Joanne Bernardi
University of Rochester. Emerita Professor of Japanese and Visual & Cultural Studies
Re-envisioning Japan: animating objects and finding points of contact in collaborative scholarship
Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture (REJ) conjoins an original collection of early- to mid-20th-century multimedia tourism ephemera with a collaboratively built, open-access digital archive that dynamically displays these objects in digital space. Designed to allow curated access to resources documenting representations of Japan and its place in the world, REJ’s archive draws on Carole Palmer's idea of a Thematic Research Collection, a web-based resource in which scholarship is embedded in both the product and its use. Silent cinema research and film preservation work inspired the original collection of travel-contingent objects that make this hybrid project a tool for re-envisioning Japan's past in granular detail. REJs emphasis on the often ephemeral, commonplace material evidence of personal, transcultural experience and change offers alternative approaches to understanding how Japan has defined itself and how it has been defined by others over time. The collaborative dimensions of collection cataloging and the iterative design of the digital archive's infrastructure and parameters that make REJ a versatile research and pedagogical tool are integral to its effectiveness. Since 2013, the interdisciplinary nature of REJ's team (library colleagues, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, and students in REJ's dedicated course) has enhanced its capacity to interrogate enduring and dominant historical narratives. After briefly introducing REJ and its background, I focus on the curatorial features that interdisciplinarity has engendered, including collaborative object analysis, contextual metadata management, and online multimedia exhibition and curation. Such features enable accessibility and the creation of adaptable classroom assignments. They include: "Object Encounters" (visual explorations of objects inspired by Prownian analysis); a customized streaming media window; and a media annotation tool for contextualizing locations, events, and formal elements that reveal enlightening visual patterns.