Digital Content Development of Taiwanese Folklore Artifacts

Abstract

Folklore artifacts hold strong cultural meaning for a people. Taiwan Folklore Museum (TFM) is Taiwan’s first official folklore museum which aims at providing the people of Taiwan with a place where they can reflect about the past and experience how the pioneers lived. There are a great variety of artifacts, which were classified into ten categories according to their life styles and functions, collected in the museum and it attracts a great number of oversea tourists each year. The museum is also the most popular place for students from kindergartens and primary schools and for general citizens to learn what their tradition is and how their ancestors lived. In this paper, we report our current progress in digitization and content development of the artifacts. Totally 1412 collected artifacts have been digitized so far. The originality and function of each collected artifact was described in three different languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and English, in which detailed information of the artifacts were examined and studied by several Taiwanese folklore specialists. To facilitate inter-museum communication, metadata based on Dublin core and its extensions were provided as well. A website (http://www.folkpark.org.tw) dedicated to demonstrate the digital contents of the artifacts and to support digital surrogates for the folklore researchers was also constructed. It allows people from all over the world to surrogate the information about the collected artifacts so that studies regarding Taiwanese folklore artifacts can be done without territory constraint. Future works will focus on the construction of 3D models for the artifacts on demonstrating their global views. E-learning contents for Taiwanese folklore courses will also be authored for providing general publics and children an interactive way of learning on the Internet.