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ACAHUCH Symposium 2021: Navigating Encounters and Exchanges


(online) Melbourne, Australia
Organisation: The University of Melbourne
Buildings for industry, agriculture and trade in Australia, the Pacific and South-East Asia share an important but forgotten history of encounter, exchange, and influence. Industrial heritage is also underrepresented in World Heritage lists, with the Asia Pacific region poorly represented and global connections between industrial sites insufficiently understood (Falser & Yang, 2001). This symposium addresses these research gaps by providing a forum for academics, archivists, and heritage practitioners to share their examinations of unprecedented buildings for trade and industrial-scale resource extraction across Asia-Pacific’s multiple colonial entities and their successor nation-states.
The two-day symposium will feature international and local keynote speakers as well as panel discussions which explore flows and connections of commodity, craft, labour and expertise between sites and communities across Asia Pacific from 1800s – 1950s and beyond.
Convened by Amanda Achmadi, Hannah Lewi, Soon-Tzu Speechley, Paul Walker and the Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne.
With a lecture about maps …
‘Unlocking’ maps, locating forms: Assembling the Digital Historic Maps of Southeast Asia platform by Jane Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College Singapore and Victoria Marshall, Visiting Senior Fellow in Architecture, NUS Singapore.
What can historical maps tell us about the architectures of trade, commerce and resource extraction in Southeast Asia? Early maps can offer a great deal in terms of understanding the trade routes that moved resources, people and goods across the emerging global imperium of the Age of Exploration.
This paper explores this question through the newly developed Digital Historical Maps of Singapore and Southeast Asia platform, which seeks to enhance public and scholarly access to, and understanding of, historic maps of Southeast Asia currently held in distributed collections worldwide. The platform draws on the Southeast Asia historical map collections of our partner libraries: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Leiden University Libraries; and the National Library of Singapore.
The paper discussed how we have enhanced discoverability of the maps and curated specific featured content that charts new pathways of sense-making about intercolonial trade, industry and labour mobility in pre-1900s Southeast Asia.
E-mail: theo.blankley@unimelb.edu.au
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