Research Team
Director of the Research Center
Research Group Conveyors
Chinese Historical Memory
On the one hand, this research group uses the digital tools provided by the metaverse to present “Chinese Historical Memory” through digital curation. On the other hand, we use the data collected through this digital curation to analyze collective memory through brand new cross-disciplinary research methods. Compared to text-based or traditional static exhibitions, the biggest difference in terms of form in digital curation are visualization (combining sounds and images), interaction, and virtual scenarios. These allow readers and audiences to become active viewers and, through a participatory experience, to develop a more diverse and profound understanding of history. More importantly, this dynamic process of digital curation can give audiences with different or even opposite positions in the recognition of existing historical memory the opportunity to put themselves in someone else’s place through participatory experience. This allows them to understand, face, and even experience for themselves the historical realities and historical memories of others, while .at the same time reflecting upon their own historical memories. In the next step, they will work towards establishing o more collective historical memory and strife towards historical reconciliation. This kind of research combines information technology and history uses virtual reality and role-playing experiences to reconstruct historical situations, allowing the audience to not only experience them, but to also become the agents, participants, and respondents within the virtual reality, instead of simply being passive recipients of text-based or audio-visual lecture-style didactics.
Chinese Religious Practices
Through new perspectives on the links between religious families and local communities, this research group hopes to reconstruct a balanced and complete historical memory of Buddhism and Taoism in Taiwan, as well as their modern dynamics. We also hope that through the study of ritual and ritualization, we can shift the focus of religious studies from belief to practice, and on the basis of the traditional Chinese worldviews and cultural views, can focus on how contemporary Chinese religions produce and create a new era of religious meaning. We further explore whether it is possible to thereby strengthen and redefine Chinese identity and to establish the values of a “new Chinese culture” with Taiwan as the main subject.
Our specific methodology is to collect, interpret and compare data in the broader spatial and temporal context of Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and South China, areas with different political, social, and cultural backgrounds; Combined with the innovative digital humanities research conducted by integrating and applying Metaverse’s digital humanities technology and curatorial modes to collect records of visitor interaction experience and behavioral analysis, this is an unprecedented new approach in the field of Chinese religious research. The combination of digital technology and traditional humanities research will open up new horizons for the study of Chinese religions, which will lead to the formulation of new questions and the construction of new research paradigms. In addition, we hope to present the essence of Chinese religious culture in the shape of a “metaverse” and to develop a Chinese religious digital education museum. In this way, we will not only help to enhance art appreciation, moral education, physical and spiritual healing, personal life exploration, and community integration for our fellow Taiwanese, but also provide a full range of religious education and life exploration services for primary and secondary schools, rural education, the general public, and the elderly.
Chinese Mass Culture
We will analyze the fluid identities of Chinese mass culture in depth via representative works, such as Jin Yong’s wuxia novels, Taiwanese pop music, Taiwanese gezixi operas, the history of Chinese body metaphors, Chinese cinema, Taiwanese sci-fi literature, and Sinophone literature. We will look at Chinese genre films and their cultural politics; Jin Yong’s wuxia and lyricism, “psychogeographic” narratology, and its cultural symptoms and identity; the transnational mobility of Taiwanese gezixi opera and the benefits of the media loop in terms of ethnic consciousness and cultural identity; also, how in the midst of a media technology and visual transformation, Chinese mass culture has started an everyday revolution, deconstructed reality, and demonstrated the revolutionary power of everyday utopia, and so on. In addition to theoretical approaches and cross-media analyses, the identity politics of Chinese mass culture are presented in multilayered and multidirectional perspectives: from “tradition” to “modernity”, “globalization” to “localization”, “body” to “post-body”, “anthropocene” to “post-humanity”, from “Enlightenment” to “anti-Enlightenment”, and from “national allegory” to “anti-national allegory”, and so on.
Chinese Cultural Metaverse Ecosystem
The research group is committed to developing the “Chinese Cultural Metaverse Ecosystem” platform into an ecosystem capable of supporting digital curatorial creations in innovative Chinese cultural metaverses which provides blockchain digital asset protection, NFT smart contract licensing, and the operation of a virtual digital economy. Thereby we will support the three Chinese culture research groups in developing innovative digital humanities research models based on the “Chinese Cultural Metaverse Ecosystem” platform. This includes the practical verification of primary and secondary research models, and serves as an innovative field of practice to support the dissemination of Chinese culture and its application in teaching.
The “Chinese Cultural Metaverse Ecosystem” platform provides asset owners with the ability to upload digital content for blockchain protection and NFT smart contract authorization. Curators may set up exhibitions for digital curatorial creation, and visitors can view exhibitions through the use of digital virtual points in a digital economy. Exhibitions are equipped with 3D immersive curation, viewing and virtual interaction functions. In addition, it also provides advanced digital curatorial modules that can stimulate visitors to further explore exhibits in detail, as well as the background of and impetus for the exhibition as a whole. This means that the exhibition is no longer just a passive process of absorbing knowledge, but a process of exploring knowledge through active and self-directed learning, thus achieving its goals of revitalizing historical materials, promoting communication, and creating new knowledge.
Chinese Cultural Metaverse Digital Governance
The research of this research group aims to support the research of the three Chinese cultural research groups of Chinese Historical Memory, Chinese Religious Practices, and Chinese Mass Culture regarding the numerous and complex legal issues related to intellectual property rights and licensing of digital assets arising from digital curatorship, which are very different from those encountered in traditional curatorships in the physical world. These include: (1) Collaboration between curators and viewers may result in secondary creations. This may lead to difficulties in determining the authorship of viewers and the attribution of intellectual property rights. (2) Exhibitions spanning the virtual and real worlds will increase the complexity of intellectual property licensing and seriously challenge the current legal system of intellectual property licensing. (3) If the transaction of digital creation adopts the licensing model, without applying the principle of the exhaustion of intellectual property rights, this is extremely disadvantageous to the licensee’s subsequent value-added use; if a trade model is adopted, this involves the issue of how to deliver and transfer ownership of digital content. If no solution for this dilemma is found, this will seriously affect the development of metaverse content curation.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Content in Development
