Education – Translation Networks

Education

Education in 1900s in China

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I was always wanting to do some research related to education as I wanted to use my knowledge of technology to enhance education. This project gives me a really good opportunity to look at some old people’s opinions on education in China back in the 1900s. That period was a chaotic developing period as many changes were happening in China at that time. It is really interesting and also valuable to look at some ideas back then.

Below is a picture of a famous magazine back from that period called “Xin Qing Nian”. It introduced many western ideas such as democracy and freedom to China. Those newly appeared ideas caused a huge conflict between traditional customs and introduced theories. I put this cover here because I believed this could be considered as the key to education at that time. Many students learned from those magazines and went out to share their understandings. I believe it is still important now to help students get to know different ideas and share their understanding as well.

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu05853974?urlappend=%3Bseq=5%3Bownerid=113725522-498

Link to my collection: Collections: asian297-jundesong | HathiTrust Digital Library

Link to the specific page: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu04784189?urlappend=%3Bseq=61%3Bownerid=113488790-65

My collection is basically about the education in the 1900s in China. Those texts illustrate what people thought at that time about education.

nnc1-cu04784189-61-63-1648751872Download

Catalog Record: Shi di xue bao = Journal of the Historical &… | HathiTrust Digital Library

This is a screenshot of the famous magazine “Xin Qing Nian” when I searched education in that period in China. I found it important and very related to my research as it imported many western ideas into China and greatly influenced the students at that time. The keyword here is “Periodicals”. It is hard to find archival, educational documents directly from that time; the general way to collect information is to read periodicals as those documents contain some essays related to education. These periodicals help us learn what they thought during the 1900s.

I think my research connected to the “Xin Yue Ji” on the slide as they were both written in Chinese. Furthermore, it is connected to “Lu Xun” on the Translation Network map. Lu Xun was a famous movement leader at the time, and his ideas influenced many students. Specifically, people began to use modern Chinese because of him, which was a big step in China’s education history.

I am surprised to find many common things in my classmates’ posts and my collections. For example, Kimberly K Liang focuses on the evolution of ancient Chinese literature to modern Chinese literature(Ancient to Contemporary Chinese Literature – Translation Networks (umich.edu)). I began to notice more on this topic as many of my collections are from the time when the transition is the most intense. I am intrigued by the idea of evolution from ancient Chinese literature to contemporary Chinese literature. I didn’t have much experience of this change before as I hadn’t engaged with ancient Chinese literature much. I started to get more ideas on these topics as I conducted my research. Even works from the 1910s, still relatively recent, are still a little bit hard for me to understand. Also, Yan Wei Jin(Chinese Folklore – Translation Networks (umich.edu)) and Anuja Bagri are both focusing on old stories but from different countries. Talking about the rules, simple rules can be the language used to write materials that bots can recognize. There are many examples of materials written in Chinese. Another rule is to find synonyms in the title. An example is Wei Jin’s stories about Mulan and Bagri’s old imaginative Indian tales. Finally, the rule requires more thought. My research on 1900s education might not seem related to the evolution of ancient Chinese to modern Chinese of Kimberly K Liang’s collections at first; however, it is actually at that time the transition became more and more intense. These kinds of links require more historical and cultural backgrounds. Also, my research is related to Yan Wei Jin and Anuja Bagri’s as we are all interested in the culture of a specific country. The culture of a country is very important to the education of a country as each country wants to pass its unique culture to the next generation. Therefore, we see a lot of old national literatures such as tales in each country’s education. I think the category that Kimberly and I have both in common is Chinese, which is a bit obvious but still needs to be publicly recognized. Also, I noticed jhceobe posted a post about criminal procedures in China and Japan. I believe there must be many periodicals on this topic. Hence, in this sense, we are connected as well. Talking about the tags, my tag would be “Chinese” “Periodicals” “Cultures” “LuXun” “Education” “movement”.

In a Sawyer Seminar panel, Barbara Alvarez talked about how romanization plays a really important role in the digitization of books. Because we couldn’t type out non-roman words until recently, many works have been transliterated using the Roman script. This is an important aspect we should keep in mind while we are conducting research. This connects to my research as Chinese is much different from a language with the Latin alphabet. Hence, it used to be that to make a record of a Chinese work, it first needed to be transliterated. This process sometimes could cause the loss of information in the original work and caused many difficulties in recording historical words. One example is that there are only a few documents about my topics. Luckily now we have enough technology to record almost any language. Below is a screenshot of the keyword searching of “education” in Chinese in one of the Periodicals.

The first 6 matching terms are from contents. As you can see, there are multiple essays about education especially geography and history education. People at that time proposed many interesting ideas (such as addressing the importance of thinking), which I think is even greater than the history education in China nowadays. Thanks to the help of technology, we can now easily localize those essays we like to refer. (During the Seminar, I learned the origin of the cooperation between universities and Google. Universities and Google both would like to digitalize the books for their own reasons and hence the cooperation began.)

In addition to all of that, I began to be more and more interested in reading those documents as I found an effective way to search for them. Also, I found reading materials from that time really fun since I got to know ideas from that period. When I was reading the material, I found a lot of essays discussing the things that happened at that time. Those discussions help society become better.

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.cu05853974?urlappend=%3Bseq=10%3Bownerid=113725522-493

This page is one of the examples. It discusses whether people at that time should talk about politics. Those readings make me better understand and experience the cultures and societies at that time. I have a more thorough and complete view of that period. Hopefully, I can express my understandings of that period in the future through games.

Education in 1900s in China Read More »

Japanese American Experience in WWII

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Link to my HathiTrust collection: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=758227452

Title Page of “Nisei in Uniform”
Title Page of “The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II”
These two book titles represent the focus of my HathiTrust collection. My collection looks at the Japanese American experience during WWII including (but not limited to) Japanese American incarceration and Japanese Americans in the U.S. military.

Introduction

As a Japanese American, I have always been interested in the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. That is why I decided to focus my collection on this topic. My collection looks at the treatment of Japanese Americans on the home front (mainly at Japanese Incarceration) and their service in the military. Before I started curating this collection, my knowledge on Japanese Americans service in the military was mainly on the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, since those were the units that my family members had fought in. Therefore the first text that really caught my eye was “Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during WWII”. It was interesting to read about how essential Japanese Americans were during WWII in Military Intelligence units.

Connections

A Page from “Nisei in Uniform”

I chose this image from the “Nisei in Uniform” book for a couple of reasons. First, the top half of the page is an attention grabbing photo showing the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The bottom half of the page features photos of three soldiers, all Americans, who volunteered for military service from incarceration camps. My translation network map connects some of my sources (such as this one) with the Library of Congress: Tagore on the lightning talks slide. The Library of Congress source shows the different ways that Rabindranath Tagore’s name is romanized and translated. I saw a connection since with Japanese American names such as the names of these men, the name must be romanized and there are multiple ways to romanize their names (with some variations being more common than others).

I think that Jacky’s collection on “Education in the 1900s in China” can be connected to my collection. There are multiple texts in my collection looking at the education system during World War II. For example, one of the texts in my collection is on Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during the war, and another is on Army Japanese language schools. My collection also looks at the Japanese American experience in Internment Camps, which includes schools for the children that were incarcerated there. Jacky’s post mentions how people debated whether politics should be discussed about. This discussion about what should be included in the education curriculum is something that would have occurred in Japanese Internment Camps as well.

Sawyer Seminar

In the closing remarks of the Sawyer Seminar, my professor Christi Merrill said that human elements can change the way that we see the connection and histories between different texts. This is something that I experienced in class, since while looking for connections between my collection and my classmates’ collections, I had a difficult time finding a connection to Michael’s collection. However, since Michael is knowledgeable in Sufism (where I am not), Michael was able to find a connection between Sufism and Japanese Incarceration.

Category/Tags Name

I think that one category name that could connect my post with my classmates post is the category of “Historical Events”. Even if their collections are not truly focused on a historical event, there could be a certain event that affects their collection. For example, Kristen mentioned in her blog post that Japanese writing changed from traditionally being written right to left to be written left to right after World War II. Therefore, our collections could be connected in an even smaller category of “World War II”, but even more of our classmates collections could be included in the broader category of “Historical Events”

This screencast highlights a keyword of “Education” which can be connected both to Japanese Incarceration as well as the Military, and it shows three texts in my collection that can be connected to this keyword. As mentioned earlier, when connecting my collection to Jacky’s collection, there were schools in the Interment Camps for Incarcerated children as well as Japanese Language Schools for Military Intelligence at the University of Michigan. I also show how the catalog records of the three texts (The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, The Army Japanese language school, and The Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during World War II) are not tagged to be related to education at all. The second two texts do not have any tags, which can make it difficult for humans to make connections and impossible for bots to make connections between these texts

Important Links

Japanese American Experience in WWII Read More »

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