Teaching Resources: Curator’s Tour and Lesson Plan
For undergraduates in museum studies and history. Building this site over the past two weeks meant running into the same family of problems again and again: evidence of uneven strength, records that contradict one another, oral accounts and physical objects that have to be weighed against each other, and the trade-off between telling a good story and saying honestly that something is unresolved. These are exactly the things a digital-humanities or curatorial-practice class finds hardest to teach in the abstract. This resource puts the site’s own concrete decisions on the table as cases you can argue with, rather than inventing teaching material from scratch.
Curator’s tour: six decisions worth arguing about
Every stop is a choice this site actually made, paired with a question you can take back to class. These are not rhetorical questions; they genuinely have no settled answer.
Should evidence strength be “translated” for the general reader?
This site tags nearly every factual claim with one of four levels (first-hand account / independent source / biography paraphrase / unverified) instead of writing a vague “it is recorded that”. Grading of this kind is routine inside professional archives, but exposing it directly to public visitors is not: most institutional sites present only the conclusion and keep the chain of evidence backstage.
When sources contradict each other, should the curator take sides?
Chen Songru’s own memoir gives 4 August as the date of the Sichuan Restaurant’s trial dinner; an article by his son Chen Tinglong gives 28 August — three weeks apart. This site sets both down as they stand rather than picking the “more credible” one for the main text.
“Sought” entries: making the gap in the collection an exhibit in its own right
The biography mentions this certificate, but the site has never obtained the object. The conventional practice is simple: if you do not have it, you do not list it. Here it is numbered and catalogued anyway, with the ownership field reading “unknown (sought)”, its evidence level capped at “biography”, and an address published for anyone who can help. The hole in the collection thus becomes an exhibit — visible, and fillable by anyone who knows something.
Oral retelling versus physical evidence: which outranks which?
One record has the banquet welcoming Li Zongren hosted by He Long and Luo Ruiqing; Chen Songru’s own memoir names Zhou Enlai as host. The first may descend from later oral retelling; the second is first-hand — but a first-hand account decades after the fact can also misremember or conflate years.
How faithful does digitisation have to be before it counts as “enough”?
The site gives the 37-page manuscript a deep-zoom viewer and an IIIF-conformant manifest, while stating plainly that there is no IIIF Image API tile service, because the site is statically hosted with no server-side image processing. The choice was an honest reduced version — neither skipping it, nor pretending to meet the full standard.
Should a biographical work keep reminding readers that it is not established fact?
Every page carries a fixed disclaimer at the very top stating that the content derives mainly from a biography written by others, that it tends to idealise its subject, and that it is not Chen Songru’s own writing. The strip runs through the whole site at very low visual weight and very high frequency.
Lesson plan (one session, about 85 minutes)
For the instructor to adapt freely. It assumes students have done the pre-class reading.
| Where it fits | A single topic session for a digital humanities, museum studies or historical method course; suited to upper-year undergraduates who have the basics of historical theory and are studying digital curation or archival practice. |
|---|---|
| Learning objectives | 1. Distinguish levels of evidence among sources, and say why. 2. Analyse the costs and benefits of setting contradictions side by side, rather than simply calling the choice right or wrong. 3. Tell a project’s capability limits from its ethical limits — the first set by technical conditions, the second by value judgements. |
| Pre-class reading (20 min) | Students read the whole “About this site” page, concentrating on the seven honest-limits cards and the note on evidence labelling, then complete Worksheet 1, questions 1–2. |
| In class, part one (20 min) | The instructor walks the class through two or three of the six tour stops (stops 2, 3 and 6 are suggested), spending three to five minutes on the live page at each, putting the question to the room. Do not press for consensus; record where students disagree. |
| In class, part two (30 min) | In groups, each assigned one of the sets of conflicting sources listed in Worksheet 2 (question 1 offers four, each with both sides traceable to a stated source). Each group: (a) reconstructs the chain of evidence behind each version; (b) judges whether leaving them unreconciled was right here; (c) says how the group itself would present it — 20 minutes of discussion, then one minute per group to report. |
| In class, part three (15 min) | A whole-class discussion of Worksheet 3, question 3 (the guestbook’s localStorage mechanism and what it does to an open call for material). This is a real case in which an implementation choice directly produces an ethical consequence — a good place to close on the point that technical choices are value choices. |
| Assignment (optional) | Students pick one exhibit on the site (the timeline, the manuscript exhibition or the Singapore exhibition) and write 500 words of curatorial assessment, naming one place where they would have chosen differently and why. Simply restating the discussion points given above does not count. |
| Further reading | The site’s changelog works as a secondary case in how a digital archive iterates over time and how it exposes its own mistakes — worth pointing out to students interested in project management and version governance. |
Student worksheets
Three standalone exercises, usable on their own or with the lesson plan above. Print them or export to PDF for writing in class.
Worksheet 1: Grading evidence
- Open the note on evidence labelling and define each of the four levels (first-hand account / independent source / biography paraphrase / unverified) in your own words. Do not copy the wording given. Hint: “independent source” turns on having no direct tie to Chen Songru’s family or line of disciples — not merely on coming from the press.
- Open Digital Archive → page: pick any three items from the certificates table and note the evidence label on each. Then ask: with the labels removed, could you infer the same level from the ownership and source columns alone? Do your two judgements agree?
- Find CE-003 (the Korean Chollima medal), labelled “unverified”. Set it against the note on evidence labelling — where “unverified” means records disagree, the source is single and unchecked, or the family has explicitly disproved it — and use the note field’s remark that two different years are given, to explain why this item belongs there rather than under “biography paraphrase” or “first-hand account”.
- Suppose you hold a source that is detailed and confident in tone, but you can find no second, independent source for it. Would you label it “biography paraphrase” or “unverified”? Where exactly does the line fall? Support your answer with a real example from this site.
Worksheet 2: Holding contradictions side by side
- Open the honest-limits statement, item 4. Choose any one of the four below; both sides of each are traceable to a stated source.(a)the trial-dinner date, 4 August or 28 August;(b)the number of cooks brought to Beijing in 1972–73 (twelve / some thirty / two waves totalling sixty-odd);(c)the year of the Korean Chollima medal, 1962 or 1986;(d)the host of the 1965 banquet for Li Zongren (Lineage → page, Luo Guorong entry: He Long and Luo Ruiqing, against the memoir’s Zhou Enlai). Set out each version in full, with its source.
- The site sets the versions side by side without reconciling them. Design two alternative treatments — taking only the better-evidenced version; demoting the other to a footnote; leaving the episode out — and state what each gains and what it costs.
- As the site’s cataloguer, how would you answer a reader who writes in to say: if you cannot even settle a basic fact, why should I trust this site? Draft a reply of 150 words or fewer.
- Turn it around: might setting out every disagreement also be a posture — building credibility by displaying rigour, rather than purely serving the reader? Are the two motives mutually exclusive?
Worksheet 3: Curatorial ethics and technical implementation
- Open Community → page: find the note on how the guestbook is implemented (localStorage). In your own words, explain why messages a visitor writes cannot be seen even by the site’s operator. Is that a privacy-protecting design, or a hole in the call for material?
- For unidentified people and calls for material the site ended up publishing a real address (info@chensongru.com) rather than routing visitors through the local guestbook. Compare the conditions each design depends on, and explain why the choice of technology is itself a value judgement rather than a purely engineering question.
- Suppose you are building a similar community-contributed archive on a small budget, with no back end available. How would you design a visitor-message feature that keeps the simplicity of having no server and still makes the open call mean something? Set out the main points of your approach; no code required.
- The acknowledgements on the About page state that this project has no affiliation with the expert committee for the study of Chen Songru’s culinary heritage. Read the third-party note on the Committee → page and consider: how far does an unofficial, personal memorial project have a duty to keep clarifying its relationship to official or semi-official bodies? What follows if it does not?
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