About Visualizing Cultures
Visualizing Cultures [http://visualizingcultures.mit.edu] uses the power of the Web to open windows on modern history by integrating graphic images, expert commentary, elegant design, curriculum, and databases in ways that have only recently become technologically possible.
Launched at MIT in 2002, the site has focused topically to date primarily on Japan. The principal investigators are MIT professors John W. Dower, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian whose scholarship includes close attention to visual materials, and Shigeru Miyagawa, who is a pioneer in the production and use of digital media for education. Visualizing Cultures presently contains 23 elaborate units on Japan and China on topics that include the Perry mission to Japan, Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the Yokohama treaty port , Felice Beato’s pioneer photographs of Japan, consumer culture and the Shiseido cosmetics firm, and the Canton trade system in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
All units, including curriculum material, are available openly and freely on the website. While initial VC units were authored by Professor Dower, recent units have been authored by professors Allen Hockley of Dartmouth (on photography) and Gennifer Weisenfeld of Duke (on Shiseido), and Koizumi Kishio’s 1928-1940 urban woodblock prints by James Ulak of the Smithsonian’s Sackler and Freer Gallery. Major institutions such as the Boston MFA, Smithsonian, and Peabody Essex, and the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo have agreed to provide image collections to VC under a Creative Commons license, which allows the user to freely download, copy, alter, and distribute them for educational purposes.
Images of every sort are introduced and examined here—in partnership with contributing institutions and collections, and with the collaboration of experts devoted to transcending the printed word and hard-bound text.
MIT Team
John W. Dower Principle Investigator, MIT Ford International Professor of History
Shigeru Miyagawa Principle Investigator, MIT Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, Professor of Linguistics and Head, MIT Foreign Languages & Literatures
Ellen Sebring Creative Director
Scott Shunk Program Director
Andrew Burstein Media designer
Advisory Board members currently include:
- Andy Gordon, Harvard University
- Allen Hockley, Dartmouth University
- Sheldon Garon, Princeton University
- Anne Morse, Boston Museum of Fine Art
- Peter Perdue,Yale University
- Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University
- Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, University of California at Irvine
- James Ulak, Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution
- Lynn Parisi, Program for Teaching East Asia, University of Colorado
Collaborating Instututions:
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
http://www.asia.si.edu
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/index_e2.html
Honolulu Academy of Arts
http://www.honoluluacademy.org
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
http://www.mfa.org
Peabody Essex Museum
http://pem.org/homepage/index.php
Ryosenji Treasure Museum
http://www.izu.co.jp/~ryosenji/eigo.html
Shiseido Corporation
http://www.shiseido.co.jp/com
Smith College Museum of Art
http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/index.htm
Yale University Beinecke Library
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke