Visual Cultures in East Asia is the new generic platform of
the Institute of Asian Studies (IrAsia) for the development
and display of research projects and collections that
involve the use of visual and cartographic materials. It
will actually serve as a portal for the individual as well
as collective projects of the LEAS scholars and graduate
students, as well as their partners.
In the earliy years of the 20th century, intrepid Western
plant explorers were sent to 'exotic' lands to gather
economically useful plants and seeds. Botanical and
Cultural Images of Eastern Asia, 1907-1927, is the
digitized collection of Eastern Asian photographs taken by
some of the plant explorers commissioned by the Arnold
Arboretum of the Harvard University. The database features
images of plants, people, and landscapes as were seen and
recorded by the explorers: John George Jack (1861–1949),
Formosa is a digital library hosted by Reed College of
Portland, Oregon that specializes in gathering early images,
maps, and texts on the island of Taiwan, which was called
\Formosa\ by foreign visitors in the 19th Century. Scholars
can even find a small sampling of primary linguistic data on
various aboriginal languages collected by early explorers.
Primary source data like this were originally published in
European and North American books and journals during the
19th Century, but have since become hard to access with the
passage of time.