Virtual China

According to recent news from Analysys International (Chinese site here), a Chinese research and consulting firm, a new search engine has launched that may be of use to researchers: Soshoo.com 搜数网 bills itself as the first free Chinese vertical search engine focusing on statistics and survey data. Soshoo can search China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the Beijing Bureau of Statistics, and a group of "comprehensive statistical organizations".

Soshoo explains itself thus (rough translation): If you use Google to look for the word "statistics," you’ll find many websites related to statistics; provincial, municipal, and official government statistics websites are especially numerous. But if you want to search further for more specific statistical data you’ll find that the results from general search engines won’t make you happy. Why? It’s because many statistical websites are highly vertical, and the general search engine machines aren’t able to go deep enough to retrieve all of the data…

At first glance the site looks user-friendly, with topic links such as "natural resources," construction and real estate," "education," and so on.  Soshoo also promises English and Japanese versions on the way.  When you click on a topic the latest data appears in chronological order.  When I tried to dig further, however, I was asked to register–now waiting for the email update. Will look forward to other search results to see if this is actually as useful as it sounds.

What is "vertical search" anyway? According to this blurb for a recent talk at Google on the subject, vertical search "is search focused on a specific vertical. Vertical search engines
mine data for one specific niche of the market place - for example,
travel, jobs, hotels, music, movies, and even health care. As web sites
and data proliferate, the task of locating specific information gets
tougher. Vertical search engines provide an efficient way to get to
that information.

Verticals are very different from domain specific portals which are
usually product placement vehicles for vendors. VSEs organize all
niche-specific information and present it in a manner that is simple to
use and easy to consume. Vertical search engines can also offer
advertisers a more focused ad platform."

Have been continuing to think about the educational website issue since I posted a few days ago on my recent experiences with a few educational/academic searches.  Several readers remarked that after all, they are able to access the sociology BBS from their
computers.  My point, however, was not to say that any particular site
is never open to any particular group of people who would like to
access it–rather that, faced with the knowledge that one might not be
able to get through or will have to wait for long periods of time
without knowing the payoff, some scholars just won’t try. That goes for
both scholars outside of China searching Chinese language materials AND
scholars inside China searching for non-Chinese language materials.  Chinese universities may simply not have the resources to provide open internet access for scholarly work, but it seems absolutely critical if Chinese academics are to effectively prepare themselves for the future.

Several people also pointed out that MIT OpenCourseWare is available here on a Chinese server with bits and pieces translated into Chinese. (Those more broadly interested in open source scientific scholarly communication and the politics of academic publishing will want not want to miss the plethora of papers in Session 157, "Promoting Open Access" in Asia and Oceania (scroll down the program and you’ll find the links), recently presented at the 2006 World Library and Information Congress in Seoul.  These include "The Open Access Movement in the Korean R&D Environment," "Comparing Three Chinese Reprint Systems," and "Open Access–Philosophy, Policy, and Practice: A Comparative Study".) 

Finally, Li Kaifu reminded me of another common situation at Chinese universities — some schools charge individuals extra to
access foreign websites.  I do not know whether this practice inhibits scholarly searching for those faculty and students. 

Update: This email just in from a professor at one of China’s top schools: when I was at school, I have to pay a lot for access to "foreign" website according to byte volume, while I can get free domestic access. When I was at home, since I have purchased commercial service package from a private company by paying a monthly fee, so I can get free access to both foreign and domestic website without volume limits, as far as Chinese web police did not block these websites…So there did exist a cost problrm for my graduate students, unless they could find a proxy server to get foreign access free.

According to a recent survey of Chinese university students done by Sinomonitor, a Sino-Japanese independent market monitoring company, and China Youth Zeitgeist Cultural Co Ltd, a domestic media firm specializing in university students, the average student spends 66 RMB per month (about USD $8.00) on "Internet connection, mail box and online games."  Based on the survey data, students have an average of 4,919 RMB (about USD $614) disposable income per semester, so this works out to a mere 4% of their disposable income per month.  Not much. 

Another survey on Chinese university students (I cannot find when it was conducted!) done by the China Youth and Children Studies Center 中国青少年研究中心reports that students spend on average 50-60 RMB per month on Internet connection fees, but that these fees could go as high as 200 RMB. 

If anyone knows of a good study looking at the cost of accessing foreign websites for university scholars, and how it shapes their scholarly search practices, please do let us know! 

Just back from a recent trip around China, where I discovered many wonderful things.  Accessing academic information via publicly available websites, however, was not among them.  My sense is that the Chinese filters create a major obstacle for
academic research, certainly from the Chinese side but perhaps from
outside of China as well. A few data points don’t make a theory, but a few data points are what I have so that’s what I’m reporting. 

• a social sciences graduate student wanted to show me the most prominent academic Chinese sociology website http://blog.sociology.org.cn/.  I couldn’t access it inside China and can’t access it now, from outside.  I am able to access the cached website via Baidu, which shows me what’s there (e.g., discussion forums on latest sociological issues, research, theory, methodology, and "blogs" by prominent academic researchers) but none of the links work.  The blogroll has other relevant sites including: http://community.sociology.org.cn/ [can't access], http://www.1828.com.cn/blog [can't access], the home page of Dr. Feng Gang, chair of the sociology department, Zhejiang University  [this one works and also has space for graduate student discussions].
• when discussing with a humanities graduate student the difficulty of obtaining affordable academic books in English, I mentioned MIT’s Open Courseware, which offers syllabi, lecture notes, and detailed reading bibliographies in dozens of fields.  It’d be a great help to Chinese grad students…if they could access it.  The students I was with could get to the MIT home page only with a proxy, and once there could not access Open Courseware. 

How crazy is it that China’s most advanced students cannot access online information and knowledge that would assist them in their learning?  Or that foreign academics cannot access scholarly discussions in Chinese on Chinese servers?  It’s one thing when sites are inaccessible because of language problems, and I understand that the Chinese government has its own reasons for filtering what it considers to be particularly sensitive political issues–but I don’t see the logic of making scholarly exchange so difficult.