La plateforme Virtual Shanghai propose une nouvelle approche des sciences humaines et sociales appliquée à l’histoire urbaine à travers le recours aux sources « marginales » de l’histoire et aux technologies du numérique, de l’Internet et du SIG. Le carnet de recherche est destiné à la fois à porter à la connaissance des utilisateurs de la plateforme les évolutions les plus récentes et offrir un espace de discussion et d’échanges sur les contenus, les sources et l’état de la recherche dans les différents domaines disciplinaires et de savoir liés au projet Virtual Shanghai.
We are pleased to invite you to the “Habiller la Ville” webinar which will take place on Tuesday, November 3, 2020 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. on the theme: “Equiper sans encombrer : le mobilier publicitaire à Shanghai dans la première moitié du XXe siècle” (in French). More information is available...
We are pleased to announce the release of our collection of Shanghai Municipal Police archives in searchable text format on Bibliothèque Numérique Asiatique [Asia Digital Library]. The original collection of microfilms was purchased from NARA in the mid-1990s and remained accessible only through in...
The text that follows was written for the "Bluebook on Chinese studies" currently under compilation by the GIS Asie at the request of the Ministry of Research in France. It is meant to serve as a general assessment following the initiative by President Emmanuel Macron to establish a European Institu...
The history of Shanghai during wartime has too often been written on the before/after mode, with a strong propensity to simplify the political and military configurations that prevailed at different times during the war. In this short post, I would like to address the issue of the regimes of occupat...
The population of Shanghai (1865-1953) will soon be available at Brill. After three rounds of proof editing and correcting — Brill is very thorough in its editorial process — the manuscript is now in press. It is scheduled to come out from the presses for Christmas. What follows is a peek into into...
In the recent weeks, the users of the Virtual Shanghai platform may have noticed a substantial upsurge of the Data section. This section is meant to provide historical statistical data in the form of spreadsheets that contain fully referenced and verified data. The reason for the recent increase is...
Ordinary professional commercial photographers tend to leave few traces behind them. Unlike a Robert Capa or a Henri Cartier-Bresson who became famous worldwide for their artistic or field photographs, they easily fall into oblivion despite the wealth and scope of pictures they produced. Yet, becaus...
Entreprises et Histoire, a French academic journal devoted to business and economic history, features in its last issue a review of Cécile Armand's doctoral dissertation "'Placing the History of Advertising'. A spatial history of advertising in Shanghai (1905-1949)" EH_090_0151 by Marie-Emmanuelle...
During my last visit to NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington D.C. — in fact the facility located at College Park, Maryland —I had planned to re-visit the Consular Trade Report series. I may write later on my most recent findings in this series, but today I wish to point...
I have been musing about my recent tip to Shanghai as a head start for resuming posting on the Virtual Shanghai blog. Last year, I took the resolution to post regularly on the VS blog, but academic (make it bureaucratic academic) took the best of my time this year. Basically, Aix-Marseille Universit...
In this post, I intend to introduce briefly a spate of new works produced under the energetic guidance of Prof. Ma Jun at the Institute of History (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences). Ma Jun is without contest one of the most productive historians of Shanghai. He has been unrelenting in exploring...
Rather than jumping straight into academic matters, let me indulge a bit in one of my favorite pastimes. Almost every time I travel to Shanghai, I take pictures. I started from the first day I set foot in the city back in July 1982. Sometimes just a few, sometimes quite a few, depending on time and...
Historian Zhao Weiqing (赵伟清) has contributed a new essay on the Virtual Shanghai platform on the process and underlying factors of change in the space of cinema in the foreign settlements of Shanghai before 1949. It is based on the Ph. D. dissertation "Pouvoir et espace : la censure du cinéma dans l...
On Friday 16 September, IrAsia (Research Center on Asia) will hold a workshop (9h-18h) on the use of digital technologies and the exploration of the past. The event will take place at the Pôle Multimedia (Building T1) in the Schuman Campus of Aix-Marseille University at Aix-en-Provence. All presenta...
At long last ! This item has been missing for a long time on the Virtual Shanghai platform. Here it is now ! Users will now find a "user's guide" (see the right hand side menu) that explains the organization of the menus and their function. Virtual Shanghai basically provides all its resources throu...
In the course of their work, many scholars collect, compile, and process quantitative data. It may just be a small table listing the price of rice over a few years or large sets of figures extracted from one of several large-scale surveys. These materials serve during the period of analysis and prod...
This has been a project in the making for many years. It started out of a short foray into the archives to write a paper about the "suffering body", those of the combatants in the 1937 Shanghai Battle. The main objective was to dig up and collect visual documents about the scars of war. I failed on...
One of the challenges the Virtual Shanghai Project has tried to meet is designing a tool tailored for the production of visual narratives. This ambition has been running through the project from the beginning. Our upcoming tool, VizStory, soon to be unveiled, will take up this challenge. Before we g...
Virtual Shanghai just published on line the Chinese version —— 1937年8月:戰爭與平民的集體死亡 —— of "August 1937: War and the death en masse of civilians" presented by Christian Henriot at the “War in History and Memory: An International Conference on the Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Victory for the War ag...
There has been little activity recently on this blog due to these many factors that weigh on a scholarly life (classes, reports, dissertations, etc.). Yet we are back again and will resolutely maintain a flow of news on the Virtual Shanghai Project and its current and upcoming transformation. We are...
Among the various solicitations the 70th anniversary of the end of W.W.II and victory over Japan is generating in China, the People's Daily (人民日报) asked Christian Henriot about his views on the contribution of China to W.W.II. The gist of the paper [To rember the contribution of China [to W.W.II] is...
On 18-19 May 2015, the French Société Asiatique (Asian Studies Society) held its annual conference at the Collège de France on "War in the societies of the Orient and the far East." The conference brought together a wide array of scholars across time periods and boundaries, from ancient Egypt to med...
Just recently, an unexpected email message led me to discover a new collection of photographs on wartime Shanghai. The William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University has released a very rich series of photographs taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, presumably by Werner von Boltenstern...
French national TV channel FR3 broadcasted a reportage during its prime time 7:00-8:00 news on the Lyon exhibition of the T'ou Sè Wè figurines. The exhibition takes place at the Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs from 5 December 2014 to 11 January 2015. FR3 Reportage The exhibition is organized...