CONCEPT To develop an international collaborative interactive research and publication network in the humanities and social sciences, using MIT's Metamedia environment, focussed on exploring the use of internet-based multimedia databases. UNDERLYING RESEARCH PROBLEM: MIT has developed Metamedia as a teaching environment, which mobilises multimedia data to enable collaborative class-room work with students. It also enables teachers to offer a media-rich resource for student projects. Metamedia has potential to move beyond the classroom to become a critically important framework for research and publication in the social sciences and humanities. In particular publication in the humanities and social sciences has been reluctant to utilise the full power of the web, as there are few avenues for publication that are peer reviewed, and few scholars confident to develop and offer peer critiques. Individual webprojects are costly and do not produce career-supportive outcomes for younger scholars. Metamedia could provide: • user-tailored interfaces for research projects • multi-layered user access to shared resources, drawn from collaborating institutions and scholars • a framework for collaboration between scholars based in remote locations • a framework for the critical testing of hypotheses advanced by scholars researching common resources • visualised mapping of historic research strategies that point to potentially unexplored pathways for further work • proposition testing of relationships hypothesised by researchers • multimedia publication of research outcomes mobilising related components of the database. GOALS • Identifying a defined field of research in which scholarship is well established and in which new research is occurring • Describing a range of resources of value to scholars in a number of disciplines, such as history, cultural studies, Asian studies, sociology, economic history, international relations, religious studies, and literary studies • Bringing together in a Metamedia database digital resources including primary source documents, photographic images, cartoons, artworks, newspapers, reports, magazines, academic articles, audio files, moving image (including original newsreel, interviews with key participants, contemporary cinema clips), and links to other data bases, in a range of languages • Developing tracking methodologies to mark out resources used to respond to research questions defined by participating scholars, and display the pathways that have proved fruitful, while indicating areas that could offer new research challenges • Building online interactions among scholars around specific research problems, thus encouraging the building of the archive through commentaries and contributions of additional materials • Prototyping publication strategies that utilise the internet environment in a scholarly rigorous way. PROPOSAL To develop a Metamedia research space, focussing on the Jews of China, and thereby test the capacity of Metamedia to meet the six goals identified above. • Over the past decade there has been a rapidly developing interest in the experience of Jewish communities in China. While this subject matter may appear somewhat esoteric and of limited interest, it meets the criteria of being both established and evolving, and of interest across disciplines, international in scope, and transcultural in its engagement. It is also a space that can be curtailed for research and development purposes: in this case to Shanghai. Scholars working on this subject include those based in Europe (especially Germany), Israel, China, Japan, Russia, Australia and the USA. For the purposes of this project institutions in the USA, Israel, Germany, China and Australia would be involved. • Key resources have already been identified and preliminary contact made with their institutional owners. Some have already been secured by the research team in Australia, while others have been agreed in principle with institutions in the USA, China and Europe. These materials are of interest to political and cultural historians, cultural studies scholars interested in inter-cultural interactions (between Europeans and Asians), scholars of comparative modernisation, scholars of diasporic cultural development (eg German language press in Shanghai), students of urban development (especially of Shanghai), sociologists interested in community survival and change, and religious scholars and philosophers researching the role of religion and philosophy in periods of social crisis. • Material (biographies, video interviews, photograph albums, ) associated with seven Jewish families in Shanghai from Europe and Asia, and related documents have already been collected for a website ("The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu"). During 2004 additional sources were identified and preliminary discussions regarding access to a range of resources in many media formats successfully completed. These sources include: • Judaica collection, Widener Library, Harvard University (documents, posters, newspapers) • Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, National Holocaust Museum, Washington DC and Shanghai Municipal Archive (documents) • Shanghai Police records, National Archive, Virginia (microfilm files, hard copy posters) • Shanghai Collection, YIVO Foundation, New York (organisational records, photographs, newsreel) • Shanghai Collection, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York (artefacts, documents) • Shoah Visual History Foundation, Los Angeles (video testimony of survivors) • Jewish Museum, Berlin and Exil-Shanghai Project (documents, academic papers, photographs) • Australian Archives - government and family documents and photographs • Sydney Jewish Museum (artefacts, film, photographs, posters, interactive exhibition) • Prof P Perdue, MIT, 1930s and 1940s China cinema collection (annotated cinema clips) • Prof H Levine, Boston U, Sugihara documents (original documents and photographs) • Bei Gao, Chinese and Japanese scholar, Washington (translated Japanese and Chinese documents) Other resources have been identified in Australia (Eisfelder photo collection, Film and Sound Archive, Sydney and Melbourne Jewish Museums, National Archive of Australia), in the UK (Jewish ex-servicemen's association) in Israel (Museum of the Jewish Diaspora), and Poland (Museum of National Memory). • Many commercial sites use clustering and tracking software to aid client search and purchase activities. However this approach has not been widely used to assist scholarship. The project will allow scholars to input research hypotheses, and operationalise the hypotheses through specific interrogations of the data (to which they can add their own resources). Software will be developed to track the research pathways chosen, and display these both graphically and in textual form. Other users can then choose completed or in progress research questions, understand the research strategy, and explore the way in which data has been selected and interpreted. • Metamedia allows research to be a continuing process of exploration, proposition, argument and review. One of its greatest values is to facilitate the online collaboration of scholars, who can contribute to the database as it develops, without disturbing the original materials. Thus each item is meta-tagged, and can be linked to scholarly critiques, additional commentaries, notes, varying interpretations. Queries can be directed to authors (through list serve or email functions), and patterns of scholarly argument can be modelled. • While some journals allow hyper-text marked articles to be published in online versions, these are limited in their usefulness. The project will seek to develop prototypes or templates that facilitate full online publication of argued scholarly texts, which fully integrate the media-rich materials in a form that is time efficient and easily accessible. The current stasis in academic publication in innovative online environments appears to be a function of the time intensity required to build publication environments (such as scholarly websites), the disciplines imposed by the linearity of traditional academic argument, and the division in skill sets between scholars and online creative producers. It is proposed to explore how this tension might be overcome, and more user-friendly methods developed for publication.
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