Current Trends in Digital East Asian Studies

Speakers:
- CJ Chen (Nanjing University)
- Hilde De Weerdt (Leiden University)
- Lik Hang Tsui (City University of Hong Kong)
- Kiyonori Nagasaki (International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo)

Event description:
Research in Digital East Asian Studies has grown in scale and visibility in recent years, reflecting both the establishment of digital humanities initiatives in the region and increasing awareness of the limitations of digital tools developed in an anglophone context. Whether historic or contemporary, this research has to address a unique set of circumstances including the digitisation and OCR challenges presented by non-Latin scripts more broadly, different encoding standards, uneven availability of digital datasets/corpora, regional differences in how digital research is articulated, and variation in institutional embeddings for East Asian studies outside of the region. The field draws on a complex array of transdisciplinary, cross-regional and multilingual approaches which may be difficult to distil succinctly, but which offer an important counterpoint to anglophone digital research.

In this panel, four leading scholars in East Asian studies offered their perspectives on a range of questions, including the following:

What have been the main scholarly achievements of digital East Asian studies in recent years?
What are the key social, technical and/or epistemological challenges for the field right now?
How do the different regional interpretations of ‘digital humanities/digital studies’ in the region, and the different institutional embeddings of ‘East Asian studies’ outside the region facilitate or complicate collaborative research on this topic?
To what extent are East Asian languages and scripts served by existing digital infrastructures, international standards and supposedly ‘language-neutral’ digital methods, and to what extent is a regional/localised approach necessary?
How should digital methods in East Asian studies be taught? What examples of best practice exist currently, and how do they combine the study of language and culture?

This event is part of the Digital Modern Languages seminar series convened by Paul Spence (King’s College London) and Naomi Wells (Institute of Modern Languages Research). It was begun as part of the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative, as a collaboration between the Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community and Language Acts and Worldmaking projects.