[Aktuelles] DH Conference Brief “Materials, Media, and Methods: Digital Issues in East Asian Studies”

February 3–5, 2023, four Ph.D. candidates at the Center of Asian and Transcultural Studies – Xiaojie Chang, Jia Xie, Fengyu Wang, and Shimin Zhang – organized a Digital Humanities conference, ‘Materials, Media, and Methods: Digital Issues in East Asian Studies,’ under the project ‘Japanese Handscrolls and Digital Exploration,‘ funded by the DFG Priority Program ‘The Digital Image.’ While emphasizing the field-specific perspectives that concern East Asian materials, languages, and practices, the conference contemplates the transformative and mediating role of digital technologies in the process of knowledge (re-)production. The program included three special lectures by senior scholars and six panels of burgeoning and advanced digital projects. An animation screening followed by discussions was organized with the Nanjing University of the Arts. The Zoom Webinar boasted 243 online attendees from diverse time zones with 63 concurrent viewers at the peak. Prof. Barbara Mittler, HCDH Director, opened the conference with a short speech on the decades-long DH journey of the East Asian Studies departments in Heidelberg.

Despite the diverse fields and subjects, from historical and literary analysis to museum practices, art restoration, and digitization, the six panels (16 presentations, 21 panelists) share common concerns regarding digital approaches and tools that address East Asian languages and materials. Brought to the discussion were multilingual thesauri (as metadata collection), digitization of 3D and reflective objects, and interfaces for Chinese and Tibetan scripts. The dichotomy of text and image was a prominent issue, as not only OCR, AI recognition of cursive scripts, and AI image generation were debated, but the reductive process of transcription and image reproduction was also problematized.

The advancing Web 3.0 technologies were at the center of two special lecturers. Prof. Donald Sturgeon (Durham) demonstrated the endeavors in his Chinese Text Project to create structured data in premodern literary and historical materials using the knowledge-based approach and Resource Description Framework (RDF). Prof. Ryō Akama (Art Research Centre, Ritsumeikan) introduced the ‘ARC Research Space‘ that supports generating one’s personal datasets by viewing, editing, and annotating digitized premodern prints, books, and artworks from cultural institutions worldwide as well as the diverse databases at ARC via the Image APIs of International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Prof. Michael Radich (Heidelberg)’s lecture on his computational philology project on the Chinese Buddhist canon concluded the conference and inspired the final roundtable discussion. He foregrounded the post-digital situation in which the distinction between digital and non-digital projects has become less fruitful, while a clear understanding of the role and limitations of digital tools (and human researchers) remains critical in all humanities inquiry.