Remembrance Of Contemporary Events: On Setting Up The Sunflower Movement Archive

In the late evening of 18 March 2014, students and activists stormed into and occupied the main chamber of Taiwan's Legislature. The event set off the Sunflower Movement, signifying a turning point in Taiwan's recent history. Researchers at Academia Sinica arranged to acquire all the supporting artifacts and documentary materials in the chamber before the protest came to a peaceful end. In this article, we discuss the issues in archiving and making available to the public a large collection of artifacts created by thousands of participants during a contemporary event. We demonstrate systems designed to encourage people to identify objects of their own in the archive. We show how an accessible catalog to the archive can help people tell their stories, hence collectively may strengthen the public's recollections about the movement.