[Bahasa Indonesia, klik disini]
CONTENTS OF THIS SITE
This site provides most of over 700 published writings by or on Ariel Heryanto and his work, such as interviews, published responses by others on Ariel’s works, and reviews of his books.
Most of the materials are old opinion columns in Indonesian which are not easily accessible to the general public. Several dozen are in English, and a few are translations in other languages (German, Turkish, Mandarin, French and Thai).
This is not a comprehensive collection of Ariel’s published works. His books are not included here. Several are missing because they have been unintentionally overlooked and undocumented. Others are identified but their archived copy is missing (click here for the list of missing materials). Also excluded on this site are unpublished works by Ariel (either because he never sent them to a publisher, or he did, but was rejected), and those published with a pseudonym.
More materials will be added to this site, if missing materials are rediscovered or new published materials are available.
BACKGROUND AND AIMS
Regardless of the intellectual worth of the materials collected here, this open access site was prepared in light of the potential value of these materials as historical artefacts. They are testimony of the mood and concerns of the society of the time, even if they were all seen from the perspective of a single individual over time. The life of the author spans two different millennia, over three generations, and as of today, under no fewer than six Indonesian presidents. It dates back when computer-internet-smartphones were simply unimaginable, and continues to the new millennium when billions of humans are constantly interconnected by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and twitter.
Ariel was born and raised in an orality-oriented environment. Most of his writings from the 1990s and earlier were prepared with a manual typewriter, before being sent to a publisher by post. If the publisher was interested, it took time to retype the manuscript manually. In this process, mistyping was commonly done, either on the part of the author, the publisher, or both.
Such process may sound backward to the digital media generation today. But there was something important and valuable from that past which has now vanished. In pre-internet Indonesia, most serious discussions in public were shaped by the few pieces that got published once a day in the newspaper. For at least one full day, published opinion columns had the potential to gain public attention (with scorn or appreciation) not commonly seen today due to the amount of traffic in cyberspace.
FORMAT
Nearly all materials in this site are scanned copies of the actual published materials in print, or a copy of their online version on the publisher’s website. A considerable number of Ariel’s writings, including those excluded on this site because their print copies in the original are missing, are available in plain text elsewhere, click here.
Some of the original prints appear in large sizes – larger than A4 or B5. The scanned copies of such material also exceed these standard paper sizes accordingly. If you print them on A4 or Letter sized paper, the texts and images will appear smaller; some may be too small for convenient reading. In such event, you have the option of enlarging your prints, for instance by photocopying them onto A3-sized paper. If you read them on computer screen or iPad, you can enlarge their appearance by changing the View feature.
Kindly be reminded to visit the page Terms and Conditions of Use.
Ariel Heryanto 