Materials, Media, and Methods: Digital Issues in East Asian Studies

This conference of Digital Humanities focuses on the problems, challenges, and breakthroughs with digital technologies in East Asian Studies research. While emphasizing the field-specific perspectives that deal with East Asian materials, languages, and practices, it also aims to contemplate on the transformative and mediating role of digital technologies in the process of knowledge (re-)production. The latter concerns not only the digitization process that reproduces analogue materials into digital forms, but also the indication of digitalization that brings changes to the infrastructures and modi operandi at research and art institutions.  

Digital Humanities embodies in research and practices a range of topics, from the digitization of premodern materials to the “born-digital” art productions, from computer recognition and analysis of texts and images to participatory research in digital communities, and from the creation of digital datasets to the construction of national cultural platforms. DH has developed into an “expanded field” structured by the relations and tensions among the diverse concepts and disciplines of its scholarship.1 In a post-digital era where a demarcation between the “analogue” and “digital” becomes less meaningful in the inevitable hybridization of the two, the far-reaching implications of the so-called computational turn for East Asian Studies in their research methods, institutional structures, and even disciplinary reconfigurations, are worth critical considerations. This conference invites scholars of East Asian Studies to reflect on the re-conceptualization of Materials, Media, and Methods at the intersection of the disciplinary specificities of areas studies and the medium specificity of the digital.