Across centuries, a wealth of excellent books and oeuvres were written by European authors inspired by China. And of course the real Chinese literature is a to explore.
Interesting reading tips inspired by the Land of the Dragon are presented in this blog authored by Julien Ménabréaz, including classic literature, European Chinoiseire, poetry, crime novels.
As an interesting yet highly stereotypical Chinese character which entered the Western culture, the concept of a sensual, beautiful, dangerous and lethal Chinese woman has been depicted in comics, novels, computer games and of course action movies, performed by famous actresses of Asian decents.
The story of the “Dragon Lady” character derives from past times of extreme discrimination and racism towards Chinese people, which affected both Europe and America from late 19th century onwards. Next to admitting the biases of Chinese community representation in our pop culture, it is also worth to notice that strong and powerful Chinese women actually existed and had a prominent role in recent history, but not reflecting at all the sensual and threatening femme fatale character that still today animates fictional spy-stories.
Read the full blog about the Dragon Lady between history and fiction, authored by Sofie Taes and developed in collaboration with Europeana XX Century of Change project on Europeana website >>
Over two centuries ago, Chinese craftsmen used to produce a very peculiar kind of paintings expressely intended to be sold as souvenir for Westerners, with a range of subjects going from flowers, animals and landscapes, to scenes of daily life and processes of manufacturing local products like tea or silk. These depictions gave foreigners a taste of China and answered to the European taste for exoticism, so that they soon became very popular in Europe and a much lucrative trade.
Most of these paintings were brushed on pith paper: a cheap, spongy material made with the earth of a shrub native from southern China, and because of the nature of the paper, the paintings were very fragile. Most of these paintings were made by a team in a studio. Painters used watercolour or gouache (oil paintings were less common), producing vividly colourful impressions of China. Because these export paintings were generally made by craftsmen and not artists, they weren’t considered to be an art form by the Chinese, unlike calligraphy or ink paintings. This may be the cause for it taking such a long time before Chinese export paintings became a serious object of historical and artistic study.
Read the full story of the Chinese export paintings and enjoy a nice selection of images from Europeana in the blog authored by Julien Ménabréaz in The quayside at Canton, 18th-19th century, CC-BY-SA Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen via Europeana.
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
image of the original Carl Simon’s projector and materials. Courtesy of United Archives. Photo Alex Wittmann.
With 10 press photo agency- and publisher archives, 13 photographer lifeworks and many more assets to our name, United Archives is today looking at a combined stock of several million images – and can say today, that these collections are united in United Archives. Many of UA’s archives hold images which have a relationship to China: most of them are travel images, which show what was in the focus of tourists in the 1979ies, 1980ies and 1990ies or what professional travel photographers thought could be of interest for their picture agencies worldwide.
A small but highly peculiar collection with great historical interest is the lecture about China created by Carl Simon in the first half of the last century. We are sure that Carl Simon never visited China, nevertheless he created a lecture with about 80 hand colored glass slides, to show his audiences in the Germany of the early last century his ideas about Chinese culture, history and politics. The lecture was not precise or professionally curated, and for illustration purposes he also mixed images of Japan and China – this creating some inconsistencies which showed up only during the PAGODE – Europana China project: a curatorial mistake done about 100 years before.
images of the original Carl Simon’s projector and materials. Courtesy of United Archives. Photos Alex Wittmann.
As said above, Carl Simon somehow had these black and white glass slides coloured by his staff. The slides were arranged according to corresponding themes or countries and conserved into small wooden boxes. For these slide series we assume that he had teachers or historians involved to create the so-called “lecture booklets”, in which every slide motif was individually described. He used to lend these wooden boxes with the hand-coloured slides to interested people, together with the lecture booklets and a slide projector, so to allow replication of the show. The slides were shown for example in the town hall or in a parish with the Dia projector and supplemented by the detailed lecture texts: in this way it was easy to tell exciting stories and present the appropriate pictures, thus recreating an educational and also entertaining event.
We have to imagine that at the beginning of the 20th century only a few people were able to travel to get to know other countries, their people and culture. For the others, all this was made possible by Carl Simon’s visionary idea, which motivated him throughout his life. Unfortunately we do not know how he came to this large slide collection. Perhaps he got it from those early travellers who came back in Europe, or from photographers he knew. That will remain his secret: there are no more contemporary witnesses.
Next to Carl Simon’s glass slides, the participation of United Archives in PAGODE was much larger, with over 3.900 beautiful photographs provided in Europeana with the highest standards of quality and completely open access.
PAGODE Digital Festival is proud to present an online talk and presentations to discover the work that was done in the project with curation and annotation of digital cultural heritage collections in Europeana, the European digital library.
Among the activities in PAGODE, a big effort is deployed to annotate and enrich with additional metadata a selection of existing collections from Europeana, also with the help of students, citizens, culture lovers and experts engaged with the PAGODE Annotation Campaigns. By accessing a crowdsourcing platform, users could view curated collections sourced from Europeana and manually “tag” each record with appropriate keywords about places, subjects and highly-specific terms related to Chinese heritage. The tags were then sent back to Europeana.
In this short seminar, experiences, impact and outcomes of the PAGODE Annotation Campaigns were illustrated for anyone to learn from and to replicate. Testimonials from four involved MA and BA students at the University of Ljubljana and KU Leuven offered a first hand glimpse of the annotation user experience.
Hosted on Zoom by the University of Ljubljana.
Date and time: Tuesday 31st August 2021 h. 10:30 – 11:30 CEST
Programme:
Introduction to the PAGODE project (Antonella Fresa, Promoter s.r.l.) – PDF
PAGODE – Europeana China is a project aiming to highlight digital collections of Chinese heritage, with a particular attention on those made available by various cultural heritage institutions in Europeana, the European digital library. Many of those collections would benefit from additional and richer information (i.e. metadata) to make the resources more visible and easily searchable.
Among the activities in PAGODE, a big effort is deployed to annotate and enrich with additional metadata a selection of existing collections from Europeana. This is done in two different actions:
Automated semantic enrichment: by the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence, additional metadata are extracted from the existing records. The additional metadata are then re-associated to the cultural resource, also adding links to authority files and established LOD thesauri. A human-in-the-loop approach in the validation of the enrichments guarantees the highest level of confidence for these AI-generated information, thus sending back to Europeana trustable metadata. This task is coordinated by partner PostScriptum.
Deep curatorial annotation on selected objects: this is also called the PAGODE Annotation Pilot, and the action makes use of a crowdsourcing platform, where users can access curated collections sourced from Europeana and manually “tag” each record with appropriate keywords about places, subjects and highly-specific terms related to Chinese heritage. This task is coordinated by partner Photoconsortium.
Both actions are based on specific lists of keywords developed by the Sinologists, specialized in Chinese heritage semantics, of the University of Ljubljana.
expected outcomes
While the automated semantic enrichments are now completed, offering additional metadata to over 20.000 existing records in Europeana, the Annotation Pilot is continuing all across the summer, expecting to offer back to Europeana over 3.000 items with curated annotations.
Two campaigns were deployed in the past months: Scenes and People of China, consisting in ca. 1.900 records annotated with over 26.000 tags; and Artefacts, consisting in ca. 600 records with over 6.900 tags.
Additionaly, a summer annotation sprint is currently ongoing with participation of students of digital humanities master courses at the University of Ljubljana and at KU Leuven. Expected result from the students’ annotation sprint is to achieve additional 1.000 objects enriched with about 24.000 tags.
A dedicated seminar in the PAGODE Digital Festival series, set on 31st August 2021 h. 10.30, will showcase the impact of this crowdsourced annotation activity in terms of user engagement with digital cultural heritage and also in education.
image: Wereldculturen Museum CC-BY via Europeana
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
In June 2021 PAGODE participated in the Europeana Aggregators’ Fair, an event from the Europeana “family” dedicated to Cultural Heritage Institutions and partner Aggregators.
PAGODE held a dedicated session entitled Behind the scenes of PAGODE: building an aggregation value chain, to illustrate the good collaborations and the progress made within the project, with a focus on highlighting and improving visibility of Chinese-related cultural heritage collections preserved in European Cultural Heritage Institutions
Speakers at the workshop were: Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik and Maja Veselič, (University of Ljubljana) and Sofie Taes (PHOTOCONSORTIUM).
PAGODE Digital Festival is proud to present an online talk and presentations to discover barely seen collections of Chinese heritage in the holdings of PAGODE content partners Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, KIK-IRPA and United Archives. The thematic focus of the the event will be on the “everyday exceptional”, to discover daily life in China through digital heritage collections.
Organized by the Department of Asian Studies at University of Ljubljana.
Moderated by Maja Veselič.
Date and time: Tuesday 15th June 2021 h. 15:00 – 16:00 CEST
Programme:
Introduction to the PAGODE project (Antonella Fresa, Promoter s.r.l.) – view presentation
Chinese heritage in Europe as a result of exchange of objects, ideas and people (Maja Veselič, University of Ljubljana)
Collection highlights from KIK-IRPA (Erik Buelinckx, KIK-IRPA) – download PDF
Collection highlights from United Archives (Carsten Pauly, United Archives) – download PDF
Collection highlights from SEM Slovene Ethnographic Museum (Ralf Čeplak Mencin, SEM)
Engagement with PAGODE – Europeana China (Sofie Taes, Photoconsortium)
In June 2021 the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum and Europeana Foundation will hold the first ever Aggregators’ Fair, and PAGODE has a prominent participation with one ignite talk by Kostas Kostantinidis (Postscriptum) on day one and a dedicated session entitled Behind the scenes of PAGODE: building an aggregation value chain by Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik and Maja Veselič, (University of Ljubljana) and Sofie Taes (PHOTOCONSORTIUM) on day two.
Highlights from PAGODE, pitch by Kostas Kostantinidis, 16 June h. 14.45 CEST
Behind the scenes of PAGODE, workshop by Antonella Fresa, Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, Maja Veselič, Sofie Taes , 17 June h. 13 CEST
At this online web conference, the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum opened their virtual doors to cultural heritage professionals and anyone with an interest in high quality, open cultural heritage content. The exciting programme gave participants the opportunity to listen to inspiring speakers, join panel discussions, take in training webinars and ask questions of the people working in aggregation. It has been a great opportunity to find out more about how high quality cultural heritage content is being made accessible to new audiences through Europeana, and how one can get involved.
PAGODE – Europeana China is making an impact on education, being included in a students project for the Master in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven. The organizing students of this “PAGODE group” are Gelan Cen, Lilia Chalakova, Shau Zou Fong, Jing Yun and Emily Jayne Benson-Kallman.
The students’ project included a video competition, where participants were expected to select one, several or a series of pictures from the Scenes and People from China campaign in the PAGODE crowdsourcing page and explain the reasons for their choices by recording a nice video to be shared on social media. The videos were be evaluated by an independent jury basing on a detailed evaluation system, to award the nicest one.
We are happy to present the best videos from the competition!
first prize: sudan chen
second prize: Cynthia
second prize: Chloe Lam
Third prize: xue’er Huang
Third prize: jade zhang
third prize: wayne
image on top: The solitary stillness of the mountains and ravines, c. 1980, CC-BY Qian Songyan, Östasiatiska museet via Europeana
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
