Reversing the Flow: Place, Protest, and Hydraulic Engineering in Western Sichuan

FAIN: FT-55377-07

John Myers Flower
University of Virginia (Charlotte, NC 28223-0001)

Reversing the Flow: Place, Protest, and Hydraulic Engineering in Western Sichuan is a digital essay using interactive maps and multimedia artifacts to explain the deep historical structures underlying the 2004 Hanyuan dam protest, the largest rural protest in China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. My aim in the project is to use GIS technology to explore the ways in which hydraulic engineering has transformed the local landscape historically, and to peel back the layers of compressed historical meanings underlying the protests in order to better understand the perspectives of the protestors. The project thus works toward the digital humanities goal of finding new ways to understand the experiences and thinking of others.