The Common People and the Artist in the 1930s

Overview

" The present project proposes a new form of “intellectual journey.”¹ This would be a journey in which historical knowledge is produced and conveyed by visual materials integrated into an architecture of relational data.² Our exploration of this approach in the fields of history and China studies has a major purpose: opening the way to comparable applications in all the social sciences. This project will take up the challenge of elaborating a new form of historical writing. The objective is not simply to combine texts and documents but to make these different elements “speak” separately, in parallel and/or together. To achieve these goals, the participants in this project will follow a parallel route on the basis of three distinct corpuses of still pictures (photographs) and moving pictures (films) centered on three groups of individuals (“common people”, “peasant-boatmen”, “actors, actresses and new women” in three different spaces at the same period (the 1920s and the 1930s)
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Research Topics

• The Common People of Peking
• Actors, Actresses and the "New Woman"
• Peasant-boatmen of the Grand Canal

Funding

The organizers of the project gratefully acknowledge the support from:

• The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchanges, through a 3-year research grant (2004-2007)
• The CPER [State-Region Pluriannual Contract] fund for research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres & Sciences Humaines

Contact

Mail: commonpeople@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr

¹ We borrowed this expression from Lew Lancaster, director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (http://www.ecai.org).

² Gibson, Alex, “WWW and the Internet: New Opportunities for Historical Discourse?,” History and Computing, 1995, 7(2): 81-89

Page modified on 22 February 2007

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