Digitizing Chinese Englishmen

In this talk, Koh presents Digitizing Chinese Englishmen, a digital project that documents the creation of a group of “Asian Victorians” during the nineteenth century within the British Empire in Southeast Asia. While digital scholarship on the nineteenth century has proliferated in the past ten years, few projects that focus on the influence of Empire on Victorian culture currently exist. Digitizing Chinese Englishmen addresses this gap in an attempt to create a “postcolonial” digital archive in content and form: firstly, by digitizing The Straits Chinese Magazine, a nineteenth-century journal of Anglophone writing in Southeast Asia, and secondly, through features which allow site visitors to play a larger role in shaping the meanings of this archive via social media and their comments. In so doing, Digitizing Chinese Englishmen attempts to address a larger debate on silences on race, class, gender and access within the digital humanities community through its recovery of overlooked texts, and by adopting an approach to display that is self-reflexive of the process of imperial knowledge creation within the digital archive. This talk documents the ways in which Digitizing Chinese Englishmen undertakes this through describing certain scholarly gaps within the digital humanities community and Victorian studies, explaining how this project tries to address these gaps, and finally explaining some of the challenges involved in this recovery project.