Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War

FAIN: HD-50594-09

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
Alan Scott Christy (Project Director: October 2008 to April 2011)

Development and testing of a prototype multilingual website platform for the gathering and study of memories of the Pacific theater of World War II incorporating perspectives of survivors from the United States and Asia.

Funds requested for an innovative website that provides a living archive of Pacific War memories in multiple languages. Our prototype provides a social media and multi-lingual database structure enabling communication between researchers, war survivors, and the general public in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This site facilitates research on the circulation of war memories throughout the Pacific region and across linguistic boundaries. Online participants will transcribe, translate, tag, and add context to user-contributed archive posts. The architecture makes transparent the negotiations and contested categories of memory-in-translation. In this online environment, users can confront the cultural embeddedness of language, and researchers can trace the transformations of memory as it travels across cultural boundaries. As an open source tool, our online platform can be applied in various contexts to address the language barrier issue that is so central to the humanities.