by Benjamin Hlavaty (February 2016)
Tracking the advancement of European Taiwan Studies across the world is the goal of this database. To do so, we gathered all information possible of all participants in the conferences of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS) from 2004 to the present. The EATS database presently lists all the EATS participants from 2004 – 2015 and their corresponding details. So far there are slightly over 300 participant names within the database. Out of these participants, a little over 1/3 (113 persons) are accounted for regarding whether or not the person has published any work based or strongly related to his or her EATS presentation. Out of the 113 accounted for, 55 of these participants (roughly 1/6 total) have released such publications.
Within the database, the following information is given: affiliation, such as the presenter’s university; email address; whether the presenter had sent in confirmation regarding publications; the position of the presenter at his or her affiliation; and of course the titles of the presenter’s EATS presentations. Added to this are the bibliographical references to the presenter’s publications based on his or her EATS presentations, as well as those of the presenter’s latest EATS-unrelated publications. Furthermore, URL links are given for most of the publications based on EATS presentations, be they public domain or available for a fee.
Aside from tracking the advancement of European Taiwan Studies, a later goal that was added to this database is to enable further advancement of Taiwan Studies. A new page was added that lists all the academic institutions of EATS scholars based outside Taiwan and their corresponding webpages, the institution’s bookshop webpage showing its contact information and, if available, the email address of the bookshop. In theory, this should allow EATS scholars to promote more easily Taiwan-related publications to the universities.
EATS should be proud to know those 55 academics who had published EATS-related research are based from institutions that span all across Europe, hailing from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Sweden, Italy, Slovenia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Academics based outside Europe who had published EATS-related publications are based in institutions not only from Taiwan, but also Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Canada, and the United States. Also, due to the good number of responses received from academics regarding any of their Taiwan-related 2015 publications, we expect to receive continuously further updated information regarding any other EATS-related publications and, perhaps, to expand further across the world.
Added to the participants but in a separate section are the EATS Keynote Speakers, which so far number just below twenty persons. There are also two other smaller sections of presenters who were unable to be contacted (e.g. lack of a valid email address) and names who were deleted altogether from the main section of the database, often due to absence from the conference to which they were invited.
Although a 1/3 turnout of responses is perhaps passable, we were hoping for a greater number of responses, more in the line of 2/3. However, one can assume that the proportion of presenters who had published such work does not reach too far beyond 1/6 of total presenters. Furthermore, it should be noted that not every category is filled in for each presenter, and certainly some information may be very well out of date. Fortunately, those presenters who did take the time to reply have all their latest professional information outlined. Communication among us for this project ran smoothly, the only hiccup being technologically related and the research assistance’s negligence of creating proper backup files. However, the research assistant soon sorted out this problem and the database, along with any accompanying related files, were soon completed.