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Project Name: The Huntington
Archive of Buddhist and Related Art and Its Projects
Project Representative(s): Susan and John Huntington, Janice
Glowski, The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist
and Related Art contains nearly 300,000 original color slides and black
and white and color phetographs of art and architecture throughout Asia.
Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Myanmar
(Burma). Works range from approximately 2500 B.C.E. to the present, and
dorumentation includes contemporary religious activities in various parts
of Asia. The Archive documents the art and architecture of these countries
in situ, as well as works of art found in most major Asian, European, and
American museums. This broad, yet detailed, collection contains predominantly
Buddhist material, but also includes Hindu, Jain, Islamic, and other works.
In addition to being the most comprehensive collection of its kind, The
Huntington Archive includes the largest photographic archive of Nepali
art and architecture in the world and represents the only formal collection
that photagraphically records this country's artistic heritage.
The Huntington Archive represents the efforts of over twenty-five years
of field documentation photography by John and Susan Huntington, professors
of Asian Art History at The Ohio State University. In 1986, the Huntingtons
decided to formally expand their photographic collection beyond the countries
central to their personal research to include other major countries in
Asia that had not yet been documented. When the move from a personal resource
materials archive to a pan-Asian documentation project was made, the Huntingtons
and the History of Art Department decided to create an institutional archive
that could be used for scholarly research and classroom teaching.
Recent developments: Their most recent project is the Newar
Buddhist Photographic Documentation Project, which is a a photographic
documentation of the Kathmandu Valley Newar people of Nepal, for which
no systematic documentation project has ever been undertaken.
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Project Name: The Tianhou Temple Project
Project Representative(s): Joseph Bosco, Chinese University
of Hong Kong, China
This project entails mainly the development of a CD-ROM containing
a wide variety of multimedia information, including photos, maps, and audio-video
clips. The resource contains detailed information on such things as temple
rituals and architecture.
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Project Name: Central Asia/Silk Road Mapping for the Electronic
Cultural Atlas
Project Representative(s): Sanjyot Mehendale and Bruce Williams,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
The Silk Road group is one of the numerous regional teams working on
the atlas. This team is led by Bruce (texts) and Sonjyot (archeology).
The inclusion of the Silk Road area in this atlas has special importance,
due to the fact that the vast area of Central Asia has heretofore been
largely neglected in the course of research in area studies. But because
it is an region which is the medium between so many different cultures,
the study of it yields much in the way of fascinating information. The
map consists of sites, routes and artifacts which are situated as increasingly
detailed views. In using the tool, one can go from a view of an entire
region to a single room in a house. There is also extensive hyperlinking
within the map.
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Project Name: Educational Multimedia on Japanese Culture
Project Representative(s): Thomas Price, State University of
California-Humbolt USA
Thomas Price has put together on his CD-ROM an breathtaking assemblance
of 3D panoramic photography, which is designed primarily as an instructional
tool for school children--thus falling firmly in the category of "educational
multimedia." Along with the superb photography of temples, gardens and
a variety of other scenes of natural beauty, are presentations of demographic
information, geography and case studies. The CD also includes numerous
audio-video clips rendering sublime natural scenery.
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Project Name: Image Repositories and Image Presentation on the World
Wide Web
Project Representative(s): Thomas Duncan, Museum Infomatics
Project, University of California, Berkeley, USA
This project is concerned with the resolution of the technical problems
related to the presentation of images on the web. Quite often high-resolution
images can range from 20 MB up to as much as 150 MB, and therefore there
are cases when these need to be compressed for actual presentation. One
of the prominent new strategies for dealing with image compression is termed
"pyramiding and tiling," generally done in five stages.
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Project Name: Electronic Chronological Table for Japanese Religious
and Cultural History
Project Representative(s): Shigeru Handa, Jinjya Honcho Research
Fellow, Nagoya, Japan
Ultimately aimed for installation on the internet. Its basic organizing
format is that of a Shinto dictionary, but which makes wide use of a broad
range of multimedia elements. With Shinto being such a broad-ranging Japanese
cultural phenomenon, the dictionary naturally contains a wide variety of
cultural information. There are also various other forms of information
attached, such as a classical Japanese texts like the Kojiki and
Nihonshoki. There is also an extensive bibliography, along with
audio-visual clips in Japanese and English. One of the central functions
of this database is the chronological table, which one can search via a
number of methods. It also includes a tool for converting Western dates
into the sixty-year cycle of the traditional Chinese calendar.
