Images: Commemorations
In the twentieth to twenty-first century, visual representations of Perry’s landing in Japan continue to be produced and reproduced. Monuments, festivals, and popular goods memorialize the event, while images are published in print or on the web.
In the Flickr gallery below, we have collected photographs of commemorations that exist today, in both Japan and the U.S. We did not produce any of these images ourselves, but instead linked to exiting photographs that Flickr users had uploaded, and added our own comments.
As the online community grows, cultural institutions are realizing the potential of social networking sites to interact with new, international audiences. For example, museums, libraries, and archives share their historical material on the Flickr Commons. At the same time, snapshots that someone took on vacation could potentially become valuable research material as well. With the overwhelming amount of resources on the web, it is important to think about how to organize and curate these existing materials.