MCLC: web archives and Chinese literature

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: web archives and Chinese literature
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Source: UK Web Archive Blog (9/13/12):
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2012/09/web-archives-and-chi
nese-literature.html

Web Archives and Chinese Literature
The following is a guest post by Professor Michel Hockx, School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London, who explains the
difference between doing research on internet literature from doing
research on printed literature, and how web archives help.

In July of this year, Brixton-based novelist Zelda Rhiando won the
inaugural Kidwell-e Ebook Award <http://www.kidwellyefestival.com/>. The
award was billed as ³the world¹s first international e-book award.² It may
have been the first time that e-writers in English from all over the world
had been invited to compete for an award, but for e-writers in Chinese
such awards have been around for well over a decade. This might sound
surprising, since the Chinese Internet is most frequently in the news here
for the way in which it is censored, i.e. for what does notappear on it.
What people often forget, however, is that the environment for
print-publishing in China is much more restricted and much more heavily
censored. Therefore, those with literary interests and ambitions have gone
online in huge numbers. Reading and writing literature is consistently
ranked among the top-ten reasons why Chinese people spend time online.
 

I have been following the development of Chinese internet literature
almost since its inception and I am currently finalizing a monograph on
the subject, simply titled Internet Literature in China and due to be
published by Columbia University Press. (That scholars of literature feel
compelled to publish their research outcomes on topics like this in the
form of printed books shows how poorly attuned the humanities world still
is to the new technologies.) Doing research on internet literature is
substantially different from doing research on printed literature, most
importantly because born-digital literary texts are not stable. Printed
novels may come in different editions, but generally the assumption of
literature scholars who do research on the same novel is that they have
all read the same text. For internet literature there can be no such
assumption, because ³the text² often evolves over time and usually looks
different depending on user interaction.  The text looks different
depending on when you visited it and what you did with it. So one of the
methods I employ is to present my interpretations of such texts at
different moments in time. For traditional literature scholars, this is
unusual: they don¹t normally tell you in their research ³when I read this
text in 2011, I interpreted it like this, but when I read it again in
2012, I interpreted it like that.² Using this method relies on the
availability of the material, and on the possibility to preserve it so
that other scholars can reproduce my readings. And that is where web
archives come in.
 

As far as I know, there is no Chinese equivalent of the UK Web Archive. In
the area of preservation of born-digital material, China is very far
behind the UK (instead it devotes huge resources to the digitization and
preservation of its printed cultural heritage). Some literary websites in
China have their own archives. In the case of popular genre fiction sites
these archives can be huge, and they can be searchable by author, genre,
popularity (number of hits or comments), and so on. Genre fiction (romance
fiction, martial arts fiction, erotic fiction, and so on) is hugely
popular on the Chinese Internet, because of the relatively few legal
restrictions compared to print publishing. Readers subscribe to novels
they like and they then receive regular new instalments, often on a daily
basis. However, no matter how large the archives, there usually tends to
be a cut-off point after which works are taken offline. When I first
started my research in 2002, I was blissfully unaware of such potential
problems. As a result, roughly 90% of the URLs mentioned in the footnotes
to my first scholarly articles on the topic are no longer accessible.
Fortunately, when I began to rework some of my earlier articles for my
book, I found that the Internet Archive <http://www.archive.org/> had
preserved a substantial number of the links, so in many cases my footnotes
now refer to the Internet Archive. Although the Internet Archive does not
preserve images and other visual material (which can play an important
role in online literature), having the texts as I saw them in 2002 is
definitely better than having nothing at all, and will convince my fellow
scholars that I am not just making them all up!

 
During my later research, I took care to save pages, and sometimes entire
sites or parts of sites, to my own computer to ensure preservation of what
I had seen. But archiving material on my computer does not make it any
more accessible to others. That is why I use the services of the Digital
Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS, with one server in Heidelberg
<http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/>, andone in Leiden
<http://www.leiden.dachs-archive.org/>), where scholars in my field can
store copies of online material they refer to in footnotes to
publications. DACHS also has another important function: it preserves
copies of online material from China that is in danger of disappearing,
because it is political or ephemeral, or both. DACHS also invites scholars
to introduce such materials and place them in context, as in Nicolai
Volland¹s collection of online documents pertaining to ³Control of the
Media in the People¹s Republic of China²
<http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/dachs/volland050530a.htm>, or Michael
Day¹s annotated collection of Chinese avant-garde poetry websites
<http://leiden.dachs-archive.org/poetry/websites.html>.

In order for online Chinese-language literature to be preserved, its
cultural value needs to be appreciated not just by foreign enthusiasts
like myself, but more generally by scholars and critics in China itself.
The first decade or so of Chinese writing on the Internet will probably
never be restored in any detail, although a relatively complete picture
might still emerge if existing partial archives were merged. Meanwhile, I
hope that new archiving options for later material will become available
soon.