The recent announcement on federal funding worth $900,000 for a Chinese Canadian portal project that involves UBC Library has received ample media coverage.
Here are pieces from the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Xinhua News Agency.
And here’s a great photo of a tour of the Chung Collection, held after the formal announcement, in Metro Vancouver – see the top of page 3.
MEDIA RELEASE | AUGUST 9, 2010
UBC gains $900,000 federal award for unique Chinese Canadian history web portal
A bilingual website featuring the legacies of Chinese Canadians who helped shape this country will soon be a reality thanks to an ambitious project led by the University of British Columbia and a $900,000 grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP).
The CHRP award was announced today by Alice Wong, Parliamentary Secretary of Multiculturalism, during a visit to UBC’s Vancouver campus to mark the beginning of a workshop for CHRP grant holders across the country. From August 10-13, workshop participants will discuss resources and strategies for collecting and preserving historical legacies, as well as ways to improve their respective projects through collaboration.
The web portal, called Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Stories from a Common Past History, will launch in 2012 and provide a one-of-a-kind bilingual site with English and Chinese resources for students, researchers and others wanting to learn more about the oft-ignored Chinese experience in Canada.
The initiative includes other important innovations such as an online virtual experience, portable interactive kiosks and a searchable database of digital material created by CHRP-funded partner organizations.
“Through this project, we will ensure that all Canadians, now and into the future, have access to the work of those organizations that have completed historical recognition projects,” said Stephen Owen, UBC’s Vice President External, Legal and Community Relations. “We welcome the support of the Government of Canada toward UBC’s goals of promoting intercultural understanding and expanding knowledge through new technologies.”
“Chinese migrants came to what is now British Columbia over two centuries ago, engaging with First Nations peoples at the same moment that the first migrants from Europe arrived,” said Henry Yu, project lead and associate professor in the Dept. of History. “In other words, long before Confederation, the Chinese were part of the founding peoples of what would become Canada. This project will reshape the way all of us understand Canada, and reclaim the forgotten histories of peoples who have long been ignored in Canadian history.”
“This project stands out for its community engagement and its collaborative nature,” said Ingrid Parent, UBC’s University Librarian. “UBC Library is grateful for the CHRP funding, and proud to help lead this ambitious and necessary effort to assist researchers and students of all ages in discovering the valuable contributions of the Chinese Canadian community to our country and our culture.”
The UBC-led project emphasizes connecting younger generations to the stories of earlier generations. UBC undergraduate students will help collect, interpret and assemble materials for school programs. It follows an earlier CHRP-funded project that involved UBC students interviewing Chinese Canadian elders about their experiences during the times of the restrictive Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Immigration Act.
“Already, we have seen the life-changing transformations that can occur when a student conducts an oral history interview with one of their grandparents or an elder in their family,” said Yu. “They come to understand who they are in a whole new way, and often appreciate the sacrifices and struggles of those who came before them.”
Other project highlights include a digital archive that preserves material from partner organizations; portable kiosks that will appear in cities including Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Kamloops; and promotion of the website and digital materials for Grade 5-12 students. The site will also feature the Chinese Head Tax Register, a digital database developed at UBC that includes more than 96,000 records.
This collaborative project features a host of on- and off-campus partners, including Simon Fraser University, UBC Library units – including the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University Archives, Rare Books and Special Collections, cIRcle (UBC’s digital repository) and the Asian Library – as well as the Department of History, the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese-Canadian Studies (INSTRCC), the Critical Thinking Consortium, the Great Northern Way Campus and the Learning Exchange. Meanwhile, the Faculty of Applied Science, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the Museum of Anthropology and the Faculty of Arts will be involved in mobile interactive kiosk design.
For more information and sample materials, visit www.chinesecanadian.ubc.ca.
BACKGROUND | AUGUST 9, 2010
Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Stories from a Common Past
The Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past web portal is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary project led by the University of British Columbia. Funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP), the project will serve as a valuable mechanism of communication and collaboration between UBC, Simon Fraser University and community partners.
For more than 200 years, migrants of Chinese heritage have traveled to Canada to live, to work, and to raise their families. Many have called a variety of places home before coming to Canada, but once here, they formed vibrant communities that have significantly shaped Canadian society.
Until now, there has never been a one-stop web portal dedicated to collecting, digital archiving, accessing and distributing information about Chinese Canadian history. The UBC-led project involves the coordination of an array of academic units that are each at the forefront of their fields. It brings together the outstanding expertise and resources of a wide range of on- and off-campus partners, including local civic institutions, and non-profit organizations. The initiative aims to create:
1. A bilingual (English and Chinese) website for Chinese Canadian history.
2. A digital archive that preserves digital material created by partner organizations funded by the CHRP in a searchable database.
3. Workshops in the summer of 2010 and 2011 that will be attended by participants from local community organizations and other organizations across Canada that are receiving CHRP funding. These workshops, along with community engagement events across the country, will also help promote the process of digital collection and preservation, and share insights gleamed from the summer workshops.
4. Promotion of Grade 5-12 classroom use of both the portal website and the digital materials through the creation of learning resources and teaching materials that will use CHRP created materials, embedding the material within a rethinking of the role of Chinese and First Nations peoples in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway and in building Canada. The project aims to create 500 copies of teaching guides for the use of the downloadable web resources that can be accessed for free at the UBC website.
5. Virtual experiences that will appear in different forms on the portal website and within portable interactive kiosks, to be launched in early 2012.
– 30 –
****************************************
Contacts:
Glenn Drexhage
UBC Library
Tel: 604.827.3434
Email: glenn.drexhage@ubc.ca
Lorraine Chan
UBC Public Affairs
Tel: 604.822.2644
Cell: 604.209.3048
Email: lorraine.chan@ubc.ca
mr-10-112
A project involving the digitization of community newspaper photo archives appears in the Langley Advance. This project received funding from the BC History Digitization Program, an initiative that was launched by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre in 2006.
You can read the article here.
Image Credit: Catherine McLaren
These photographs are a collection of images that have been taken in Tepetlaoxtoc over the last three years by Catherine McLaren during the period when the artist’s relationship with the place and its people had matured. As the culmination of three years, these images provide an opportunity for the viewer to look into a rare world and consider what it means to be a man there. For individuals who are learning about masculinity academically, this body of work provides a chance to exercise the ideas and concepts they are learning and apply them directly to a model of masculinity that is very different from our own.
Tepetlaoztoc or Tepetlaoxtoc (Nahuatl for “tepetate” or “cave place”) is a small village located in the Valley of Mexico. The terrain is hilly and 90% of the municipality’s economy comes from agriculture and livestock. TheVaquero (cowboy) lifestyle predominates here and the people are highly religious, Catholic, very poor and extremely proud. It is like another world as it seems as if everyone is related to everyone else by blood or marriage; extended families are so complicated that in many cases they have given up on keeping track of such things and just call everyone cousin.
Fiestas (celebrations) are a serious undertaking and typically involve huge fireworks called castillos, loud music competing from every direction until the wee hours of the morning, dwarf ponies and mechanical bull rides, game arcades and a vast array of food and drink. Many of the photographs were taken at a huge fiesta in January called La Mayordomia de los Arrieros, which is a celebration in honor of San Sebastián Mártir, the patron saint of the region and thus it is one of the largest local fiestas. Far from prudish however, this religious celebration involves people dressing up and reenacting the struggle between the arrieros (who transported merchandise across dangerous land with the help of pack animals) and the bandits of the Rio Frio. Most of the male population are dressed up and on horseback in order to chase each other through the streets, shooting into the air and getting progressively drunker. There are very few women who participate — some men dress up as women and get chased around and molested by other men sometimes in the presence of their sons. This in no way challenges their view of themselves as being straight males.
To see more photos of this exhibition, please find here.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Matthiessen poses the theme that is “language evolving”. This can be interpreted either very generally or more technically. (1) Taken very generally, this could mean language changing in any of the three time-frames that have been explored in systemic functional linguistics phylogenetic change (language changing in the human species, or in human societies, over a long period of time ranging from generations to history of the human species), ontogenetic change (language changing in human individuals [seen as organisms or as persons] in the course of a lifetime, or logogenetic change (language changing in the course of the unfolding of text). (2) Taken more technically (i.e. with “evolution” in the technical sense introduced by Darwin), this means language changing phylogenetically language evolving as part of the evolution of the human species (in biological terms) and as part of the evolution of human groups (in social terms), these two being complementary aspects of human evolution. However, Matthiessen focuses on the narrower, technical sense of “language evolving”. More specifically, he explores the “big history” of humans – a deep time view of human evolution in linguistic, or more generally in semiotic terms, starting with the emergence of the human line and moving up to the present.
Biography of Speaker
Christian Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistcs (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 100 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. A major work is his Lexicogrammatical cartography, published in 1995—a 700-page study of the grammatical systems of English from the perspective of SFL. As of 2008, he is Professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Select Books Available at UBC Library
Halliday, M. A., & Matthiessen, C. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. [Link]
Halliday, M. A., & Matthiessen, C. M. (1999). Construing experience through meaning: A language-based approach to cognition. New York: Cassell. [Link]
Caffarel, A., Martin, J. R., & Matthiessen, C.M. (2004). Language typology: A functional perspective. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Deacon explains the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory. To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it. Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly, many of these developmental mechanisms bear a resemblance to aspects of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g. form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation). A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language. Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language
Biography of Speaker
Terrence William Deacon is an American Anthropologist (Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, Harvard University 1984). He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Professor in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and member of the Cognitive Science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Deacon’s research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language and language origins. His neurobiological research is focused on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, again, particularly language.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Deacon, T. W. (2010). A role for relaxed selection in the evolution of the language capacity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(19), 9000-9006. [Link]
Deacon, T. W. (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: W.W. Norton. [Link]
Deacon, T. W. (1997). What makes the human brain different? Annual Review of Anthropology, 26(1), 337-357. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Halliday poses the evolution of language seems a simple enough concept: it arose in the work of scholars studying the history of linguistic forms (phonology, morphology, some syntax). But a language is a semiotic system; more importantly a semogenic, or meaning-creating, system; and meaning also has a history – a highly complex one. Every language has, in Sapir’s term, a “certain cut”, its own (constantly evolving) ways of meaning; yet most of its features are shared with other languages. We seek out the history of meaning along various routes: in the history of the form of language, in the history of the people that speak it, in the history of the locale where it is spoken, and in the history of its varied cultural contexts. Consider English and Chinese, as two widely spoken and widely-documented languages. The history of meaning in English includes changes that took place in ancient Greek and in ancient and medieval Latin, even though English is not “descended from” these languages; Chinese has undergone somewhat less upheaval, but the history of Mandarin involved contact with ways of meaning derived from Sanskrit and from Mongolian, both also “unrelated” to Chinese. I think that, to study the history of meaning, we take account of both child language development and the emergence of learned forms of discourse; we maintain a trinocular perspective; and we seek systemic and functional (especially metafunctional) explanations of semiotic patterns in discourse.
Biography of Speaker
Michael Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic functional linguistics [SFL]). Halliday obtained his B.A. in Chinese language and literature from the University of London and then did postgraduate work in linguistics, first at Peking University and later at the University of Cambridge, from which he obtained his Ph.D. in 1955.
Selected Books Available at UBC Library
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Intonation and grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. [Link]
Halliday, M. A. K., & Webster, J. (2002). Linguistic studies of text and discourse. London: Continuum. [Link]
Halliday, M. A. K., Webster, J., & ebrary, I. (2002). On grammar. New York: Continuum International Publishing. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Centre for Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research, the inaugural annual BC China Scholars’ Forum was held on April 9th & 10th, 2010. The Forum’s theme is “Moving Words, Moving Images” and was held in conjunction with Asia Voila, UBC’s annual Asia Open House. The keynote address was delivered by Professor Jerome Silbergeld , P.Y. & Kinmay Tang Professor of Chinese Art History & Director, Tang Centre for East Asian Art, Princeton University. “What Is the “Chinese Motion” in Chinese Motion Pictures?”
For rest of the conference webcasts, they can be viewed here:
The Victoria Times Colonist recently published an article on the Colonial Despatches project, which involved the digitization of letters between Vancouver Island and the Colonial Office in London.
This project was supported by the B.C. History Digitization Program, an initiative launched by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre in 2006.
The article also pays tribute to Ike Barber and his contributions to digitization efforts in B.C.
You can view the piece here.
The new issue of the BCLA Browser features a story on UBC Library’s strategic plan.
Links to the article, and other pieces about BC’s library community, can be found here.