Visualizing Cultures
an MIT project in digital image-driven history
MIT Visualizing Cultures
As Creative Director of MIT Visualizing Cultures, Ellen Sebring designed the project’s format and collaborated with some 25 scholars on over 50 units focused on the visual record of modern Japan, China, and the Philippines. She also authored several units for the project. Sebring produced a series of Visualizing Cultures online courses, exhibitions, and a related site, Visualizing Portugal: The New State (1933-1974).
About the project
Visualizing Cultures has become a widely used resource and example of digital historiography. Founded in 2002 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John W. Dower, and linguist/online learning specialist Shigeru Miyagawa, Visualizing Cultures explores digital publishing for unprecedented ways of presenting modern history through large bodies of previously inaccessible images and unlimited numbers of high resolution graphics.
Conferences on Image-Driven Scholarship
Visualizing Cultures co-sponsored four conferences on image-driven scholarship: "Visualizing Asia in the Modern World," at Yale University (2010 and 2013); Harvard University (2011); and Princeton University (2012). Sebring presented on image-driven digital scholarship at four Association of Asian Studies (AAS) conferences, 2016-2019.
Curricula
Visualizing Cultures offers award-winning secondary school curricula available on the website.
NY Times Review
“But as it has grown over the years, “Visualizing Cultures”—which was honored last year with an award from the Association for Asian Studies—has become a kind of virtual museum in its own right, an addictive and visually stunning one not just for scholars but for anyone with even a casual interest in Japan and China and their economic and cultural interplay over the last 300 years. . . The site is a marvel of navigation, with topics and historical periods arranged in grids or in lists. Long before the advent of the iPad, the architecture set up to show the imagery and words gave a glimpse of how fluid, interactive and just plain gorgeous history and travel books would look in the coming world of electronic tablets, with links to essays, maps and processions of large, high-resolution images that scroll horizontally across the screen.”
— Randy Kennedy, "Asian Culture Through a Lens,” The New York Times, 4/16/2010
Civilization & Barbarism
Sebring authored the unit, Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary and the “White Man's Burden” (1898-1902), discussing imperialism as seen in cartoons at the turn of the 20th century. She also co-authored, with historian Peter C. Perdue, several units for Visualizing Cultures on the Boxer Uprising.
vc menu
Visualizing Cultures developed an icon-based menu in 2004 that juxtaposes content units over time and location.
Founded in 2002 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, John W. Dower, and linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, the Visualizing Cultures project:
explores digital publishing for unprecedented ways of presenting modern history through large bodies of previously inaccessible images and unlimited numbers of high resolution graphics.
co-sponsored four conferences on image-driven scholarship, "Visualizing Asia in the Modern World," at Yale University (2010 and 2013); Harvard University (2011); and Princeton University (2012).
offers award-winning secondary school curricula available on the website.
Creative Director, Ellen Sebring, designed the VC template, collaborated with scholars on the individual units, and presented on image-driven scholarship at four Association of Asian Studies (AAS) conferences, 2016-2019.
review
“But as it has grown over the years, “Visualizing Cultures” — which was honored last year with an award from the Association for Asian Studies — has become a kind of virtual museum in its own right, an addictive and visually stunning one not just for scholars but for anyone with even a casual interest in Japan and China and their economic and cultural interplay over the last 300 years. . . The site is a marvel of navigation, with topics and historical periods arranged in grids or in lists. Long before the advent of the iPad, the architecture set up to show the imagery and words gave a glimpse of how fluid, interactive and just plain gorgeous history and travel books would look in the coming world of electronic tablets, with links to essays, maps and processions of large, high-resolution images that scroll horizontally across the screen.”
— Randy Kennedy, "Asian Culture Through a Lens,” The New York Times, 4/16/2010
in process
New units by Peter C. Perdue, Yale University, and Ellen Sebring on the Second Opium War, and Visual Narratives of the Boxer Uprising will be released in 2020.
civilization & barbarism
essays and papers
Sebring authored the unit, Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary and the 'White Man's Burden' (1898-1902), discussing imperialism as seen in cartoons at the turn of the 20th century. She also co-authored, with historian Peter C. Perdue, several units for Visualizing Cultures on the Boxer Uprising. Her publications include papers on the structure of image-driven scholarship in the digital platform.
MITx MOOCs
online courses from Visualizing Cultures
Lead developer of three MOOCs based on Visualizing Cultures content, Sebring joined the teaching team headed by historian John W. Dower, pictured here with Prof. Andrew Gordon of Harvard, and Gennifer Weisenfeld, Dean of Humanities at Duke University. The first MOOC, VJx, was a collaboration between MITx and Harvard X; VPx; and VTx (to be released in 2020) are MITx productions.
VJx
Visualizing Japan (1850s-1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity
An MITx/HarvardX collaboration, this course explores Japanese history through the images created by those who were there, and teaches the skills of reading history through images in the digital format. VJx covers themes of Westernization, in Commodore Perry’s 1853-54 expedition to Japan; social protest, in Tokyo’s 1905 Hibiya Riot; and modernity, in the archives of the major Japanese cosmetics company, Shiseido. VJx was a finalist for the 2014 Japan Prize. Instructors: John W. Dower (MIT); Andrew Gordon (Harvard University); and Gennifer Weisenfeld (Duke University).
VPx
Visualizing Imperialism & the Philippines, 1898-1913
Political cartoons and photography at the turn of the 20th century reveal debates over US entry into global imperialism through the conquest and occupation of the Philippines. The course explores the theme of Civilization and Barbarism c. 1900; photography and power in the Philippine-American war; and racism and the complexities of ethnographic photography in Dean Worcester’s photographs of Filipino tribes and National Geographic. Instructors: John W. Dower (MIT); Christopher Capozzola (MIT); Ellen Sebring (MIT); with Carla Sinopoli (University of Michigan); and Genevieve Clutario (Harvard University).
VTx
Visualizing the Birth of Modern Tokyo
The city of Tokyo is captured at critical moments in the tradition of the “100 views.” The MOOC is based on Visualizing Cultures units created in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution that explore the “100 views” by two artists: Kiyochika Kobayashi’s pensive gaslit depictions of the new capital in the late 1870s; and Koizumi Kishio’s depictions of the “Imperial Capital” in the 1930s. Instructors: John W. Dower (MIT); James T. Ulak (President, United States-Japan Foundation, formerly curator Freer-Sackler Museum, Smithsonian Institution); Hiromu Nagahara (MIT), and Ellen Sebring (MIT).
Begins June 29, 2020
Samples
from the Visualizing Cultures website
Exhibitions
developed by Visualizing Cultures
The Canton Trade System and the Export Art of the Pearl River Delta, 1780s-1880s
Written and designed by Ellen Sebring based on MIT Visualizing Cultures units “The Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System” by Peter C. Perdue, the exhibition focused on art objects produced in China for Western consumption between the late 18th and late 19th centuries. Commissioned by Jenny Tarlin, Director of the American Culture Center, it opened at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST), Shanghai, May 2016.
Black Ships & Samurai Traveling Exhibition
The Black Ships & Samurai Traveling Exhibition toured the US and Japan from 2003–2005 in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of Commodore Perry’s 1853–54 mission to open long-secluded Japan to the outside world. Based on John W. Dower’s inaugural Visualizing Cultures unit, the exhibition juxtaposed the visual record of the US official narrative with the renderings by Japanese artists upon seeing the Americans and their steamships for the first time. Presented in partnership with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the US Consulate System. The interactive kiosk is in the permanent collection of the US National Archives. Exhibition design by Ellen Sebring.
MIT Meets Broadway
In 2005, the Black Ships & Samurai exhibition was adapted for Studio 54, for the run of the musical, “Pacific Overtures,” by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, starring B.D. Wong, directed by Amon Miyamoto, A Roundabout Theatre Company Production. Exhibition design by Scott Shunk, Program Director of Visualizing Cultures, and Ellen Sebring.
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Visualizing Portugal
a project commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation
In 2013, Sebring produced the MIT Visualizing Cultures spinoff site, “Visualizing Portugal: The New State (1933-1974),” commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
Visualizing Portugal presents a rare look into the visual record of the Estado Novo (New State) period and its official ideology for Portugal.
The visual record of the Estado Novo period is predominantly imagery sanctioned by the Salazar regime. The posters, schoolbooks, and events orchestrated by the SNP (later SNI) — the regime's office of propaganda and information — promoted a Salazarist vision of Portugal and what it meant to be Portuguese based on the core values of "Deus, Pátria, Família" (God, Fatherland, Family).
Opposition to the New State government and ideology can be found domestically in the 1960s imagery of protests covered by the press, political prisoners and censorship in the files of the PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado); overseas in Portugal's colonial provinces; and by observing the large wave of emigration.
Source images came from international press coverage, personal collections, and from the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Portugal.
“We are particularly pleased that the program has a worldwide reach through the Visualizing Portugal website. This portal is considered a one-of-a-kind resource for international scholars and students, as well as for members of the general public. It uses a visual approach to teach the history of the period from 1933 to 1974 in Portugal, stimulating intellectual inquiry and making archival images publicly accessible.”
— L. Rafael Reif, MIT President, letter to the Gulbenkian Foundation, November 20, 2014
Visualizing Portugal: The New State (1933-1974)
Sebring produced this 2013 website presenting rarely compiled images from the period under the Salazar regime.
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