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East Asian Photography

Images of China from Duke

Duke University Libraries has launched an online digital collection of about 5,000 photographs shot primarily in China between 1917 and 1932.

The photographs were taken by Sidney Gamble, the grandson of Procter and Gamble co-founder James Gamble, and provide a glimpse into daily life unlike any other photographs from this period. A sociologist, China scholar, and avid amateur photographer, Gamble travelled extensively in China from Liaoning province in the northeast to Guangdong province in the south and to the western edge of Sichuan province along the border of Tibet.

The photographs came to light when Gamble’s daughter, Catherine Curran, discovered the collection at the family’s home. She gave the entire collection to Duke in 2006, just before her death.

By mmacken

twitter: meganmacken

Director, Visual Resources Center and Digital Media Archive, Division of the Humanities, The University of Chicago.

My academic background ranges from classics and comparative literature to modern art and architectural history, and so, naturally, I am a librarian. I have graduate degrees in art history and library science, manage digital image and audio collections for the Division of the Humanities, and am always eager to collaborate across disciplines, universities, and even continents! I'm interested in exploring the library's role in Digital Humanities, not just as an archive for born-digital objects but as a locus for Digital Humanities centers. At THATCamp I'm excited to find out how others are visualizing data, especially to facilitate creative research and teaching in art and architectural history and film studies. How can visual data (still images, film, 3D models, etc) move beyond illustration and become a source for research? What kind of creative information retrieval interfaces do we need to do this? We've got metadata...let's make it work!