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?"
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
It sounded innocuous enough. On the morning of March 12, a group of Taichung political powerbrokers held a press conference in support of Deputy Legislative Speaker Johnny Chiang’s (江啟臣) bid to win the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) primary in the Taichung mayoral race. Big deal, right? It was a big deal, one with national impact and likely sent shivers down the spine of KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文). Who attended, who did not, the timing and the messaging were all very carefully calibrated for maximum impact — a masterclass in political messaging. In October last year, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
RSS