With Taiwan's established English-language media outlets behind the Internet/multimedia curve, it's up to a new Web site run from a small office in Taipei's Central News Agency (CNA) building to lead the way.
Culture.tw, which is funded by the Executive Yuan's Council of Cultural Affairs and run by CNA, aims to be the main Internet portal for English speakers around the world who are interested in Taiwanese culture, arts and entertainment.
The project was launched quietly this summer and will only be promoted actively starting next month. Despite the lack of fanfare, though, it already draws most of its hits from abroad, with roughly half of them coming from the US.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF CUTURE.TW
"The new Culture.tw Web site is a wonderful reference source for our students," said Dafydd Fell, an academic at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, in an e-mail exchange. Fell is in charge of the school's Centre of Taiwan Studies, which offers an MA and the widest range of postgraduate courses on Taiwan outside of Taiwan. "In the past students had to search through multiple sites, but now it's all under one roof," he said.
Miranda Loney, chief editor of Culture.tw, said that the site was unlike other cultural portals because, in addition to presenting links to local Web sites, it also offers information and articles in a foreign language. "Our site is not just a cultural portal. If we'd have just made a cultural portal it wouldn't have worked," she said. "We had to augment it with lots of English information that wasn't readily available."
She cited a thread on the Web forum ParentPages.net as an example of the kind of feedback Culture.tw has received from its readers. "I have spent hours on this site, reading all the articles and getting lost in links," wrote a poster under the name Asiababy. "I've been in Taiwan twelve years, actively involved in the community, and had NO IDEA there was so much cultural/arts stuff going on."
To be sure, many Taiwan-based English-language Web sites already cover Taiwanese culture, and a few offer a partial multimedia experience. Internet surfers can download podcasts from International Community Radio Taiwan's (ICRT) Web site, for example, or watch videos on the Taiwan News' site. And with 800 unique visitors per day, Culture.tw draws less traffic than several of the more well-known expat blogs.
But Culture.tw has access to CNA's extensive video and audio production resources and takes the multimedia experience to a new level, with videos, audio files and a well-managed collection of links, in addition to a growing collection of articles and pictures. There are plans to add Web 2.0 functions like blogging and user-generated content as part of a redesign next year. Readership is growing, and the site is already one of the first links that pops up when a person enters search terms like "Taiwan culture" or "Taiwanese art" on Google.
Culture.tw was conceived three years ago by a group of academics led by Wu Chin-fa (吳錦發), the assistant director of the Council of Cultural Affairs (CCA). Foreigners were enlisted for a focus group to brainstorm ideas for an "English Web portal" (英文入口網站). The CCA then submitted an RFP, or request for proposals, for companies who were interested in running the site. CNA, a news service that derives a portion of its revenue from the Taiwanese government, won the bid.
The site is run by Loney, an editor at Academia Sinica and former reporter and editor for the culture and arts section of Japan's Asahi Evening News, two editors, a project manager, two Web designers, six systems engineers and four translators. It employs one full-time reporter and has featured articles by 15 paid freelance writers.
The writers tend to be experts in a particular field, like Taiwanese visual arts or Aboriginal cultures, and Loney said she's always looking for more contributors.
Two early highlights are articles about Hoklo-language poet Chen Chao-cheng (陳昭誠), a taxi driver who was a victim of the White Terror period, and Tsui Kuang-yu (崔廣宇), a video/performance artist who has shown his work at Tate Liverpool. Readers can listen to Chen read three of his poems in a soulful baritone and watch a video of Tsui rolling bowling balls at pigeons in London.
"It's very exciting. And everybody loves working for us," Loney said. "Just think that just a few years Taiwanese weren't even allowed to speak their own language. And now we can broadcast it over the Internet for everyone to hear the beauty of their language. It's great, isn't it?"
If a leisurely afternoon of high-end dining and watching the scenery roll by from the comfort of a plush armchair sounds like a good time to you, consider a trip on the Sea Breeze (海風號). This culinary, cultural and scenic experience is the perfect setting for a date, a celebratory outing with a small group of friends or a relaxing solo ride. The price tag is steep, especially if you consider the short distance the train actually covers over the 3.5-hour journey. But what you’re paying for on the Sea Breeze isn’t transportation; it’s the comfort, the service, the exclusivity, the
June 15 to June 21 According to legend, a giant from Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) named Si Mangangavang once built a large tatala canoe capable of carrying 16 people. He set sail southward to the Batanes in the Philippines, where he traded with the local Ivatan people. One of the goods they coveted was cowhide, which the Tao people of Orchid Island used to make armor. Through continued trade, the Tao and Ivatan forged close ties, and Si Mangangavang became good friends with a Batanes giant named Si Vakag. This story, collected in a 1998 book by ethnologist Yu Guang-hong (余光弘)
Taiwan’s renewable shortfall is a problem of execution, not resources. Japan’s long-cycle, joined-up energy planning is the model worth studying — but what Taiwan can borrow is the institutional machinery, not the politics. When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) used his visit to Taipei last month to warn that the country needs far more electricity, he was naming a constraint its own planners already know well: Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) expects demand from the semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) sector alone to exceed 5 gigawatts (GW) by 2030. The harder question is not whether to build more capacity but which
One of the wildest things about the reception of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) in the international media is the way her words are presented without being contextualized, let alone challenged. The Financial Times, for example, interviewing her during her visit to New York, said that she blamed the halt to exchanges between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for raising tensions. “There has been no dialogue, so you can see that the situation is almost on the brink of war,” the Financial Times quoted her as saying, without any hint that the PRC, not
RSS