the graphics, photos, and if you have a computer which is capable of producing sound and video, you can hear text and see moving images. A good starting point for asianists is the following location. If you have access to WWW, try: http://Coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html http://Coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLPages/WhatsNewWWW/Asian-www news.html These are a few sites that give you a good starting point for finding information on Asian Studies in the Web. ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING Another area in connection with the Internet that is developing quickly is that of electronic publishing. Using the Internet as the medium to disseminate academic literature is becoming rapidly widely recognized as a very fast and powerful tool for the academic researcher in almost any scientific area. Literature that is published in journals is affected by the current development of the possibilities of the Internet. At this moment there are several scientific journals that only appear in electronic format. Though the number of journals that are published in this way is still quite limited, and are mainly journals on physics and medical subjects, it is expected that within a few years the Internet will deal with an important part of the publishing of academic research. It is also likely that newspapers are going to discover the possibilities of Internet. There are already a few newspapers that are published on the World Wide Web. Not only the publishing of electronic journals and newspapers are a proof of the advantage of the Internet, also the way the traditional journals are distributed among academic researchers is affected by it. Several publishers are experimenting with publishing their journal electronically. The TULIP program of Elsevier and the Carl/ Uncover program are two examples of this. In these partly experimental programs, the users are enabled to browse online through the contents of their favourite journals. They can select articles they find interesting and order them. These articles can be printed locally (as in the TULIP program) or centrally, and sent to the user who ordered them. There is also a vast majority of pre-print papers and articles that are disseminated through Internet. In this way a researcher can collect comments by many more people on his work before its official publication than would be possible in the traditional way. This is a very fast and efficient way of improving the output of a researcher and communicating about publications with other researchers. In the years to come the tool of electronic publishing will come to its full potential. A site to look at for this is the Electronic Newsstand. Here you will find lots of different magazines on a wide range of topics. It is very nice to browse through. Just one warning, subscribing to some magazines will cost money. You will find it at: WWW: gopher://enews.com or http:// enews.com telnet: enews.com, login enews How does all this connect with Asian Studies? Lots of institutes and universities offer access to their stored information through the Internet. Researchers can access all kind of documents, consult catalogues of libraries to find books that are uncommon, and stay in touch with developments and colleagues through e-mail and mailing lists much quicker than by normal mail. Files can be easily transported back and forth. More and more articles, perhaps even books, in the future will only appear in electronic form. Like it or not, the Internet is here and will probably stay. Asian Studies will have to go with the flow and join in this new means of communication and try to extract the best from it. The IIAS intends to be accessible on the Internet as well. Towards the end of January 1995 the Newsletter will be available electronically. You will find us for the moment at: OASIS, a subsystem of the Campus Wide Information System of leiden University, which is accessible through Gopher and WWW ( http://www.leidenuniv.nl, choose oasis) This address will change in the course of 1995 as the IIAS will have its own computer server and WWW home page. (with many thanks to Ren‚ van der Voort for the information about electronic publishing.)