VNLP builds an audience and an archive in English on the Web for Vietnamese novelists and poets, scholars of Viet Nam, and foreign authors touched by that nation.
Informed reporting in English by VNLP brings one hundred years of imaginative writing and scholarship to the new world of learning.
VNLP plays to interest created by the American intervention in the war between Ha Noi and Saigon. We address the issue highlighted by that disaster, the need to hear individual voices in context of the nation each speaks for.
Our pilot blog, comics, translations and wiki rank in the first page of search engine results on their topics. Readers also arrive via links initiated from websites serving constituent or tangent interests. Total visits to the VNLP website have grown steadily toward one million.
In the new crowd-sourced world VNLP champions understanding of Viet Nam grounded in individual expression and informed by scholarship. Deliberate, professional, weekly publication will bring focus and depth to what a reader on the Web learns in English from Viet Nam.
The front page blog makes clear and urgent the importance of a project embracing American and Vietnamese imaginative literature and research scholarship. The blog creates one audience for a sprawling topic. Regular, brief, illustrated, timely publication brings prominence in search engine rankings to each post and to the website overall, attracting new readers.
VNLP emphasizes the lives and works of authors. The biography, bibliography, and key works of an historian or novelist deliver nuanced, contextual, sophisticated understanding of topics like “Vietnamese nationalism” in an efficient and entertaining manner. We enrich our articles and translations with Viet Nam Literature Comics and the online Viet Nam Literature Seminar.
VNLP archives all work at Wikivietlit. The Vietnamese American poet Linh Dinh wrote its core 200 articles in a few months, making the common sense of a Vietnamese literary intellectual available to all. VNLP will engage librarians and reporters to improve wiki organization and expand coverage.
VNLP will draw on the Wikivietlit archive and reach out through the blog audience to publish electronic books. The first title will be an annual Best Vietnamese Literature like the collections that serve American short story and genre markets. An author prominent in Viet Nam will edit the series.
VNLP will send the work of our field forward to succeeding generations by archiving the site permanently at a research university. VNLP will as well negotiate for permissions to archive the field of amateur and fleeting but invaluable sites that the VNLP archive references.
Donations in the twelve months prior to July, 2012 total $22,000. Operating VNLP with a weekly blog and purposeful, substantial additions to the archive such as articles, translations, Viet Nam Literature Comics and the Viet Nam Literature Seminar will cost more.
Over August, September and October we will specify how much more. We will further detail the cost of expanding Wikivietlit with deliberation and to consistent editorial standards.
We will project the cost of an editor, honoraria, permissions and publicity work for a Best Vietnamese Literature annual. We will forecast the institutional participation necessary to migrate VNLP to a university archive.
We resume publication in November.
