Visualising China was launched yesterday at the “Treaty Ports in Modern China” conference held at the University of Bristol. The conference is organised by the Department of Historical Studies as part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project entitled “Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Tianjin under Nine Flags, 1860-1949“.
The site now allows users to explore more than 8000 digitised images of historical photographs of China taken between 1850 and 1950. It cross-searches metadata from Historical Photographs of China, the Sir Robert Hart Collection and Joseph Needham’s Photographs of Wartime China. In addition we also include resources chosen from Google Books by subject experts. Users are encouraged to annotate existing data with suggestions and in the future we plan to offer researchers and others the ability to “add” other relevant resources by incorporating moderated online content which can then be browsed and searched through this single point of access (for example images on Picasa, Flickr, Internet Archive, personal libraries of related Google books, videos from YouTube or online journals).