Wikipedia and Academic Libraries: A Global Project/Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
HONG KONG LITERARY LANDSCAPE: A MEDIAWIKI FOR LITERARY READING AND WRITING
Abstract
For almost three decades, literary walk has been used by various education and public institutions in Hong Kong as an effective way to promote reading and writing to secondary school students. Funded by the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government in 2013, the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre (HKLRC) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library (CUHK Library) jointly kicked off a two-year proposal entitled “Fun with Learning Chinese Language through Literary Walk” aimed at promoting literary reading and writing skills to junior secondary school students in Hong Kong. In this paper, the authors discuss a key deliverable of this project, the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki, jointly developed by the HKLRC and the CUHK Library, which provides literary walk materials on the wiki platform including video clips, critically selected literary works, literary maps, creative writings of the student participants, and so on. Apart from the project participants, the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is also a useful tool for other secondary school teachers, students, and a wider group of audience in the Hong Kong community.
Keywords
Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki, Literary Walk, Reading and writing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Digital humanities.
Introduction
Despite the fact that literary walk has been adopted as a way to promote literature around the world, there is, however, no shared definition of what a literary walk should be (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2020; Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, 2020; Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 2020). In the context of Hong Kong, a literary walk usually consists of a docent and a group of participants. The docent designs a route for the walk by identifying some major landscapes and events of a specific area mentioned in the literature. While they walk through the area, the docent introduces these landscapes and events to the participants in order to demonstrate the cultural and historical context reflected in the literature. On the face of it, a literary walk looks very much like a historical walk, but the major difference is the text used for the walk. A literary walk usually makes use of poems, prose, and fiction to devise the route while a historical walk relies very much on historical documents and archives.
In the early 1990s, Lu Weiluan, a renowned scholar and writer in Hong Kong, put forward the idea of learning Hong Kong literature through literary walk. She believes that it is very important for students to have on-site learning experiences in order to better understand and appreciate literary works. In the past three decades, literary walk has been used by various education and public institutions in Hong Kong as an effective way to promote reading and writing to secondary school students. Funded by the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research (SCOLAR) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (HK SAR Government), the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre (HKLRC) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library (CUHK Library) kicked off a two-year proposal entitled “Fun with Learning Chinese Language through Literary Walk Project (Fun Project).” Apart from introducing the Fun Project, the authors also discuss a key deliverable of this project, namely Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki. (CUHK Hong Kong Literature Research Center and CUHK Library, n.d.) In this paper, the advantages of using MediaWiki as an effective open platform for creating content collaboratively are discussed, and the challenges of using an online platform to promote literary reading and writing are addressed.
Fun with Learning Chinese Language through Literary Walk: A Brief Outline
In January 2013, the SCOLAR of the HK SAR Government invited applications for the “Chinese Language Promotion 2013–2014” to promote creative and meaningful activity to improve Chinese writing skills of primary and secondary students. The HKLRC and CUHK Library jointly submitted a two-year proposal entitled “Fun with Learning Chinese Language through Literary Walk Project,” which aims at promoting literary reading and writing skills to junior secondary school (equivalent to junior high school in North America) students in Hong Kong. e proposal was submitted to SCOLAR in March 2013 and was subsequently accepted in July 2013. The work team of the Fun Project consisted of four members: principal investigator, coinvestigator, project coordinator, and project assistant. The principal investigator and coinvestigator oversaw the direction, execution, and evaluation of the project while the project coordinator and project assistant were responsible for the project delivery including liaising with external parties, conducting publicity, coordinating literary walks, editing student writings, and setting up the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki.
The Fun Project was designed in such a way that a literary walk was conducted in each district of Hong Kong. Administratively, Hong Kong is divided into eighteen districts in three major geographic areas: Central and Western, Eastern, Southern, and Wan Chai districts in Hong Kong Island; Kowloon City, Kwun Tong, Sham Shui Po, Wong Tai Sin, and Yau Tsim Mong districts in Kowloon and New Kowloon; and Islands, Kwai Tsing, North, Sai Kung, Sha Tin, Tai Po, Tsuen Wan, Tuen Mun, and Yuen Long districts in New Territories. The Fun Project organized altogether eighteen literary walks in two years. To kick-off the project, an official invitation letter was sent to all principals and Chinese subject heads of the secondary school in Hong Kong to recruit student participants. In the past decade, the organizers have been actively promoting Hong Kong literature and have built up close connection with literary figures in Hong Kong. The project team identified emerging professional writers who published frequently on literary journals and websites to join the Fun Project. These emerging writers were not only young in age but also young in heart. For a designated district, a “young writer” was invited to serve as the docent.
After enrolling in the literary walk of a specific district, the student participants received a pack of reading materials critically selected by the docent. Apart from literary quality, these reading materials also cover the cultural and historical aspects of the respective district. The student participants were required to study the articles before attending the literary walk. On the event day, the docent delivered a workshop to the student participants by introducing the selected articles in more details so that they could grasp the main features of the articles. This arrangement facilitated a close interaction with the docent before the start of the literary walk. After the event, the student participants were required to submit a piece of creative writing in the form of poem, prose, or fiction on their experience and reflection of the literary walk.
Being a key deliverable of the Fun Project, the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki serves as a repository of the output generated from the literary walks in eighteen districts, including critically selected articles, literary maps, video clips, creative writings of the student participants, and so on. The docents shared their views with the student participants about their creative writings using the discussion platform of the MediaWiki. In addition to the project participants, the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is also a useful open source to other secondary school teachers and students. Teachers can benefit from the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki by making use of the online resources available on the wiki platform to design their own literary walks for their students. The Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is also beneficial to students because it provides an interesting and interactive way of learning Chinese language online.
Chinese Language Curriculum for Secondary School: Literary Walk and Chinese Language Learning
In 2001, as part of the education reform in Hong Kong, the Education Bureau of the HK SAR Government released a policy document on Chinese language learning titled Chinese Language Curriculum Guide (Junior Secondary and Senior Secondary). As stated in this policy document, Chinese language learning comprises nine learning areas, namely reading, writing, listening, speaking, literature, Chinese culture, morality and affection, thinking, and independent language learning. Among these nine learning areas, reading, writing, listening, and speaking are considered as the fundamental learning areas that can also facilitate learning in the other five areas (Education Bureau, 2001). In other words, it is vitally important for students to build up their knowledge and hone their skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking in order to succeed in Chinese language learning. Once they are competent in these four fundamental areas, their learning in the other five areas can be enhanced.
Figure 1 Nine learning areas of Chinese language. (Education Bureau, 2001).
According to the Chinese Language Curriculum Guide, the objectives of the four fundamental areas of Chinese language learning are the following:
| Reading: | To enhance reading skills such as comprehension, analysis, experience and appreciation, etc.; to master reading strategies; and to enjoy reading and do it diligently and seriously; increase the quantity and range of reading. |
| Writing: | To enhance writing skills such as conception, expression and creative writing, etc.; to master writing strategies; and to enjoy writing and do it diligently and seriously. |
| Listening: | To enhance listening skills such as comprehension and evaluation; to master listening strategies; and to enjoy listening and do it seriously; expand the range of listening. |
| Speaking: | To enhance speaking skills such as conception, expression and response; to master speaking strategies; and to enjoy expressing and do it bravely, giving graceful response. (Education Bureau, 2001) |
Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are essential learning skills in not only Chinese language but also other languages as well. It is very important for junior secondary school students to master these skills in their early stage of language learning. To this end, the Fun Project was aimed at enhancing the skills in these four areas of Chinese language learning of the student participants. In the workshop delivered by the docent, the participants could grasp a better understanding of the content and style of the literary works. rough face-to-face interaction with the docent during the event, the student participants had the opportunity to improve their listening and speaking skills. rough these interactive learning activities, the participants can enhance their reading, writing, listening, and speaking capabilities.
There is no doubt that literature is an excellent source for language learning. The Chinese Language Curriculum Guide also indicates that students can appreciate the beauty of language and acquire the sense of truth through literature learning. This is is exactly the reason why literature is considered as one of the nine learning areas of Chinese language. In the Chinese Language Curriculum Guide, the learning objectives of Literature are the following:
- To experience the pleasure of literature reading and appreciate the beauty of it;
- To develop aesthetic insight, attitudes and skills;
- To enhance language learning interest and proficiency through the delightful reading experience;
- To share the unique but common thinking and affections in works to strengthen interpersonal communication and mutual understanding, and inspire life experience. (Education Bureau, 2001)
The Fun Project was designed to spark interest in language learning through literature among the student participants by reading and appreciating literary works in a relaxing and enjoyable setting.
Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki
Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. After developing its content by the Wiki community in the past two decades, Wikipedia is now the largest online encyclopedia in the world. Given the popularity of Wikipedia, a series of enhanced products among the wide variety of functions provided by Wikipedia, the content management, collaborative workspace, reference source, training guide, and so on, of Wikipedia are particularly relevant to library applications.
In the Fun Project, MediaWiki was adopted as the platform for the project deliverables for two reasons. First, MediaWiki supports very useful features such as easy navigation, editing, formatting, referencing, look and feel change, file uploading, user management, and so on. MediaWiki not only provides openly accessible data storage and retrieval service but also handles structured data including text, image, and multimedia files of the source data. It also supports Chinese character that is critically important for the Fun Project. Second, MediaWiki is a collaboration and documentation platform that helps to collect and organize knowledge and make it available to people (Liginlal et al., 2010). It provides the collaborative editing function to facilitate the interaction between the docents and student participants of the Fun Project. Even though MediaWiki adopts open-source platform, it provides a secure environment for the Fun Project. With these resources available on MediaWiki, the project team could explore the best ways to support the project participants and to engage individuals from the wider communities (Poulter & Sheppard, 2020).
Besides selecting the best platform for this project, we also had to decide whether we should use a vendor-hosted solution versus a local-hosted solution. In terms of technical knowledge of the platform administrator, a vendor-hosted solution is less demanding and thus the platform can be setup in a comparative short period of time. Also, the platform provider takes care of the platform upgrade and data backup, which can be costly for a project with a limited budget. However, localhosted solution guarantees the long-term preservation of the data and service by making use of the technical and human resources of the hosting institution. It also facilitates the customization of the interface and searching function. The downside of a local-hosted solution is that it requires additional resources for supporting the technical requirement. Given that the Fun Project was a two-year project and there was no budget provision for technical support, it was a sensible decision to adopt the vendor-hosted solution in order to roll out the platform as soon as possible in view of its tight schedule. Also, MediaWiki development is backed by Wikimedia Foundation with strong financial support. It is very unlikely in the foreseeable future that there will be any development and maintenance problem with the codebase of Mediawiki.
Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki: Key Features
The aim of Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is to preserve and make accessible materials on literary walk in all districts in Hong Kong. It is anticipated that, in the long term, Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki will be a repository of the archival materials on literary walk. e Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is accessible by not only the project participants but also the wider public. is feature supports the mission of knowledge sharing with a larger group of audience of this project. The structure of the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki was designed according to eighteen administrative
Figure 2 The home page of Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki. (CUHK Hong Kong Literature Research Center and CUHK Library, n.d.) districts in Hong Kong, which contains materials related to the literary walks in each district. On the main page of Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki (http://hkliteraryscenes.wikidot.com/), there is a word map of these eighteen districts. By clicking the name of the district on the word map, it will bring you to the district subpage.
Each district subpage provides a list of critically selected articles related to its district. If the copyright of an article has been cleared, it also provides hyperlink to its full text. Apart from literary articles, the district subpage also contains the project outputs, namely literary maps, literary routes, project handouts, video clips, and the creative writings of the student participants. The literary route highlights the literary landscape and relevant articles along its route. School teachers can make use of these materials and handouts for their students to hone their skills in reading and writing. They can also utilize project materials to devise their own literary walk to enrich the learning environment outside of the classroom.
Figure 3 Literary map of Central and Western District. (CUHK Hong Kong Literature Research Center and CUHK Library, n.d.)
Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki: A Collaborative Learning Platform
As a web 2.0 application, Wikis provide online collaborative function. The Wiki user is not only an information receiver but an information creator as well. Wiki applications, like Wikipedia, adopted a very simple markup based on UseModWiki because of its simplicity and security. As an open-source program, UseModWiki is a user-friendly computer language that can be learnt and used very easily. The Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki adopted the MediaWiki application to build up a literary reading and writing platform. By making use of the discussion platform, both the docents and the student participants are able to exchange their views and comments about reading and writing. This kind of interaction can facilitate a collaborative learning environment. After submitting their creative writings about the literary walks of their districts, the project coordinator created a separate subpage for each piece of writing submitted by the student participants. The project coordinator then invited the docents to comment on the creative writings in the discussion box after uploading these works. All student participants could respond to the comments made by the docent as well. They could add not only text but also photos and hyperlinks in the discussion box. is interactive process was an essential part of collaborative learning activities in the Fun Project.
Conclusion
The Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki is the first of its kind in preserving and providing access to literary walk materials in Hong Kong. Looking ahead, there are three major challenges in terms of sustainable growth and development of this Wiki project. First, there should be a sustainable funding support from public agencies. Given the success of the Fun Project, the organizers successfully solicited the funding support from the SCOLAR for three similar projects on literary walks for junior secondary students, namely Read/Write My City Project (2015–2017), Narrating Him/Her in My City (2017–2019), and Fun Writing Literary Footprints Project (2019–2021). The deliverables of these projects have also been made available on the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki. But what will happen after 2021 if there is no sustainable funding model for this Wiki project? Second, there is always a limit that we can successfully clear the copyright issue of the selected literary works that are used for literary walks. There is no doubt that the more full-text artifacts that can be made available on the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki the better. Third, usually no more than twenty-five student participants were registered in a literary walk. How can the number of student participants be increased without comprising the quality of Chinese language learning? We consider these three major challenges vital to the success of the Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki as a repository of the materials on literary walks in Hong Kong. In the long term, it is anticipated that Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki can be used as a digital humanities resource to map the literary landscapes and activities in Hong Kong using spatial analysis and visualization technologies such as Internetbased GIS. e author believes that Hong Kong Literary Landscape MediaWiki will help to uncover a range of ndings from historical, cultural, and societal perspectives that have not been addressed before.
References
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