Living Heritage
A forthcoming project about the social life of Hong Kong’s sacred artefacts, to be developed by HKU students as part of the owner’s Common Core Summer Course at HKU.
The social life of artefacts
A temple bell, a soul tablet, a plaque carried across the harbor district twice: the databases in this prototype count venues, and none of them sees the things inside. This section sets out the record format for a course. Each student documents one object with a social life, in the sense Kopytoff gave the phrase, as a record that names the object, places it on a floor of a building, states who made or gave it, who keeps it, when and how it is used, and other relevant elements concerning its biography.
This site will tell the stories of these living artifacts and function as a curated virtual tour, informing visits to the places and preserving and promoting Hong Kong's living heritage.
Objects are grouped by walking distance, the nearest neighbours joined first, until no two groups are closer than the chosen radius; each group of at least the chosen size is ordered by the nearest-neighbour rule from its westernmost object and becomes a trail. With three seed records the generator produces one short trail on Tai Ping Shan Street; with a cohort's thirty it produces the map of the course. The export uses the same record format as the five walking routes.