If you are an instructor you can …

• Assign one or more modules as course readings, along with their associated primary source translations. Encourage students to discuss the many roles that spatial identities, experiences, and forms have played in the history of early modern and modern East Asia.
• Use Bodies and Structures as the basis for student research projects. Students can develop their own modules by combining two of the site’s primary sources in a novel way and making an argument for how they would locate their module within the site’s Tag and Geotagged Maps. For more on this, see “Using Bodies and Structures for Student Research Projects.”
• Use Bodies and Structures's historical and conceptual maps to show students how historians create knowledge. Start with one primary source, and use the module to discuss how the author reads the document by putting it into conversation with other texts. Then, have the students discuss where they would locate the module in the Tag Map, consider how and why the author locates it where they do, and what new questions this placement might lead them to ask.

If you are a student you can…

• Read individual modules to learn about significant people, events, and ideas in the spatial history of early and modern East Asia;
• Identify topics and sources for research projects or presentations;
• Use the Tag Map to capture thematic connections between modules;
• Explore how historians tell larger stories from primary sources, including the kinds of methods we use for telling stories that cross traditional national and regional divides;
• Learn how you too could use Scalar to write media-rich, non-linear, and collaborative histories.

If you are a researcher, you can…

• Revisit major themes in the history of early modern and modern East Asia from a perspective that puts space and place at the core of the analysis; or, if you work in a different area context, enrich your own spatial historical interpretations by exploring how historians of modern Japan approach the history of space and place.
• Cite a module as a secondary source in your own research. Each module is peer reviewed.
• Discover thematic, historical, and geographic connections between modules that spark new research questions.
• Use the Tag Map and Complete Grid Visualization to consider how “provincializing” cartographic representation creates new possibilities for scholarly conversations about spatial history in Japan and elsewhere.
• Participate in Bodies and Structures, either by commenting on the existing modules using the hypothes.is option, submitting a Lens, or by proposing your own module. (Warning, expect to be asked to join the curatorial collaborative!)
• Explore Scalar as a platform for presenting media-rich scholarship in non-linear formats.