Re-Envisioning Japan: Recuperating Ephemeral Histories through Collaborative Digital Curation, DH Pedagogy, and Web-Based Publication

Joanne Bernardi, Nora Dimmock, and Iskandar Zulkarnain (University of Rochester)

Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in Visual and Material Culture (REJ) is a faculty-library collaboration that models scholarship realized and communicated through creative curation and a multimedia digital archive. This digital archive represents an original collection of tourism, travel and educational ephemera documenting changing representations of Japan and its place in the world in the early to mid 20th century. Grounded in a uniquely syncretic relationship between material and digital worlds, REJ is also a powerful pedagogical tool. We are now finalizing a new Omeka-based site in order to maximize REJ’s scholarly impact with enriched metadata, innovative pathways for interpreting objects, and an open-access, web-based publishing platform promoting multimodal digital scholarship. Our experience designing the digital archive, its use as a teaching tool, and our plans for REJ’s sustainable future provide a useful case study for colleagues working on similar projects in the context of a library digital humanities center.

Joanne Bernardi is a professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies at the University of Rochester. She has published on Japanese cinema and culture, film history and historiography, material culture studies, nuclear imagery, and digital humanities. Her open-ended digital humanities project, Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture, documents changing images of Japan and its place in the world in the early to mid 20th century.

Nora Dimmock is Assistant Dean for IT, Research, and Digital Scholarship at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries and the founding director of the Digital Humanities Center. She collaborates on several projects led by U of R faculty members engaged in digital scholarship, and leads a professional staff that provides expertise in scholarly encoding schemas, digital media encoding and production, digitization, 3D modeling and printing, physical computing, and spatial and numeric analysis.

Iskandar Zulkarnain is a Mellon/CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Visual Studies at the University of Rochester, where he is affiliated with the Digital Scholarship Lab and the Graduate Program of Visual and Cultural Studies. He is working on a book project that examines various forms of digital nationalism in post-authoritarian Indonesia and connects them to the historical trajectory of media technologies and nationalism in the country. His interests broadly cover digital media studies, critical digital curation, new media art, postcolonial and counter-culture discourses, technocultures, and global popular cultures.

[gview file=”http://budsc16.scholar.bucknell.edu/files/2016/11/ReEnvisionigJapan_Bucknell_BUDSC16-reduce.pdf”]


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