Jing Chen, PhD, is an associate professor at the School of Art, Nanjing University, a founding member of the Center for Digital Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanjing University, and a part-time researcher at the Center for Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, Shanghai University. From 2012 to 2014, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University, USA. Her main research interests are cultural and media studies, digital humanities, digital art and digitization of intangible cultural heritage.
Mengqi Li is a researcher at Shanghai Traditionow Culture Development Corp. Her research focuses on using digital technologies for the dissemination and transformation of intangible cultural heritage.
I'm an exhibition planner of the Shanghai Museum, China. I also work for the research and education of Chinese intangible cultural heritage at university Nanjing. My research topic focuses on the digital protection and knowledge production of Chinese traditional colors.
Yinzhou Zhao graduated from the Art Institute of Nanjing University and is currently a cultural civil servant.
Mengyue Zhang graduated from Nanjing University and is currently working in the Nanjing University Alumni Association.
Han Chen graduated from Nanjing Art Institute and is currently a photographer.
Qiang Hu is a full-stack development engineer. He is an advertising professional and front-end technology expert. He worked in Renren and Sohu, led the front-end technology development team, and trained a number of technical managers in first-tier Internet companies. He is mainly engaged in project technical design, development, operation and maintenance.
Yongqing Xie graduated from Nanjing Art Institute, is a graphic designer and freelancer, and is currently the head of Hangzhou Text Story Cultural Creative Co.
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This essay offers a case study of the ZHI project, a digital craftsmanship project showcasing the beauty of traditional craftsmanship at three levels: knowing, making, and intelligence. The project began with a Designer Residency Program and was developed to answer three crucial questions: (1) How could we bridge the gap between enthusiastic outsiders and little-known creators of intangible cultural heritage? (2) How could we help students understand and participate in craftwork? and (3) How could we facilitate sustainable knowledge production about intangible cultural heritage among the audiences, students, and craftsmen so everyone benefits and contributes? The ZHI project uses minimal computing strategies to encourage craftspeople to pass their skills and knowledge onto others, particularly younger generations, through digitization and online exhibitions that use minimal computing practices. The project provides user-friendly, accessible information to researchers and craftspeople who do not possess expensive digital equipment or high-level technical skills. This offers them opportunities to virtually present their craft and research, share knowledge, and tell their own stories to audiences unfamiliar with craftsmanship.
This essay offers a case study of the ZHI project, a digital craftsmanship project showcasing the beauty of traditional craftsmanship at three levels: knowing, making, and intelligence.
In 2003, UNESCO established their Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), to
ensure better visibility of the intangible cultural heritage and awareness of its
significance, and to encourage dialogue which respects cultural diversity
High-performance technology was promoted as an important method for the conservation and distribution of ICH. Many IT companies are used to working with museums to digitize ICH. While it is important to promote ICH to broad audiences, high-performance technology requires technical skills and equipment that bear high costs. Moreover, it is crucial to work directly with craftspeople to better understand the goals and outcomes of conservation. Our work on ZHI: A Digital Project of Traditional Craftsmanship, developed by graduate students at Nanjing University’s School of Arts, offers an alternative that incorporates minimal computing technologies and direct collaboration with creators of ICH.
The project began with our Designer Residency Program, developed in 2017 to bring together designers, craftspeople, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, and administrators from cultural institutions. As we visited local studios and interviewed designers and craftspeople, we sought to understand the obstacles to digitally preserving and transmitting knowledge about craftsmanship in Nanjing. What became clear is that it was impractical to launch a multi-year training program to share Nanjing’s ICH with amateurs or hobbyists. Seeking alternatives, we interviewed designers, craftspeople, students, and potential audiences interested in learning more about craftsmanship. We further explored digital technologies that would be user-friendly and economical for preserving ICH.
This research led to even more questions: How could we bridge the gap between enthusiastic consumers and the little-known creators of ICH? How could we create opportunities for students to learn about and contribute to craftwork? How could we facilitate a sustainable process of knowledge production about ICH among the audiences, students, and craftsmen so everyone benefited and had opportunities to contribute?
To answer these questions, we developed ZHI, a digital craftsmanship project.Zhī
means knowing (知),
intelligence (
According to UNESCO’s 2003 Convention, ICH connotes the practices, representations,
expressions, knowledge, and know-how, transmitted from generation to generation within
communities, created and transformed continuously by them, depending on the environment
and their interaction with nature and history
adapts permanently to the present and constitutes cultural capital that can
be a powerful driver for development. Food security, health, education, sustainable use
of natural resources — intangible cultural heritage is a wealth of knowledge to be used
in many aspects of life
living
status of heritage in
the communities — ensuring it can be known, learned, and transmitted from
generation-to-generation and thus remain alive — as well as the human spirit that lies in
communities and provides a sense of identity that promotes broader cultural and social
effects. Starting from the understanding of ICH as living heritage,
we adopted three
key concepts to develop a sustainable model to help practitioners share the knowledge
and skills of ICH. From the process of making and producing digital twins of ICH,
supported technically by the strategies of minimal computing
— that is, using
accessible technologies — we designed a flexible website to showcase the knowledges,
communities, and aesthetic values of ICH.
In the case of the ZHI project, digitization of craftsmanship is not simply duplicating
products, but a process of making digital twins,
a term used by Michael Grieves to
describe a virtual representation of what has been produced
in his project for his
Product Lifestyle Management Development Consortium. Grieves suggests one could,
Compare a Digital Twin to its engineering design to better understand what was produced
versus what was designed, tightening the loop between design and execution
digital twins
to cultural heritage,
Pierre-André Jouan and Pierre Hallot indicate that implementing digital twins for the
management and preservation of cultural heritage assets would assist with data
collection and management for cultural heritage, which will in turn provide initial and
long-term support for the conservation of cultural heritage. This all relies on the
value attributed to the form of cultural heritage, while evaluation of that value itself
depends on data preservation
Emphasizing the principle of living heritage, we take the sustainable production of
knowledge as the core of the ZHI project to encourage craftspeople to pass their skills
and knowledge onto others, particularly younger generations, through digitization and
online exhibition. During this process, we discovered that while craftspeople know how
to make things by drawing on their skills, it is difficult for them to convert the
knowledge that they learned from their practical experiences into what Ulrich Lehmann
calls a systematic knowledge shape.
Lehman notes this difficulty:
If making is knowing, it doesn’t follow that all makersknowtheir crafts. They might know how to produce an effective, economical, or detailed result. But this does not mean that they can change completely, reverse, or deconstruct their techne in such a way as to challenge established thinking about this craft.
Lehmann reminds us that Plato and Aristotle’s metaphorical expression of the distinction
between knowledge
and techne
universalized and empowered making processes, such as
weaving and clothes-making. These are epistemological processes of knowledge production
that go beyond material creation, and thus constitute[s] conceptual knowledge
If making is knowing, can its conditional base be separated and evaluated
independently?.... Are craft techniques, the communal structures of craftspeople, the
sociability of crafting, and the consumption of crafted forms to be seen as conditional
for the generation of knowing?
Extending these questions to the digital realm, is digital technology conditional for the making-knowing process of craftsmanship now? Does the digital making process also produce knowing/knowledge for the new generation?
Yes, we think so. Our work is inspired by projects like the Making and Knowing Project,
a research and pedagogical initiative in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia
University that explores the intersections between artistic making and scientific
knowing,
where craftspeople represent their skills and knowledge through their own
voices and stories
Inspired by the making as knowing
principle and the Making and Knowing Project, the
ZHI project invited the craftspeople to work with the undergraduate and graduate
students. During the collaboration process, craftspeople learned to use language that
young people understand to explain the tacit knowledge behind the texts and objects.
Students also needed to learn how to use texts, images, and videos — the digital content
that represents not only the material craft product but also the knowledge and emotions
of craftspeople — to demonstrate the value of crafts to users in virtual environments.
This is a making process of both material media and translations of knowledge across
different languages systems.
Strategies of minimal computing undergird this work on the ZHI project because it fits our needs and provides a framework for theorizing our practices. In
What do we need?to open a discussion of necessity-based technical practices, articulating a concern about
how to produce, disseminate, and preserve digital scholarship ourselves, without the help we can’t get, even as we fight to build the infrastructures we need at the intersection of and beyond our libraries and schools
ease of use, ease of creation
In contrast, the digital heritage community in China trends towards fetishizing
technology. The more advanced
and expensive digital technologies or devices are, the
more popular they are. Recently, virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) have
become popular in the national digital heritage community. However, not all types of
cultural heritage or ICH are suitable for VR/AR, even though VR/AR have been strongly
recommended and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Are they necessary for
the ZHI project? No. The required terminal display equipment and the cost of modeling 3D
content, as well as easily outdated operating environments, are unaffordable luxuries
for individual craftspeople and students. Even with the possibility of grant funding,
the question remains about who could continue maintaining content and customized
technologies for VR/AR when the funding runs out. Rather than following the VR/AR trend,
we considered the purpose of using technologies, focusing on the question of what we
need.
We further considered which technologies would allow ZHI project participants to
engage in the hands-on making-as-knowing process with digital technologies, rather than
outsourcing the making process and turning our technologies into a figurative “black
box” for craftspeople and students. With the strategic framework of minimal computing,
the ZHI project maximizes the use of only the most necessary technologies and the most
effective ways to expose the most important, but often neglected, aspects of ICH: the
beauty of handcrafts and the wisdom of craftspeople.
Inspired by the concepts listed above, the ZHI team examined three types of traditional craftsmanship in Nanjing: Yunjin brocade, gold foil forging, and velvet flower making. In addition to originating in Nanjing, all three are closely related to the silk industry. Due to existing market needs, especially for gold foil, craftspeople are still living within self-identified communities. To preserve ICH, craftspeople need to collaborate with researchers to digitally conserve and promote the crafts. The ZHI project helps facilitate such collaborations.
Our team consists of graduate and undergraduate students from different disciplines and our approach combines the study of documents and images with fieldwork and collaboration with craftspeople. The first stage of the project focused on identifying challenges to the preservation of intangible cultural heritage through fieldwork. Through our international Designers-in-Residency program, we worked closely with designers, craftspeople, NGO workers, and administrators of cultural institutions. We visited local studios and interviewed designers and craftspeople, discussing the obstacles of digital preservation for Nanjing’s ICH.
Through our visits and interviews, we identified two challenges. First, craftspeople do not have a systematic digital record of their products, skills, tools, and stories, since they are not part of the museum system. As a result, the value of their work has not been recognized by cultural heritage authorities. Some organizations, such as television stations, interview craftspeople but not all of these organizations give copies of images, audio, videos, and texts back to the craftspeople. Additionally, craftspeople do not have their own physical or virtual archives to preserve their work, documents, and ephemera.
Second, it is almost impossible to help designers from different cultural contexts understand an artifact with a 2000-year-old history of complicated techniques, complex meanings behind colors and patterns, or that these groups of people spend their whole lives weaving a textile or making a fan. They can respect it but not understand it. This happens with students too, even when they share the same cultural contexts as these craftspeople. Students love these beautiful artifacts and enthusiastically want to know more about them, but they do not know how to acquire that knowledge. Not all students are from the local area, so some are unfamiliar with the culture. But, more importantly, as a younger generation, they do not have first-hand knowledge and experience of traditional craftsmanship — just surface knowledge from books, museums, tourist stores, and TV shows, which are carefully illustrated, elucidated, encoded, and programmed by authoritative researchers, professionals, and product designers. Students seldom have a chance to have hands-on experiences with the making process that is needed to acquire the deep, tacit knowledge of craftsmanship and craftspeople themselves.
Based on the insights from the first stage of our project, in the second stage we chose to establish a digital website to virtually represent craftsmanship to general audiences and create an archive for craftspeople to digitally preserve their works, processes, and stories. We also adopted a research-driven pedagogical model; the process of developing the website engaged students in making-as-knowing, as they worked with the craftspeople to select, digitize, design, and interpret content, with the help of collaborators, such as researchers, photographers, and programmers.
The ZHI project carefully chose four ways to collect data: (1) taking photos, (2) making short video clips, (3) searching for free copyright images, and (4) conducting oral history interviews (see Figure 1). Most of the filming is done on students’ phones, and they can edit them on their laptops with video editing software. We ask them to strictly follow our protocols of data collection, which have been designed and customized by us, so the filming and editing work is also part of the scientific investigation process and includes consent of the craftspeople (see Figures 2 and 3). For example, students have to clearly understand the name and purpose of every step in the development of a craft, as well as additional considerations, such as why we should take a photo of silk yarn from a particular perspective — because the reflection of silk yarn in a different light will affect color representation. Students also have to understand why particular patterns have to be arranged next to another one — because royal rules in ancient China dictated the whole pattern for clothes. All of this detailed information about ICH has to be included alongside the photos, videos, and interactive games they create.
Since the content is lightweight, we designed an HTML5/PHP-based, highly flexible
website for images, videos, texts, and interactive games with a freelance developer.
color selection and matching in brocade making. All elements of the game are image-based and can be replaced and changed accordingly so the game can be extended to different patterns with different color palettes. For now, we use a line drawing named
Simple does not mean inelegant. On the contrary, we want to make the website simple but
beautiful. By studying the materials, tools, making process, and products, and talking with
craftspeople, we developed our 3S principle
as we found that the
Since the launch of the ZHI website, we have received compliments and feedback from craftspeople and researchers alike. Reflecting on our process, we can summarize the lessons we learned. First, developing a sharable knowledge network is essential. We are fortunate to have many collaborators working with us on the ZHI project, including craftspeople, dyeing experts, scholars, designers, and museum curators. They examine our workflow, protocol, and principles, and give students seminars and workshops on dyeing and color analysis. The students work very closely with craftspeople to record and annotate all the photos of procedure and craft works. During this process, tacit knowledge is circulated among this collaborative community and students’ experiences merge into knowledge production and become a new branch of the digital twin of craftsmanship. Consequently, three students from the team decided to work in cultural heritage fields after they graduated — another outcome of this project.
Next, based on the principle of mutually beneficial sharing, all photos, video, and oral
history texts taken by us from the local studios and craftspeople are given back to them
as documents. Meanwhile, all materials are authorized by craftspeople and local museums
and presented on our website as
Further, establishing data collection specifications from the beginning and following
them throughout the research and technical processes is crucial to sustainability and
scalability. Minimal computing shaped our decision to set a variety of rules before the
actual work
began and to undertake both data collection and our technical work
carefully. For example, the students record all of the scientific data as they learn
about dyeing and, in turn, all images of craftsmanship on the website are also
color-managed so that accurate and effective color analysis can be performed.
Our hope is that the ZHI project offers a model for others working to present ICH digitally in an economic and aesthetic way. While ZHI tries to decode the knowledge of craftsmanship and present the beauty of craftsmanship with minimal computing, several concerns arose with the launch of the website, chiefly sustainability and permanence. The construction of the website was largely supported by Nanjing University, Nanjing Art Foundation, and established partnerships with craftspeople, but the operation and maintenance of the website requires continued investment in human and financial resources. At the same time, we have started to promote the ZHI model to the community of elders as well as to middle school students. Through these new developments, we aim to develop a new operational model to promote ICH in the broader community.
This essay is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Nanjing University (Grant No. 011514370105) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21BA026).