CHINAVISION: 5000 YEARS OF CHINESE HISTORY DIGITALIZED

On July 1, 1991, the first 3-year phase of the research project
ChinaVision - Visual Documentation and Presentation of the
History of Chinese Culture started officially at the Sinological
Institute of Leiden University, the Netherlands. The philosophy
behind the project was that visual aspects form an essential part
of every culture, and they should play an important role in the
study of the latter. This is all the more pertinent when the
culture under study is an influential one, like the Chinese.
Moreover, the development of Chinese culture spanned great
distances, both in time and space. Textual materials still remain
essential to the study of any culture, but they can only supply
part of the information and understanding needed. 

By Stefan Landsberger

Prior to the start of the project, Prof. Erik Zrcher, the
project leader, had already gained extensive experience with a
more visually oriented teaching approach to the Chinese History
programme for junior students. Regular testing indicated that
most of the information that had been passed on visually was
absorbed by the students. 
Over the years, a large amount of visual materials (some 20,000
slides) had already been brought together by Zrcher for teaching
purposes. These images are not merely limited to Chinese art, or
to the Chinese gentry who are depicted and described in various
pictorial and literary sources. Instead, they try to impart a
sense of the daily life of the ordinary Chinese throughout the
ages; they show their tools, housing, bronze casting, educational
practices, pastimes, religious ceremonies, and so forth. 
The slides are not presented in a haphazard manner. They are
grouped in clusters, in which interlocking elements of Chinese
society are logically explained. The series 'The Written Word',
for example, not only explains Chinese calligraphy, or the
invention of printing, but the relative status attached to
literacy and literati (scholar-gentry), the examination system
and other aspects are tied in as well.

CHINAVISION
In the first phase, the research project focused on four closely
interrelated aspects:
The systematic collection of visual information concerning the
history of Chinese culture, and the contextual ordering of this
information on the basis of complexes and themes;
The formulation and development of a method of image analysis and
classification relevant to the culture, resulting in the
formulation of SinoClass;
The development of ChinaVision, an automated system enabling the
description, storage, retrieval, and manipulation of visual
information, leading to the creation of a visual data base that
will be made available to scholars and the general public in the
near future;
The active presentation of the visual information, arranged on
the basis of themes and complexes, in classroom situations.
The acquisition of the hard and software needed to start the
ChinaVision project was made possible by generous grants from the
Ministry of Culture and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, both in
Taiwan (Republic of China). Through these grants, personnel costs
were largely defrayed for a period of three years. Through
substantial financial support from the Dutch Ministry of
Education and Sciences, additional hard and software could be
acquired and more personnel could be appointed.

WHY APPLE MACINTOSH?
For the management of both the descriptions of the images, the
analytical classification, and the images themselves, the choice
fell on colorArchIS, an image management and database system
which is based on the well-known HyperCard application. It has
been developed and customized to the specifications formulated
by the project group; a Chinese language module, for example, has
been added to the original programme.
Before 1991, hardly any multi-media software had yet been
developed. The choice of the Apple Macintosh platform was based
on a number of considerations.
First, Apple had successfully solved the problems of digital data
compression and retrieval. And secondly, Apple is an extremely
user-friendly system, basically enabling everybody to operate it.
This point was not only relevant to the first stage, in which the
image and database were being created, but also to the future,
when the databases will be made available to a more general
public of interested persons. Moreover, it is an internationally
accepted hardware platform, facilitating possible co-operation
and exchange with other multi-media projects in the field, as
well as a future commercialization of the project.

SINOCLASS
An important part of the project has consisted of the creation
of an hierarchical, analytical classification scheme for a
non-Western material culture. This scheme, tentatively named
SinoClass, has now been basically completed and will be published
in the near future. It consists of more than 8,000 entry levels.
IconClass, the Iconographical Classification Scheme for Western
Pictorial Art, developed by the Department of Art History of
Leiden University, has functioned as a major inspiration and
pioneering effort in this Herculean task. IconClass, however, is
characterized by a strong Eurocentric and Renaissance
orientation. The main categories of IconClass, i.e., Religion;
Nature; Man; Society, Civilization and Culture; and Abstract
Ideas, were identified and partially reworked according to the
demands posed by the China-related materials. For the main
category Religion, for example, this meant that the relative
stress on Christian elements in IconClass had to be replaced by
the identification of the significant elements of Confucianism,
Taoism, Buddhism, Lamaism, and other Chinese religious
traditions. Similarly, the contents of the main category Society,
Civilization and Culture called for intensive research and a
complete `rethink' of the indicators of the various sub-levels.
In all main categories, sublevels have been identified, renamed
or added. The categories IconClass devotes to biblical scenes,
and scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, although very
important for the development of the Western pictorial arts,
could not be and were not used for SinoClass.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
By July 1, 1994, the first phase of the project was successfully
concluded; some 10,000 images have been digitized and described.
Besides the continuation of activities related to the further
build-up of the image bank, a number of other plans are being
made for the future. These include writing adaptions in the
software in order to put the image bank at the disposal of the
general public; this is scheduled to take place within the near
future. Collection-building will also continue. A five-part
series devoted to the historical development of the pre-modern
Chinese city, spanning some 11,000 images, is currently being
researched and written.

More information about ChinaVision can be obtained from 
Prof. Erik Zrcher or Ms. Ellen Uitzinger
Sinological Institute
Leiden University
P.O.Box 9515
NL-2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands.