Bleeding Fiction

Back at the beginning of November, I posted briefly on the Theban Mapping Project, a web-based deconstruction of an entire archaeological excavation. I asked, at the time, why no one did something similar for a site of more immediate interest to me. Well ask and, no matter how delayed, you shall receive.

Today we have Yin Yu Tang, a traditional Chinese home. There are more than eighty discrete pages of information on the site and they cover thirty five generations of a single family over an eight hundred year span of history. The site details not just the ins and outs, the physical space, of the house the family called home for so many years, but also the methods by which the house was constructed and the history of the family and their lives and possessions. This site gets into the nitty-gritty. I would go so far as to call it comprehensive. And it's just beautiful, too.

Best of all is that this site does not recount something past; it recounts a very living and accessable piece of history. With the family's blessing, archaeologists tore the building down, beam by beam, and transported it to Salem, Massachusetts, where they reconstructed it as an exhibit in the Peabody Essex Museum. You or I, any one of us, can go to Salem right now and walk through the actual physical space of this house. That's what we call "experiential learning." Maybe a stop's in order on my up-coming trip to Boston...