NSM

Nordisk Midtaustenbulletin
26, juli 1996

Tema:

Eurames-konferansen i Aix

I begynnelsen av juli vart den andre Eurames-konferanse arrangert i Aix-en-Provence. Som den førre i Warwick i 1993, bar også denne preg av å vere arrangert i samarbeid med ein lokal partner, den var derfor ein fransk konferanse utvida med eit europeisk innslag. Dette er også naturlig.

Dette var kanskje den største Midtausten-kongressen vi har hatt i Europa noen gong. Eg veit ikkje nøyaktig kor mange som kom, neppe alle 700 påmeldte, men det kan ha vore ein 400-500 tilsammen, som likevel er ganske stort. Dette førte nok til noen problemer i organiseringa, men trass i dette vil det generelle akademiske utbyttet ha vore positivt for dei aller fleste. Sjøl vart eg slått av, trass i den sterke franske dominansen, i kor stor grad den faglige samtale gjekk på tvers av landegrenser i dei sesjonane som var fleir-nasjonale, langt meir enn eg hadde venta.

Det var også eit noterbart nordisk innslag; eg telte 21 personar, derimellom ei stor gruppe (8 personar) frå Tampere. Det kan også ha vore fleire som har unngått mitt auge, og er som tidligare nemnt, klart fleire enn for tre år sidan i Warwick, trass i lengre avstand.

Det var samtidig generalforsamling in Eurames. Derek Hopwood har vore president i Eurames sidan 1992, og ønsker avløsning. Samtidig har sekretæren meldt avgang. Det var enigheit om at styringa nå bør gå til Frankrike, men ein fransk kandidat var ikkje klar i Aix. Hopwood fortsetter derfor fram til neste Rådsmøte, da den franske delegasjonen vil gi oss eit tilbod både til presidentverv og sekretariat (som da vil bli flytta frå Durham). Etter ein normal treårs-periode vil det så vere Tyskland som tar over. (Når det gjeld dei mindre land, var det enighet om det nordiske synspunktet at behovet for konsolidering av Eurames som organisasjon er best tent med at dei 'tre store' tar leiinga i denne perioden; så får den geografiske utvekslinga spele meir inn når Eurames står på ein solid basis).

Eurames har fått ein nytt medlem ved at den Polske foreining for Midtaustenstudiar er oppretta. Det tyske selskapet DAVO er nå også formelt med, og stilte for første gong som fullt medlem, sjøl om det har vore reellt aktivt i ca. to år alt. Forøvrig kan arbeidsforholda til Eurames best beskrives ved presidentens økonomi-rapport: 'Vi ba opprinnelig medlemsforeningane om kontingent, men sidan to av desse har gått konkurs og ikkje kan betale, har vi bestemt oss for heller å drive Eurames utan utgifter; noe som er mulig, men jo setter noen grenser for aktiviteten'.

Individual and Society: junior scholarships

There was also a meeting of the Steering Committee of the ESF project in Aix. The main topic was how to handle the junior scholarship applications, which were postponed from the Granada meeting. It was decided to make another call for applications, with a deadine of 1st November this year. This time the contents of the seven groups' activities will be detailed, and the applicants will be asked to address their application directly to one of the seven groups.

It will also be made clear that rather than "fellowships" as such, what is offered is travel support. The applicants should thus also include a budget for a journey; which could be either to participate in a workshop or for a field trip, within the existing economic limits. No sum will officially be mentioned, but the total sum available for each theme group is 30.000 FF, and this should normally be divided between several applicants. Thus something like 4-6.000 FF might be a reasonable average to ask for.

Those who have already applied will have their applications forwarded to this new round. In principle, they will be contacted by the ESF secretariat and asked for a budget (unless already provided, but the first call did not ask for it). The applications will pass through the relevant theme group, and the full steering committee will decide at their February 1997 meeting.

This will be the first of three such rounds of applications, as annual funds for travel support will be available through 1999; always related to the seven theme groups.

As mentioned in last bulletin, I have started to put details of these seven theme groups and their sessions in Granada on our Web server. Only one group has submitted a report so far, that will grow in the course of the summer. Check
http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/eurames/

Small unconfirmed news

I picked up various news and reports from various Nordic places while in Aix, which we have not had time to confirm; so let it at this moment only be reported as such unconfirmed news.

Middle East Centre in Göteborg

The Program of North African and Middle Eastern Studies at Gothenburg University is, I hear, reformed into a Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, which contains both language and other humanist studies. Professor Gudmar Aneer is reported to be the first chairman, and some teaching is to start this autumn. They have also negotiatied an interesting exchange agreement with a university in Iran (Tehran?).

New appointment in Oslo

I hear that the post in Arabic left vacant at the University of Oslo after James Montgomery (who left for Leeds) has been filled. From my intelligence, Michael Carter has been offered and has accepted the position, thus he should be in situ in the near future. Dr. Carter is thus one Briton filling the post after another - although he recently has been at New York University - and is especially known for his work in the grammar of Classical Arabic.

The Danish house in Damascus

It has been assured from several quarters that the plans for a Danish house in Damascus is well in hand, a director has been appointed and everything is read. Only one signature remains, and although that is not the least important one - that of president Hafez al-Assad - there seems to be little doubt that it is only a matter of time before the last formalities are in order and realization can begin.

NB: Bergen telephone extension

I have earlier reported that many University of Bergen telephone numbers will change in August. However, over the last weeks, there has been an electricians' strike in this country, which has broken a number of deadlines. Thus, there will be no changeover on 12 August. This has been postponed until 2 September (and the electricians are still not back at work as I write this). Notice also that old numbers will work for some time after the change, but new numbers cannot be used before the appointed date.

So, stick with the old numbers you have for the moment. I will get back with detailed lists when the proper time is confirmed.

Technicalities about the list, a new survey

It being summer and a short bulletin to fill, again a small piece which the technophobes can skip. I think this mailing list is one of not very many who span the four Nordic countries and using some amount of Nordic language, and which we can correlate with a total body of scholars in one academic field, that of Middle Eastern studies. For this reason, it may be interesting to map a little the relation between this email list and the community of Nordic scholars.

First out; I include into this list everyone who are interested in the Middle East and has an email address, irrespective of whether they are members in the Nordic Society or not. Thus, the list extends beyond the mere Society members; while there may still be Society members who have not yet informed be about their email address.

Currently, there are about 195 people who receive this electronic bulletin. Of these, 134 are members of the Society, while 61 are not members. As the Society has 236 members at the moment, this also means that 102 members do not have email, i.e. that the percentage of email users among Middle East scholars in our countries is 57.

It may be of interest to see if it is true that students are more active email users than established professors. According to our survey, this is not true. If we break down the membership of the Society roughly into staff and students, we find that the email percentage among staff is 64, while it among students is only 34 (noticing that our 'students' are all research students at hovudfag, speciale (MA) or Ph.D level). If we break the category "staff" into "tenured" staff, i.e. those with permanent positions at lecturer or professor level and "researcher", i.e. time-limited positions, we get for the tenured staff a percentage of 72 and of non-permanent staff 52 percent with email [for full professors alone, the figure is 76].

My categorizations of positions may leave some margins of error, but it seems quite clear that the usage of email is not more prominent with the younger, presumed more computer-oriented students and researchers. On the contrary, the higher in the academic hierarchy one looks, the higher the percentage of email users rises. Thus, it seems to be a function of the permanence of the position, rather than of age of users.

Scandinavianisms again

However, the reason I made this survey again, was the perennial problem of the Scandinavian characters, æøå, that keep bedevelling us. I have mentioned it some times in earlier bulletins. The reason we keep coming back to it, is that there is no way of using our languages in email lists in a way that does not cause problems for some readers. So I have promised to keep track of what will or will not cause problems and try to find the solution that is best for most readers at any particular moment.

Thus, I have made a survey based on letters each of you have sent to me over the years, to try to discover what kind of email systems are in actual usage concerning these three letters. I have in all received email from 148 out of the 195 people on the list over the last few years, and I can see a clear development in the various email systems in one particular direction.

I will not bore you with the detail, but let me note that there are three basic ways of using æøå in email:

  • The 'old' way, where you use curly brackets {|} for æøå [the '7bit system']. Popular until about four years ago, very few use it any longer. Only 15 out of the 195 used the 7bit system, and most of these were older messages. I have only two examples after mid-1995.

  • The 'hard', or intermediary way, where we send æøå without any encoding of these letters. This is against the official standards, and some receivers get the messages corrupted: the three characters are replaced with f-x-e. (på becomes pe) etc. This is what I have used in the last year or so, and only two milieus, both in Copenhagen, have reported that messages became corrupted. However, it may have affected more without me me hearing about it.

  • The 'new' way, where we send æøå with encoding, called QP codes. Many people hate these codes, because if your software does not support it, the letters appear as codes, with a equal sign = in front and a letter-number combination like =E5 instead of å (på becomes p=E5). Although this is the officially recommended way, I have not used it assuming that too many people would not be able to read it. This system is known as the "MIME system".

    This, then, was the purpose of the survey, to find out how many of the 195 had MIME-capable software which could understand Scandinavian characters properly. The findings were:

    Out of the 195 on the list, I had data for 148. Out of these, 108 used MIME-capable mail programs, 40 did not. However, when I looked at the age of the material, I saw that in messages from 1993-94, the percentage of MIME users was 16. In 1995 it rose to 70, and in 1996 to 91. This has clearly been the result of a concerted policy in a number of institutions in upgrading their email software to newer versions, or replacing it with different programs, noticably a turn towards Eudora for Windows in a number of institutions. This is particular noticeable since the middle of 1995.

    It is thus reasonable to believe that many of my 40 non-MIME users are in fact people who have not been in contact with me since such a changeover took place, and will now not have any problems with MIME messages today.

    A breakdown by country will, by the way, give the surprising picture that Finland is 100 per cent MIME users. Sweden is behind at 77 percent, Norway at 70 and Denmark only 54. These figures are very unreliable, as it is haphazard how much contact people have made to me; but it certain that Finland is very much a MIME country, strangely enough as it is the country which is least affected by the Scandinavian letters.

    As a result of this survey (which surprised me, to be honest), I will change the policy of this bulletin from this occurence onward (as well as my own normal email setup) to use encoded MIME. This will make those of you (in Copenhagen) who have been getting fxe-letters hopefully happy, and hopefully not create problems for others. However, it is still an experiment: IF the Norwegian section at the top appears to you with lots of unreadable codes, contact first your email coordinator (at your insitution or computer centre) to see if you can upgrade your software - this will help not only with this bulletin, but with all Scandinavian email. If that does not work, contact me. It may be that upgrading is impossible at your site.

    I would in particular like to have response from these institutions, where I am uncertain of their policy:

    If it turns out that this change does create problems for many people which cannot be arranged by upgrading their software, the backdoor is still open to revert to the previous system, which seems to have suited most, but not all, recipients.

    A message to University of Copenhagen users: It has struck me that many people at KUA use quite modern software, but refuse totally to write Danish letters. I have not understood why, but have now heard that an order has been sent out that you should write ae, oe, aa, and so you all have politely done so. However, this is probably quite unecessary and has been so for some time. (the ø's and å's that have slipped through accidentaly have arrived correctly). Most, perhaps all of you, can apparently write Scandinavian characters (as well as accented French letters etc.) without any restrictions in your email. Anyway, worth testing. Send me an email and we can check.

    Knut

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