Dear colleagues,
Apologies to those attending the 2010 BACS conference, who may be receiving
a version of this letter soon (and those using H-Asia who may also get
one).
Some of you might be aware that for a few years now I have been directing a
project at Bristol that has been locating pre-1949 photographs of China in
British collections, digitizing them, and placing them online at the
'Historical Photographs of China' site (http://chp.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/). Some
of you may have seen the exhibition that we developed from the material,
'Picturing China', some have collaborated with us, and the project has
supplied images some of you have used in books or presentations.
Over the last year we have been working with the 'Web Futures' team in
Bristol's Institute for Learning and Teaching Technology, on a JISC-funded
project -- 'Visualising China' -- to develop new ways to access this and
related material. We're now at a stage when we need to secure engaged
feedback from potential users of the new tool. (Some further information is
available via http://visualisingchina.org/)
WHY ARE WE INTERESTED IN HEARING FROM YOU?
Use of the Internet for research is now prolific across all subject
disciplines in UK universities and beyond. However, the differences in how
online content is accessed and used by different researchers are nuanced
across and within disciplines. Tools for organising, using and sharing
online information as part of research - including text, images and video
– are starting to emerge. Our particular interest in the Visualising
China project is in which tools are currently in use for research in modern
Chinese history, and what are the gaps that they leave?
* WHAT IS THE ONLINE TOOL WE ARE DEVELOPING?
We are developing a web-based resource that allows users to explore more
than 6000 digitised images of historical photographs of China taken between
1870 and 1950. This is tool for researchers and other users that offers
cross-searching with related online collections (to help avoid
time-consuming searches across multiple sites). We are offering intuitive
ways to filter image, video and textual resources according to time and
geography, in other words, ways to help you navigate and pool information
from wide-ranging sources. The tool is a research community tool, through
which more online content can be easily linked to and thus used through a
single point of access (for example images on Picasa, Flickr, Internet
Archive, related Google books or online journals). "Deep annotation" is
offered – annotating parts of images or videos for example - and
explicitly linking such items to others. The resource can be used as a
private research space, facilitated via user logins, or as a shared
workspace, perhaps to create Learning Pathway resources for students.
* HOW WOULD WE LIKE YOU TO HELP US?
We need help from the potential user community to decide how best we tailor
our tool to your needs. If you are interested in providing feedback or
simply want to keep up to date with progress, please fill in the form at
http://www.visualisingchina.org/signup.html. Your help will be very much
appreciated.
With best wishes,
Robert
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Professor Robert Bickers
Department of History
School of Humanities
University of Bristol
11 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TB
Tel: +44 117 92 87930
Fax: +44 117 33 17933
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http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/contact/bickers.html
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