Steel & Oil INDUSTRIAL MEMORY ARCHIVE

About & methodology

This is a shared evidence base, not a finished book. It assembles the documentary and material record of two industrial communities, an integrated steel complex in Anshan, Liaoning, and the upstream oil-and-gas cluster of Houston, Texas, in a form other people can cite and add to. Researchers reference individual entries as primary-source evidence; scholars, archivists, and family historians submit new entries under one sourcing standard. The collection reads both cities against one question: what civic and economic infrastructure has to be in place for an industrial transition to be absorbed by a community rather than collapse it.

Infrastructure, not a finished collection

The model here is research infrastructure: a structured, openly licensed, citable dataset that other people build their own work on, in the way ImageNet became something an entire field of researchers used and cited rather than a single lab's private result. The value is not the current entries by themselves. It is the schema, the sourcing standard, the stable identifiers, and the open contribution pathway that let the collection grow into a reference other scholars draw on. The paper that seeded this archive is one early use of it, not its ceiling.

So the archive is measured the way a shared dataset is measured: by entries contributed and by contributors, and by how often it is cited in published research. It is not measured by page views, file downloads, or classroom adoption. Those are real but secondary. A growing, well-sourced, cited record is the goal.

Scope

The catalog currently holds the first real field collection: de-identified oral-history responses and photographed artifacts gathered in Anshan in July 2026. Every record carries a full catalog entry, a stated provenance, and, for artifacts, a redacted photograph. The Houston side of the comparison, and second corroborating sources for each Anshan entry, are not yet collected; the contribution pathway and the field instruments are how the collection grows without lowering the sourcing bar.

Theoretical frame

The organizing idea is carbon technocracy, the form of technical governance that fossil-fuel-based industrial complexes generate, developed by Victor Seow at the scale of coal and electric power in twentieth-century East Asia and at the level of whole works by Koji Hirata for Anshan itself. This archive extends the frame two ways: to ironmaking and steelmaking on the Anshan side, and to a market-mediated rather than party-state instance of the same logic on the Houston side. Both books are cited throughout and resolve on the Sources & standards page.

How an entry is built

Each record is structured on a Dublin Core spine (Identifier, Title, Type, Creator, Date, Subject, Coverage, Language, Rights), extended with the fields a humanities collection needs: current status, provenance, evidence media, and cross-references. The Dublin Core card appears on every item page so the metadata model is visible, not buried. Anyone proposing a new entry fills the same fields against the same two-source rule; the Contribute page is the submission guide, and the How to cite page documents the stable-identifier scheme that makes each entry referenceable. The full record set is openly licensed and downloadable as archive.csv and archive.json.

What was built, and what only the student can do

The archive is being built in the open, so the division of labor between what has been collected and what remains is stated plainly rather than hidden.

Built now

  • Discovery and structuring of the public and secondary record: published scholarship, public corporate filings, archival finding aids, museum and university collections.
  • The Dublin-Core-aligned metadata schema, tuned to this collection, and a populated record for every entry.
  • The catalog, search and filter, the inline locator map, the per-item pages, and the openly licensed CSV and JSON.
  • The contribution pathway and submission template, the stable-identifier scheme, and the citation formats that let outside scholars cite and extend the collection.
  • Every citation verified to resolve, and the two-source rule enforced on every record.

Collected, and still to do

  • The Anshan oral-history responses and artifact photographs are now collected in the field (July 2026), de-identified, and in the catalog.
  • The Houston-side oral histories are not yet collected.
  • Second corroborating sources for each field entry (the two-source rule aims higher than a single questionnaire or photograph).
  • The student's own interpretation and analytical through-line.

The Anshan field records are labeled field-collected and de-identified; no illustrative placeholder records remain in the catalog. No interview words are invented or attributed to a real person, and every quotation is a verbatim, de-identified transcription of a real response.

Use, advisor, provenance

Use

Citable, peer-built community archives are a documented genre that researchers draw on. The Densho archive of Japanese American history holds tens of thousands of records that historians cite; the Houston Asian American Archive at Rice University runs an ongoing, contributor-fed oral-history program of the same shape this project would join. Those are the comparables this archive is scaled and sourced against, a reference others can cite and extend, not an inflated claim of its own holdings.

Advisor (targets, not yet secured)

The natural advisor for the Anshan side is Victor Seow (History of Science, Harvard), whose work on Manchurian industry is the project's frame. Other plausible targets: Naomi Oreskes (Harvard), Madeline Y. Hsu (Asian American history), Mark C. Elliott (Qing and Manchu history), and an affiliate of Rice University's Chao Center / Houston Asian American Archive for the Houston side. Each is named here as a target the student plans to approach, not yet secured. None has advised, reviewed, or endorsed this project.

Provenance

The collection's public-record half is sourced from named institutions: the SEC EDGAR system, the Greater Houston Partnership, the Society of Petroleum Engineers Gulf Coast Section, the Houston Asian American Archive, and the published university-press scholarship cited on every page. The fieldwork half is the student's, clearly labeled and pending. Every citation in the archive has been opened and confirmed to resolve.

Emulation

The archive's structure and restraint are modeled on three named exemplars: the Densho Digital Repository for the ethics and metadata of a community oral-history archive (consent terms, controlled subjects, sober item records); the Metropolitan Museum of Art online collection for catalog density and a quiet object-record layout; and a university special-collections finding aid for accession-style identifiers, provenance statements, and serif typography. The full emulation note ships with the source files.

Known gaps. The Anshan side currently has no document entry younger than 1998 and no living-memory record past the second generation; the Houston side is thinner before 1980. Both are deliberate edges of the sample, not the finished collection.