Xiaolin Sun | Preserving and Representing Textiles from East Asian Ethnic Minority Groups
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2020-04-24

Xiaolin Sun and Catherine Nichols | Loyola University Chicago

East Asian Textiles is a digital archive, which presents eighty-four textiles from the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection at Loyola University Chicago. Collected in the mid-to-late twentieth century by Dr. May Weber, these textiles are sourced from a range of ethnic minority groups in China and adjacent countries. This project makes two key contributions to the intersection of digital humanities and curatorial practice. First, it increases visual access to the Collection with particular attention to textile technique and design. Second, it foregrounds expert knowledge from contemporary Chinese scholars and textile practitioners, digitally documenting in-person knowledge exchange.

This project represents a successful collaboration between a minimally-resourced university teaching collection and a digital humanities center. The project reflects interdisciplinary negotiations – those rooted in contemporary anthropological curatorial prerogatives, aesthetic considerations, and technical limitations. Further, it responds to the Collection’s need for increased public access to professionally curated ethnographic collections.

The East Asian Textiles project consists of an interactive website, hosted by Loyola’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. The website is programmed using HTML and Vue.js, while the database is built in MySQL (Python). Faceted searching allows users to narrow search criteria and browse high-resolution images of textiles in their entirety, along with images taken using a digital microscope camera. This project also offers 360° models of selected textiles and a map that offers a visualization of the project’s textiles’ geography distribution.

The poster will highlight the project webpage, sharing both the technical aspects of digital preservation and representation of cultural heritage objects, as well as fieldwork to connect historic textiles with contemporary textile makers and scholars in Guizhou, China during June and July 2019.

For more information about the 2020 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.