Not really, but I suppose it might look a little bit Chinese to anyone watching the Olympics and seeing all those names beginning with X. Like the city of Xian, where the terracotta army was discovered. I visited there in 2001 on my first trip to China and remember the explanation then, that X is pronounced between an SH and an S. Chinese pronunciation is more nuanced than that, but it’s a good place to start. I enjoy knowing this word starting with X: xiao. It means small, and is a common part of Chinese personal names. The equivalent, I suppose, of our diminutive name endings, -ie and -y. Studying Chinese has made me much more interested in linguistics, just as work on the Encyclopedia of China is giving me a chance to learn about what’s going on in renewable energy, natural resource management, and Internet technologies, as well as Chinese history. The trouble is that I’m too busy with all this new publishing to read further! But that’s one of the great things about a good encyclopedia: it gives one a place to start, some foundation, and a sense of the territory to be explored.

But back to Xobni. I have written here about software and services I don’t like (with almost instantaneous response from the companies concerned), and wonder what will happen when I tell you frankly that I love this Outlook add-in. Trevor Young, our IT guy, suggested it, knowing the ridiculous size of my e-mail folder. I was skeptical at first, thinking that my extensive folder system was managing things just fine. But I was wrong: Xobni has made it possible for me to find files and trace communications in a way that I couldn’t have managed before. Unlike most new software, it has truly saved me time!

If only. I’ve had to speak some Spanish this week and that was a challenge, and my little bit of Chinese would hardly suggest to anyone just how much I think about bilingual publishing, something that seems to me increasingly important in Berkshire’s future. But on a more immediate issue: we’re trying to make our contact management system more China-centric, and that poses a challenge I hadn’t recognized till I started updating the list of associate editors for the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China yesterday. You can take a look at them on the product page, or pasted here:

General Editor: Linsun Cheng, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Editorial Board : Winberg Chai, University of Wyoming, Xiejun Chen, Shanghai Museum, Sherman Cochran , Cornell University, Weikang Gu, Buddhist College of Singapore, Thomas Heberer , University of Duisburg, Junhao Hong, University of Buffalo, Steve Lewis, Rice University, Heidi Ross, Indiana University, Gregory Veeck, Western Michigan University and Haiwang Yuan, Western Kentucky University

Our system does let me enter Chinese characters for people’s names, so we’re adding separate fields and will in future include them, but the system doesn’t enable me to choose an Asian name format. I’ll get these reformated as soon as possible so you will see Linsun CHENG (Western order), GU Weikang (Asian order), Haiwan YUAN, and so on. We often use capital letters for family names, a system that is helpful because some of our Asian editors use Western name order. Perhaps we should also make it Heidi ROSS, for consistency. My e-mail signature is formatted that way, in fact: Karen CHRISTENSEN 沈凯伦.

Today’s pick for worst e-manners is dnoisacc1980@halonmarketing.com and CNN.com. I’ve been deluged by e-newsletters from these people, unsubscribed repeatedly, and now got a mail that requires me to choose a password in order to get to the page to unsubscribe, it would seem.

Saturday P.S. It seems that the recent flood of CNN e-mails take me to a Russian site to unsubscribe! So, as a delightful author wrote the other day, after getting duplicate e-mails from me as a virus was being cleaned up on my computer, “I know how to press delete :-).”

For years I’ve wanted to write an article with the title “Welcome, Stranger” because it would give me a reason to talk to people about concepts of hospitality. I think about this whenever I am in another country, especially in England or China, where one is invariably offered tea upon arrival at a home or office. The warm hospitality one experiences in many cultures–where having a friend of a cousin move in for days or weeks is not given a moment’s thought–is not common here at home. Americans are known, generally, to be quite friendly, but we seem to be less and less hospitable. It’s southerners, in my experience, who have more of a traditional sense of hospitality. Those of us who live in the Northeast are, I’m told, cold and standoffish. And maybe this carries over to our behavior on the international scene–we simply don’t know what to do and say, and what not to do and say.

As the Olympics Games begin in Beijing, I have been thinking about Chinese hospitality, and American manners. The U.S. team that marched out of Beijing airport wearing masks has become a urban legend. “How could they?!” a Canada-based friend exclaimed, “It was totally unnecessary and so rude! Like walking into house of a friend whose housekeeping isn’t up to your standards wearing protective gloves.” This morning, as I naively waited for the Opening Ceremonies to begin on NBC, the commentators mentioned the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square and showed footage–the equivalent, one might say, of showing English rioters at Heisel Stadium (the 1980s lager louts) as the World Cup begins. Every nation has painful events in its historical record, and they should be talked about, not forgotten. But the beginning of the 2008 Olympics isn’t the time or the place.

I was crushed to learn that there would be no live broadcast of the ceremonies this morning–and felt even worse when someone emailed me from Latvia a few minutes ago and mentioned that he was watching!

In summertime, the words “The Berkshire Experience” suggest evenings on the lawn at Tanglewood, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and shopping the antique stores of Route 7. But that’s the title, I’ve just read, for a talk I’ll be giving in January at the American Historical Society. It certainly gives me room to manoeuvre. I just wonder what the Berkshire Experience will be, six months from now! In any case, here’s the program.

The AHA Program Committee has scheduled this session for:
Monday, January 5, 2009: 8:30 AM-10:30 AM
Sheraton New York, New York Ballroom West

192. Globalizing Historical Reference Volumes: Treats and Caveats

Chair: Pierre Yves Saunier, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique

Topics:
The Berkshire Experience
Karen Christensen, Berkshire Publishing Group

Global Expertise in Reference Book Editing
Bonnie G. Smith, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Converting to the Global Framework: A Challenge to Historians
Peter N. Stearns, George Mason University

The Geopolitics of History: Building a European Dictionary from Paris
Blaise Wilfert-Portal, Ecole Normale Supérieure

Comment: Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison

I don’t spend all that much time in the Berkshires at weekends, but thousands of other people do. I’m here this weekend and it’s turning out wonderfully–not only perfect weather, but a succession of the small delights that make this, now that I think about it, rather a nice place to build a global media business, weird as that seems to people. (I had a call a few days ago from the U.S. Commercial Service, who had been asked by someone based in Beijing to set up a meeting when she visited Massachusetts. They clearly could not make out what was going on, why a Great Barrington publisher would be of interest to someone from China. They also, clearly, had not thought to use the Internet to find out.)

Last night, my son Tom and I walked down the hill to the opera. Yes, there is a Berkshire Opera Company that brings real opera singers to our little town–and somehow they manage a 30-piece orchestra, too. Tom had been given tickets to the opening night’s performance,“Women on the Verge,” a perfect event for someone like me who can take opera only in small doses. It was a kind of sampler, arias and duets from a variety of operas, in French, German, Italian, and even English, with a little commentary by the conductor and chocolates served on stage afterward.

Today began, as summer Saturdays do, with croissants and coffee outside on the deck. The Berkshires is replete with food establishments of all kinds, but my favorite may well be French rather than English or Chinese. Bizalion is a small cafe and grocers with charming owners from Provence and an astonishingly good range of food–from baked goods to olive oil and charcuterie.

Later I went to the Green & Healthy Living Expo to sign copies of the Armchair Environmentalist and, most importantly, to get a look at what was happening at an event like this–I was curious about the vendors and the visitors, and it was a beautiful day to be at Butternut Basin, a small ski resort just outside of town.

In between these outings I’ve been doing China work, so it was nice to talk about some local businesses China connections this evening at a party in Pittsfield, where I also met a woman who works in bilingual publishing in New York. I’ve had a chance to speak French and Spanish, and to listen to opera in German and Italian. All languages I know a little. What I really need is opportunities to practise a little Chinese! But from what I’m hearing, that may soon be possible in the Berkshires, too.

It’s great to get coverage anywhere, but to have an excellent article in Publishers Weekly timed to coincide with launch of China Gold is a especially wonderful. PW’s New England reporter, Judith Rosen, has been there for some time and it’s really good occasionally to pick up our conversation–and then to see this article, “Berkshire Goes to China,” result from it. I think I often sound breathless with excitement when I talk about the business, and this time Judith made me laugh by pointing out gently that it was going to be hard to fit all the stuff I was telling her about into one article. But she’s done amazingly well!

It’s accurate, too. and my name is spelled correctly (I was long ago told not to complain about any press coverage as long as they spelled my name right). But I think this might be the time to mention that David Levinson is my ex-husband now, and to explain that after contributing greatly to Berkshire in its early days he has returned to research and has no ongoing connection with Berkshire Publishing.

I’ve got one more day of conferencing, Day 2 of the Green Data Centres Conference at the Bloomsbury Holiday Inn. I’m the “chair” of this particular event, which means that I sit in a comfortable armchair on the side of the platform, listening to the speakers at close quarters. It’s the most technical conference I’ve been to in years. While publishing events these days are filled with talk about Web 2.0, XML, and Open Access, it is the technical talk of the professional whose real expertise is in international business development or sales. At Green Data Centres, the audience is filled with people who manage massive computer systems—the systems (known as data centres, for those of you as unfamiliar with this as I) that run banks and grocery store chains and website hosting companies. The discussion is about CPUs and kilowatts and virtualization.

This new conference, with perhaps 100 attendees, reminds me of the China-U.S. Networking Symposium I attended in Shanghai in 2002, where the discussion was so filled with highly scientific detail about data flows and Internet protocols, and acronyms, that at the coffee break, unable to make conversation with the many Chinese participants, I found myself asking one of the speakers—an American with a Midwestern accent—if he could please explain his subject to me in English.

I sometimes tell people that Berkshire Publishing translates from scholarly jargon into English. This applies as much to articles written by sociologists as by computer scientists. I have no doubt that some interesting publications will result from what I’ve learned and the people I have met at Green Data Centres. While the content is highly technical, and professionally focused, the subject itself is relevant to almost every business. It directly affects the bottomline, and more every day, as energy prices rise. It is vital information for any company that wants to be, and to be seen as, socially and environmentally responsible.

I will be writing in Guanxi: The China Letter about the “Chinese Businesses Going Global” at Chatham House, and over the weekend I was able to see many of the editors of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History at the World History Association conference, held at Queen Mary’s College. We’ve begun work on a second edition of that award-winning encyclopedia, for publication about a year from now. The editors were thrilled that it would be a whole year, or close to it: they clearly expected me to say we’d have a new set out in six months, based on their previous experience of my arm-twisting and editorial whip-cracking. (Now I’m worried that they think I’ve mellowed too much in the last few years. Perhaps I should shorten the schedule a bit?)

I love marathon trips but this is a little much: three conferences, three different subjects/communities, in six days. And of course I have to pack in a few other things in London. No, not shopping–that’s not my thing. But there are friends to see, newspapers to read, and old paths to wander. Here’s what I have on my agenda. Just the conferences, that is: “Chinese Businesses Going Global,” the World History Association annual conference, and then 1-2 July I’ll be chairing the first Green Data Centres conference.

I am a passionate proponent of new technologies but one reason I’ve published a lot on technology (the entire Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction as well as articles in virtually every other encyclopedia–whether they were on sports or religion or history) is I believe we should not accept any technology without question. We need to be alert to their social and environmental consequences, and it bothers me to hear keynote speakers from Google taking a one-sided approach to issues that are difficult and nuanced. For example, David Eun, VP of Content Partnerships, an intelligent and articulate speaker at the Information Industry Summit in January, threw out a figure about the number of bytes of information now available on the Web as if quantity was what it was all about. (A odd thing from someone responsible for working with publishers, since one of our significant responsibilities is not to publish–a top scientific journal, for example, publishes only a tiny fraction of material submitted, and that’s to the benefit of the field, and, one hopes, to society.) He also announced the good news that “elementary school students are communicating in Powerpoint.”

But there’s nothing like the bottomline to focus people’s attention. As technology interferes with activities that will produce revenue, companies are beginning to take stock. Here’s an article from the New York Times about how “Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast. by forming a nonprofit group to study information overload:

. . . the participating companies, like I.B.M., are already devising ways to contain the digital flow. . . . The E-Mail Addict feature in Gmail is more of a blunt instrument. Clicking the “Take a break” link turns the screen gray, and a message reads: “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in 15 minutes!”

I like the semantics here: “real work” meaning all the stuff we’re supposed to be getting done when we’re reading e-mail (or writing blog posts). And I enjoyed this:

Silicon Valley denizens speak of “e-mail bankruptcy,” or getting so far behind in responding to e-mail messages that it becomes necessary to delete them all and start over.

Berkshire Publishing is moving offices, which means some server downtime and a pile-up of e-mail, by the way, so I may may be tempted to declare myself e-mail bankrupt this week!