The Chinese Poster Project: EALC Pedagogy and Digital Media

How do we make historical documents feel alive? As a faculty member and a research librarian, we frequently encounter tension between remote archival sources and our students’ contemporary lives. By creating a web archive, we can make rare objects available to a wide audience while encouraging these audiences to look at them closely and creatively. We have collaborated on creating a digital archive of a small group of rare Chinese political posters from the Republican Era (1912–1949) in the Haverford Quaker & Special Collections. We are including students in all aspects of the process, from development to the implementation of a webpage. This article details the background of the project, the digital communication skills learned by the investigators and student researchers in constructing a webpage featuring these posters, and some plans for the continued use of these posters and the webpage as blended learning resources for the classroom.