Remembrance of Contemporary Events: On Setting Up The Sunflower Movement Archive

Tyng-Ruey Chuang
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

2018-09-06

[Bio: Tyng-Ruey Chuang is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, with a joint appointment at the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, and at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences.]

[Note: This is the "pre-print" of an article to appear in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.]

[HTML: https://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~trc/public/DSH2018/]

[DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy061]

Abstract

In the late evening of March 18, 2014, students and activists stormed into and occupied the main chamber of Taiwan's Legislature. The event set off the Sunflower Movement, signifying a turning point in Taiwan's recent history. Researchers at Academia Sinica arranged to acquire all the supporting artifacts and documentary materials in the chamber before the protest came to a peaceful end. In this paper, we discuss the issues in archiving and making available to the public a large collection of artifacts created by thousands of participants during a contemporary event. We demonstrate systems designed to encourage people to identify objects of their own in the archive. We show how an accessible catalog to the archive can help people tell their stories, hence collectively may strengthen the public's recollections about the movement.