On September 23, the mid-term meeting of the 2016 National Social Science Fund Project “Digital Protection and Inheritance of Historical Villages: Theory, Method and Application (16ZDA158)” was held in Room 209 of SIRM. Prof. Huiling Feng, the chief expert of the project, hosted the meeting. The attendees includes facilitors of sub-projects, i.e., Yang Luo, Jihong Liang and Linqing Ma; the core researchers, i.e.,  Yongjun Xu, Li Niu, Xiaoshuang Jia, Zhenyuan Zhu, Lichao Liu, Shuo Zhang, Kai Zhang, and research assistants. The main agenda of the mid-term meeting of this project was: (1) the research progress report; (2) the internal review of the findings of No.5 sub-project “Pilot Experiment: Digital Protection and Inheritance of Gaoqian Ancient Village”.

Prof. Feng introduced the research progress and mid-term findings. Firstly, she praised on the hard work and contributions of the research members. Secondly, she reviewed the progress of each sub-topic, and clarified the future work. Then, she talked about the main problems and challenges in the research, and proposed several improvement measures. Finally, Prof. Feng emphasized the key time nodes of the project and encouraged researchers to work together to fulfill the research goals.

Associate Professor Liang, the facilitor of the No. 5sub-project, introduced the progress and research findings of Gaoqian case. First of all, she explained the theoretical basis of the digital protection and inheritance of historical and cultural villages from the perspectives of cultural heritage protection trends and concepts, social memory theory, etc., and proposed that the digital protection and inheritance of ancient villages should take into account the sense of history and consensus. Secondly, she reported on the progress of the resource library and Gaoqian website construction, saying that the current historical and cultural villages and towns digital resource library metadata and platform construction is basically completed, and the data is gradually entered. At the same time, the Gaoqian website content and art design have been basically completed, and the website implementation and webpage content have been gradually edited. Finally, the participants made a discussion on the Gaoqian website and offered suggestions.

The meeting served as a conjunction between the preceding and the following, which not only summarizes the research results and experiences of existing projects, but also clarified the direction of future work.