A Comparative View (2010)
Chris Suh, Brown '10
In the summer of 2009, Professor Susan Smulyan put me in charge of re-conceptualizing “Perry Visits Japan.” The original website, which had been conceived in 2003, appeared to be dated, and, more importantly, it included only a dozen essays on the Japanese scroll written by Brown students. Although it had been conceived as a site of transnational collaborative scholarship, “Perry Visits Japan” remained by in large an American website. At one point, a Brown student’s essay had been translated into Japanese, but no Japanese student had contributed to the website. “Perry Visits Japan” had to change in order to attract more collaborators from Japan as well as from the United States.
While I was brainstorming for ways to improve “Perry Visits Japan,” I received two sets of materials that would become invaluable additions to the new website. One was a set of essays on the Japanese scroll and the Heine lithographs written by students at the University of Tokyo under the direction of Professor Yujin Yaguchi, a close colleague of Professor Smulyan. The other was a set of different Japanese scrolls depicting Perry’s landing, owned by the Preservation Society of Newport Country, RI and on loan to the Naval War College Museum in Newport. Taking these two additions into account, I worked with Ben Tyler and Sarah Bordac at the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship to produce, by the end of the summer, a whiteboard for the new website.
The renovation of “Perry Visits Japan” took place in the spring of 2010, when I used it as my final project for Professor Smulyan’s Digital Scholarship class. Ben Tyler and I worked together to realize the vision of the new website that we had conceived the previous summer.
We changed the website’s name from “Perry Visits Japan” to “Perry in Japan” after listening to our Japanese colleagues argue that Perry’s landing was not as peaceful as it was suggested by the verb “to visit.” The first official contact, they insisted, terrified many Japanese people. We renamed the website “Perry in Japan” so that it would be a middle ground between “Perry Visits Japan” and “Perry Terrifies Japan.” The website, we figured, could serve as a site for Japanese and American students to discuss their views on the Perry Expedition.
Because we believed that the 21st century student essays were just as valuable as the 19th century pictorial depictions of the fateful event, we decided to bring out the writings to the front page, on the same page as the images. In the old site, the student writings were subordinate to the images; a visitor to the old site could access the writings only by going through the images first. Now, a visitor to the new site can access the student writings first and then explore the images, if one chooses to do so. The student essays, as I argue in my own essay, “Re-Envisioning the Perry Expedition,” serve as important documents in that they shows us how we, more than a century after the artists depicted the expedition, continue to think about the event differently.
In fact, the old and the new websites serve as useful documents as well. The two websites, much like the 19th century pictorial depictions of the Perry Expeditions, are visual representations of the transnational encounter. The websites themselves are part of the visual history that they attempt to document. Comparing the old website to the current one, I think, helps us see how our understanding of digital scholarship has (or hasn’t) changed in the past seven years.
This new website already has more documents than the original, but it could certainly use a lot more. It is my hope that students and teachers who visit this website will be inspired to contribute their own thoughts to “Perry in Japan” so that the website will become, indeed, a site of transnational collaborative scholarship of transnational encounters that it was first conceived to be.