{"id":490,"date":"2016-10-03T14:56:45","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev-the-digital-silk-road.pantheonsite.io\/?p=490"},"modified":"2016-10-03T14:56:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:56:45","slug":"a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/team-tongue\/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words\/","title":{"rendered":"A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So far photographs and videos have been much richer in information and content than anything I have read, in regards to food and its preparation. For instance, I have found this travel blog site<\/a>\u00a0with a section dedicated to Kashgar entitled, “Pictorial Essay and Record of a Historic City Salted for Destruction.” The pictures are incredible and there are small stories written in between some of the photographs that go into the feel of Kashgar as a city that are fascinating. The pictures depict pottery and metal (copper?) pots and naan and bagels; I want to know so much more about the those men and women making and selling those products, where they picked up the trade and the history behind their practices. The pictures can’t tell me all of those details, but those photographs\u00a0seem to hold more information than most of my database searches. Why is that? Is what I am searching on these databases or in google searches not the right avenue of research? Am I not using the right keywords? I feel as though I have tried going less specific with searches and gotten nothing that pertains to subjects I need, and then getting absolutely no results from more specific searches. And then the middle ground to those searches only get my toes wet in terms of the information I hope to gain or the topics I hope to delve into.
\nI have tried searching in Mandarin and then google translating websites, but even then my results are few and lacking substance. My most substantial sources of information have been YouTube videos (that I linked in a previous post) in Mandarin.
\nNow that I have become slightly burnt out on the naan and bread-making front, I have turned to porcelain. Porcelain has been proved a better topic of research so far. I have found a fair amount through databases, but I have not read through all of the possible articles and journals so I cannot say so far whether or not this avenue of research will be successful or not. Pottery in general in Kashgar, however, has been a trickier topic of research than expected. Again… why?????? I see incredible forms of pottery in photographs or wooden utensils used for cooking (such as special rolling pins for rolling out the naan), but can not find those details that look so important in photographs and videos in written form or documentation. \u00a0These cooking tools and methods are important and should absolutely have an interesting and influential history and significance, which is why I am being so stubborn in my research. There should be way more information available than what I have found!
\nThe articles, blogs, and websites I have found on the making of naan or pottery \u00a0are all modern, and the vast majority of them are not made by Chinese citizens or citizens of Kashgar. The creators or writers are, instead, Westerners who write about parts of Kashgar that seem to be novel or special. This perspective that keeps coming up in my searches is not necessarily surprising, as modern documentation is significantly easier and more accessible, but it is also important to look critically at these sources, because they do not hold multitudes of valuable information, but rather fairly surface level information. I also am thinking critically about the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much in-depth or non-western sources of information in the searches I have done. Were cooking practices in Uyghur communities or in Kashgar not documented or uncovered? Am I, for the most part, only going to find research on what the West has found important? For instance, I have found significantly more on white porcelain than I have on the history of bakers of naan or potters. I assume this is because white porcelain is world renounced and recognized by the world as an important outcome of trade from China. The documentation and history of naan is probably not as important to the western world, but it is very important to me and my research.
\nI will continue to dig deeper and try new ways of researching in order to find information from more perspectives (than just western perspectives).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So far photographs and videos have been much richer in information and content than anything I have read, in regards to food and its preparation. For instance, I have found this travel blog site\u00a0with a section dedicated to Kashgar entitled, “Pictorial Essay and Record of a Historic City Salted for Destruction.” The pictures are incredible … Continue reading A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-team-tongue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}