Texts & data

Texts

The « Virtual Shanghai » project represents an attempt to write a history of the city from its beginning to nowadays, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. This section provides entries into original essays (Papers), original individual documents in textual, video, audio, visual format (Appendices), and to our e-library of Shanghai-related books (E-Library).

The history of Shanghai can only be written by various hands. The “Virtual Shanghai” project is open to external contributions from scholars and advaned graduate students, including texts and essays, provided they meet academic standards. Due credit will be acknowledged. English is the standard medium of the project, but contributions in Chinese are also welcome, with an English summary.

Of course, the “Virtual Shanghai” platform does not plan to simply juxtapose unrelated contributions. It will present a master narrative to provide the reader with an organized journey into the history of Shanghai. In fact, one can even imagine several “master narratives” and several journeys. The “Virtual Shanghai” platform focuses on “content” about the history of Shanghai, not links to outside resources. Only resources related to written essays, such as archival documents, audio and video files, maps and visual documents, are  included in the platform.

All the texts and documents presented in this section are available free of charge. Yet they are also protected by intellectual copyrights and shall be given due credit when quoted. The purpose of the “Virtual Shanghai” project is to provide a site of reference to scholars, students, and the general public in the spirit of the OAI. It supports the aim of direct scientific communication and general circulation of knowledge for the purpose of education and research.

The section entitled Papers provides scholarly essays on various topics. Most papers eventually find their way in peer-reviewed academic publications in a revised form. Yet the version presented on the platform takes advantage of all the potentialities of linking texts with texts, with images, with maps, with visual or map narratives. Eventually we hope to achieve seamless movement through the various components of the web platform.

The Appendices section provides all kinds of original documents, mostly textual sources, used and quoted in the main essays.  Since we may use visual, audio, and video documents not related to Shanghai, these documents will not be part of the visual, audio, and video collections of Virtual Shanghai. Such documents will thus be listed in the Appendices section. The section also includes "Roadmaps": roadmaps are meant as an aid that present all the various entries into a given topic. There is no need to follow any specific order, but we found it useful to provide the reader with a summary of resources distributed among the different menus or 'gateways' on a given research topic.

E-libray provides access to digitized versions (pdf) of books related to Shanghai history in various languages. The e-library actually plugs into the digital collections of the BN-IAO, the digital library of the Institut d'Asie Orientale (Lyons Institute of East Asian Studies)

Original texts provides documents that are often not easy to find, mostly publications such as city guides. They are made available in pdf format. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have difficulties downloding these documents. We also welcome contributions of such documents to enrich this digital library.

Data

In the course of research projects, we accumulate numerous quantities of statistical data. Some are published in papers and book, while some remain in the secret vault of scholars. Data are often hard to come by, especially data collected and verified through meticulous examination. Data produced on a given topic may also be useful for another research project. In this section, we shall share data in tabular format (Excel files), ready for download with all their metadata.

Although it is of a different nature, we shall propose here maps -- both historical maps and edited maps -- in kmz format for use in Google Earth.


Last update on Monday 10 August 2015 (19:59) by  C. Henriot

 
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