User:Stapleton
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Revision as of 18:44, 23 January 2008
I am writing a book on the most popular novel published in the 20th century -- Ba Jin's Family 家 (first published serially in 1931 and 32, then in one volume in 1933). The book has inspired many other cultural products (several films, a play, a TV series, a comic strip, the novels of Chinese-American novelist Bette Bao Lord, etc. etc.). After my book is written (or while I am finishing it up), I would like to explore ways of linking it with all of the manifestations of this novel, as well as with other relevant material, such as photographs and recordings produced in China in the early 1930s, in order to inspire a greater appreciation of the period and suggest new ways of thinking about it.
My inspiration for this comes from the web site www.Dohistory.org, which makes use of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale to introduce people to 18th-century American history and the sources for understanding it. I am trying to keep up with various other history-related new media projects, such as Edward Ayers's "The Valley of the Shadow" (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/) and John Dower's "Visualizing Cultures" (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-027JVisualizing-CulturesSpring2003/Units/index.htm). I have almost no experience with digital technology beyond word processing, scanning, and Photoshop. Among historians, however, I think I count as relatively untechnophobic. My father was an optical engineer, and perhaps that helped.
