American Center of Mongolian Studies on the move, not just location but also direction

The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) has played a leading role in my sanity maintenance during my stay here in UB. Lucky for me, it’s right in my neighborhood, at least for now.

ACMS provides services to Mongolia researchers. To get my feet wet in Mongolia studies before coming here, I’d put together an analysis of the translated entries in an anthropological project entitled “The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia” which is maintained online at amantuuh.socanth.cam.ac.uk. There were only 17 subject interviews available for my use, sufficient to get me started.

My research was a linguistic theme-based analysis of the interviews. Sentiment or computational linguistic analysis is an important component of analytical toolkits in the discovery of solutions to societal and business issues, beyond traditional quantitative measures. It can provide an open-ended insight into how people relate to various aspects of a greater problem and to find areas of agreement among stakeholders with different agendas and responsibilities. It can reveal out-of-the-box win-win solutions and answer questions that nobody thought to ask.

Sentiment analysis is being used more frequently in business research and practice. In recent years, it’s become a focus of my consulting and research work and has been rewarding in terms of solid statistical results in a variety of settings.

With regards to “The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia,” I found that when people looked back at environmental topics during this period in the country, they were invariably interested in water. Using a web crawler to gather text, I also found that water issues figure largely in current Mongolian news articles, and I was also able to quickly identify key terms highlighting competing issues as well as key players.
My research, being anthropological in nature, is somewhat representative of the types of research that ACMS has historically supported. I presented the results of my research at a poster session at the ACMS annual meeting last March in San Diego. It was there that I met Marc Tasse who was just leaving to become the Resident Director of ACMS in UB.

Unlike former Resident Directors, Tasse’s background is in business, economics, and project management. This is because ACMS is on the move, not just its offices, but its services and focus areas, too. Its current location in Room 306 of the Center 34 Building kitt-corner from The Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts is temporary. One of Tasse’s tasks is to find a new home for the center that will encourage the direction of the organization in expanding its services and research focuses.

The services offered at present are an often-undervalued resource for visitors as well as those in residence. Membership which ranges from only 10 USD annually for any Mongolian citizen, 20 USD for a US student to 500 USD annually for a gold-level corporate sponsor or patron is open to all, not just Americans. (Tasse, by the way, is Canadian.) Besides offering reliable and up-to-date computing and Internet services, ACMS has a subscription to JSTOR which is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources; translation services; fellowships for non-Mongolians and Mongolians alike; and more. ACMS seeks to build upon its success.

Tasse’s goal is to promote more English-language research publications in peer-reviewed journals by partnering with institutions of higher learning both in Mongolia and abroad, corporate, as well as non-profit/NGOs and governmental agencies. Expanded services would include assistance for submitting research to English-language peer-reviewed journals as well as guidance on the protection of intellectual property in the global marketplace, namely patenting and trademarking. A particular area of interest in terms of research support is economic and financial research, to include the stewardship of underlying related data resources like stock market and company metrics, as well as other indicators critical to economic investment and development analysis.

ACMS’ goals are well-aligned with need and timely as well. Besides semantics analysis, I’ve worked for many years as a data analyst/programmer in support of business, financial, and economic research. In a separate article here in The UB Post, I present the disappointing results of an inquiry I conducted into the availability of Mongolian business and economic research data as well as articles published in English using such data.

A letter provided to me by Tasse from Charles Krusekopf, the Executive Director of the ACMS and Associate Professor at Royal Roads University, and Julian Dierkes, the Vice-President of ACMS and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, and intended for publication in The UB Post, sums up the organization’s intent to remedy the lack of research data and research publications in Mongolian economics, finance, and policy.

The letter can be found online at mongolianstudies.blogspot.com. Parties interested in collaborating and/or partnering with ACMS’s planned expansion can contact Tasse directly at mtasse@mongoliacenter.org.

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