Taiwan Studies Digital Archives

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a talk with Professor Ping-hui Liao on ways in which digital archival materials on Taiwan's print and visual culture can be utilized.

Speaker: Ping-hui Liao, Chuan-liu Chair Professor in Taiwan Studies, Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego

My talk is on ways in which we can utilize digital archival materials on Taiwan’s print and visual culture. The main objective is to familiarize scholars in related fields with such resources, so as to facilitate their teaching, research, information sharing, and creative design. A rich diversity of website materials have been made available over the years by such governmental, academic, commercial agencies as Taiwan’s National Science Council, National Taiwan University, National Central Library, Taiwan Literature Center, Film Archive, National Palace Museum, IT Park Gallery, and Hanzhen Publishing, to mention just a few. A major integrative platform, National Digital Archives Program (www.ndap.org.tw) provides hyperlinks in accessing enormous amount of metadata, among them, National Taiwan’s Huart, Ino, Tanaka, and many other valuable collections. I would like to highlight the roles of Taiwan as a hub of trans-Pacific cultural networks, especially in the production and circulation of anti-colonial discourse, Chinese modernist arts, sinophone literature and cinema, and so forth, functioning as a dynamic (albeit small) republic of letters and public sphere across the Chinese-speaking communities. Zhang Taiyan, for example, developed some of his most advanced ideas about modern Chinese state and multi-ethnic society when he escaped to Taiwan where he encountered Japanese colonial modernity first-hand and very briefly served as a column editor for the Taiwan Daily News (Nichinichi Shinpo). Liang Qichao also inspired many Taiwanese intellectuals of the time to organize themselves around cultural institutions and news media like Taiwan Youth (1920), to enlighten the “new people” at home and abroad. The constituency of such a public sphere through newspapers and print culture in Taiwan from 1896 on and of its lasting trans-regional impact, especially in the form of literary supplements and cultural criticism, can be better grasped with the publication of the digitalized versions of Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpo or Taiwan Xinmin, together with many colonial and postwar archives. In my talk, I would like to demonstrate how such digital links can be of use to courses and researches on modern Taiwan and East Asia. I shall cover topics ranging from colonial newspapers to modern art, sinophone writings, Taiwan cinema, smart cities, and sharing economy.