periodicals

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.

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.

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.

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.