About

About the Daybreak Project

The Daybreak Project is an English-language encyclopedia and oral history archive organizing the personal accounts and testimonies of participants in the 2014 Sunflower Movement. The project is in part an attempt to understand the confluence of social forces which led to the explosion of the Sunflower Movement, in part an attempt to track the complex subjective motivations which undergirded participation in the movement, and lastly an attempt to record recent history before it becomes lost.

The Sunflower Movement has been a pivotal event thus far in the history of Taiwan in the 21st century and it deserves to be recorded in history in as detailed a manner as possible. Likewise, the subjectivities underlying participants of the Sunflower Movement prove a valuable record of the unfolding and continued development of Taiwanese identity in the 21st century. The Daybreak Project in its current state is over 400,000 words, which would be over 1,000 pages if printed, and contains over 50 full-length interviews with participants of the Sunflower Movement.

Indeed, the benefit of an online archive is that it has no restriction on length, and that it can allow for organization of data on the Sunflower Movement in a manner which would otherwise be impossible in printed form.

Who Runs the Daybreak Project?

The Daybreak Project is compiled by Brian Hioe, a Taiwanese-American who was studying in Taiwan at the time of the Sunflower Movement and participated in many of the significant events of the movement. He was subsequently one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine, a bilingual publication on youth culture, politics, and social activism in Taiwan. All writing, translation, graphic design, and web design on the project was done by him. The Daybreak Project is hosted on the New Bloom Magazine domain.

Submissions

Taking advantage of the versatility offered by an online archive, the Daybreak Project is designed to be an open source project which invites outside contributions and so can continue beyond the scope of the initial project. Namely, if other individuals pursuing oral history or historical documentation projects related to the Sunflower Movement would like to host their content on the Daybreak Project, we would welcome that greatly, and we would welcome future volunteers to carry forward the project and expand its scope. If you would be interested in this, please get in touch.

Contact

Have any questions? Want to get in touch? Curious about knowing more about the project? Catch any typos or anything which needs to be corrected? Would like to submit a contribution or otherwise get involved?

Feel free to e-mail: [email protected]