Keynote Talk

Modern history has been told primarily through the written text. This is natural and richly rewarding. At the same time, however, such fixation on language cuts us off from an enormous body of historically fascinating material embedded in the visual world - the photographs, prints, paintings, popular graphics, and material objects that saturate everyday life and decisively influence how we see ourselves and others. Visualizing Cultures is an innovative website that opens windows on modern history by integrating graphic images, expert commentary, elegant design, and substantial databases in ways that have only recently become technologically possible. It can be accessed at http://visualizingcultures.mit.edu. Launched at MIT in 2002, the site has focused topically to date on Japan and Asia in the modern world. The principal directors are John W. Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa of MIT. Our case-study focus to date has been Asia in the modern world. Thirty elaborate units are now online-and in the process of developing these we have developed considerable knowledge in all aspects of this sort of digital humanities, including technology, legal issues (notably, intellectual property), education-oriented design and editing, the presentation of potentially controversial images, etc. We have also sharpened our understanding of how the Web can be used to advance image-driven scholarship of a sort more expansive than is possible in e-journals-including inclusion of large and (where appropriate) bilingual databases. We also have developed institutional partnerships with museums and other repositories of graphic images that can become a model for others exploring these same frontier.