A treasure of Taiwan Studies resources: ‘TransTaiwan: A Research Gateway to TaiwanStudies’ (TARGTS)

‘TransTaiwan: A Research Gateway to Taiwan Studies’ (TARGTS), stands as a testament to the kind of collaborative excellence typical of the field of Taiwan Studies. Supported by funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation spanning from July 2021 to June 2023, TARGTS represents a high point for cooperation among Taiwan studies entities. With EATS as the leading association, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies, the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) and the Association of Taiwan Literature came together for this new initiative. Launching its online platform at targts.net, TARGTS now provides more than 700 annotated bibliographies of Taiwan studies journal articles. Furthermore, it serves as a hub for key information about Taiwan studies associations such as EATS, NATSA, and Japanese Association of Taiwan Studies, as well as leading centres and programmes, in North America, Europe, Australia and Taiwan.

Building upon these initial achievements, EATS remains committed to securing further funding to advance its mission. In particular, our focus will be on instantiating two major categories of resources indispensable for research on Taiwan: archival materials, including tangible and digitised collections, and database portals. 

Taiwan offers so much to challenge the conventional divides between the East and the West, the North and the South, the core and the periphery, the colonisers and the colonised and the continental powers and the island civilisations. Whilst knowledge production is en route to be overwhelmed by the rapid 'mutation' of AI technologies and their known biases that will skew knowledge production, it is our responsibility to ensure that access to knowledge about Taiwan, and the resources indispensable for continuing to produce knowledge about Taiwan, is widely available for English-speaking academia, when English continues to dominate knowledge production worldwide. 

Thus, we welcome anyone who wishes to contribute to writing a research guide about any given archival collections or digital database about Taiwan to expand a list of research guides that are already collected by us. If you are interested in joining this critical task to ensure Taiwan being internationally visible, please contact us at info@eats-tawian.eu.