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Digital Humanities (DH) is an emerging research paradigm that brings computational methods to the humanities, arts, and social sciences, driven by the abundance of digitized and born-digital research materials. In Europe, DH has drawn significant attention from scholars, institutions, and research-funding agencies over the past decade, leading to numerous national and pan-European projects creating digital resources and infrastructures for DH scholarship. The significance of digital humanities is underscored by a variety of annual conferences such as DH Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), DHD (Digital Humanities in German-speaking areas), and the European Association for Digital Humanities (pan-European). The International DH Conference, held every two to three years in Europe, further demonstrates a strong European interest in DH.

However, European East Asianists have yet to find a dedicated space for effectively exchanging and discussing knowledge on digitally processing and analyzing research materials in East Asian languages. While scholars within each sub-discipline may be very familiar with each other’s work, Europe is still lacking a research community that addresses digital scholarship issues across all humanities disciplines concerned with East Asian regions and languages.

This conference aims to survey the current state of digital scholarship in East Asian Studies within Europe, to build a European community for East Asian scholars interested in digital scholarship, and to offer a platform for European scholars to obtain knowledge about key methods and resources created in cutting-edge digital projects in East Asian Studies worldwide.

The conference receives additional funding from the DFG (German Research Foundation).

Program: Workshops (July 8-10, 2024)

July 8    July 9     July 10

Due to the highly practical nature of Digital Scholarship, we have organized 14 workshops over the course of 3 days. Each of the 3-hour workshops will be led by experts introducing key digital methods or for projects to showcase their results. See the complete program and abstracts here. 

July 8:

Morning Session    9:00-12:30

Workshop 1. COMARKUS: Exporting data in context
Sander Molenaar (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)

Workshop 2. Sinographic Historical Documents Automatic Transcription
Colin Brisson (Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris)

Afternoon Session    14:00-17:30

Workshop 3. Creating a Data Model and Annotating Images in IMMARKUS
Sunkyu Lee (KU Leuven)

Workshop 4. Leveraging Large-Scale Historical Databases with HistText
Christian Henriot (Aix-Marseille University) & Cécile Armand (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon)

July 9:

Morning Session    9:00-12:30

Workshop 5. Digital Editions of East Asian Sources
Duncan Paterson (Berlin State Library)

Workshop 6: Quantitative Analysis on Licensed Materials

6a: Leveraging CrossAsia N-gram Service for DH Research
Hou Ieong Brent HO (Berlin State Library)

6b: Treating a Genre as a Knowledge System with LoGaRT
Shih-Pei Chen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Afternoon Session    14:00-17:30

Workshop 7. Algorithmic Identification and Elucidation of Intertextual Networks in Digital East Asian Corpora
Jeffrey Tharsen (University of Chicago)

Workshop 8. Building a Database for Text-Aligned Reading with DocuSky
Hsieh-Chang Tu (National Taiwan University)

July 10:

Morning Session    9:00-12:30

Workshop 9. A practical introduction to topic modelling
Christian Göbel (University of Vienna)

Workshop 10. Social Network Analysis with Gephi: Theory and Practice
Song Chen (Bucknell University)

Workshop 11. Utilising Prosopographic Databases for Sequence and Spatial Analysis
Thorben Pelzer (Leipzig University)

Afternoon Session    14:00-17:30

Workshop 12. Integrating ChatGPT into Humanities Research 
Calvin Yeh (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) & Xiang Jing (University of Chinese Social Sciences)

Workshop 13. China Biographical Database Workshop: Advancing Chinese Studies through Database Development and Prosopography Research 
Hongsu Wang & Peter Bol (Harvard University)

Workshop 14. Text and data mining with the Chinese Text Project 
Donald Sturgeon (Durham University)

Program: Conference (July 11-12, 2024)

Click to open the Conference Program and Floor Plan. 

Day 1, July 11 
Session 1    8:30-10:30
Panel 111. Overviews of European D-SEA     (Otto Braun Saal)
1. Taming the Digital Dragon: Textbases, Datafication, and the Study of Modern China
Christian Henriot (Professor, Aix-Marseille University)
2. Leveraging Large Language Models and Visual Transformers for Enhanced Analysis of Public Protests in China through Social Media
Christian Göbel (University of Vienna)
3. Re-reading Japan: Recent trends in digital Japanese studies in Europe
Alíz Horváth (Eötvös Loránd University)
4. Stabi collections as data – project, tools, technologies to better support digital research
Clemens Neudecker (IDM 4 Director, Project Human.Machine.Culture - MMK, Berlin State Library)
5. Towards multilingually enhanced research infrastructures for digital scholarship in East Asian studies - introducing a multilingual DH persona initiative
Cosima Wagner (Liaison librarian for East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin)
Alíz Horváth (Eötvös Loránd University)

Session 2    11:00-12:30
Panel 121. Overviews of global D-SEA    (Otto Braun Saal)
1. The Digital Humanities and Chinese Studies: Some Historical Notes
Peter Bol (Professor, Harvard University)
2. Bridging East Asia and Europe through Classics of East Asian DH
Kiyonori Nagasaki (Keio University / International Institute for Digital Humanities)
3. A Portrait of Digital Humanities in Korea: History and Trends
Lyndsey Twining (Researcher, Center for Digital Humanities, The Academy of Korean Studies)
4. Digital Humanities Developments in Taiwan
Jen-jou Hung (Professor, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts)
5. From Discovery to Data: Unleashing the Potential of Digital Humanities in the Hong Kong Literature Database
Lee Chi Hang Ryun (Head, Digital Initiatives, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library)
6. Introducing Institute for Digital Humanities at Renmin University
Heng HU (Professor, Renmin University)

Session 3    14:00-15:30
Panel 131. Established digital research tools (DBS)
1. China Biographical Database: Advancing Chinese Studies through Database Development and Prosopography Research in the 2020s
Hongsu Wang (Senior Project Manager, China Biographical Database Project, Harvard University)
2. Treating a genre as a database: a digital research methodology for studying Chinese local gazetteers
Shih-pei Chen (Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
3. Contextualizing Chinese historical texts through Natural Language Processing and knowledge graphs
Donald Sturgeon (Assistant Professor, Durham University)
4. Exploring collective properties from CBDB Jinshi data with DocuSky
Hsieh-Chang Tu (Postdoctoral Researcher, National Taiwan University)

Panel 132. Textual analysis: Intellectual History     (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. Intertextual Networks of the Chinese Classics
Jeffrey Tharsen (Associate Director of Technology, The University of Chqicago)
2. Core Constructs in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism: Emerging Constructs in the Philosophical Discourse
Wen Wang (PhD candidate, Wuhan University)
3. Intellectual History of Early 20th Century Korea: The Quest for Individual and Community Identity through Text-Mining
Sang Hyun Yun (Assistant Professor, Kyungnam University in South Korea)
4. RISE and SHINE: A Modular and Decentralized Approach for Interoperability between Textual Collections and Digital Research Tools
Pascal Belouin (Digital Humanities Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Session 4    16:00-17:30
Panel 141. Digital research: Case studies (DBS)
1. A comparative analysis of Japanese- and American-returned students in 東方雜誌 (1904-1948)
Cécile Armand (Researcher, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
2. Ethnicized Infrastructures of Borderlands on Ming-Qing Maps
Sunkyu Lee (Postdoctoral Researcher, KU Leuven)
3. Taking the Initiative to Build Bridges: Exploring local power dynamics through infrastructure events in late imperial Fujian
Sander Molenaar (Postdoctoral Researcher, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)

Panel 142. Textual analysis: Modern China     (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. Continuities and Changes: Quantitative Analysis of History Textbooks in the People's Republic of China
Guanhua Tan (Ph.D. candidate, University of Massachusetts)
Boya (Shirley) Ouyang (PhD Student, University of California, Irvine)
2. Tracing Legal Evolution through Digital Archives: Analyzing the Role of Ta Kung Pao and People's Daily in Shaping Privacy Law in China
Chan Hou Lou (PhD Researcher, Tsinghua University School of Law)
3. Uncovering Discourse on Civil Society in Chinese Digital Space through Text Analysis
Esther Song (Associate Professor, University of Bergen)

Day 2, July 12
Session 1    9:00-10:30
Panel 211. Ontology, data modeling, and standards (DBS)
1. Modelling datasets for DPhil research using ontology
Fudie Zhao (DPhil Student, University of Oxford)
2. Archiving, Modelling and Representing Knowledge in Southern Chinese Martial Arts
Yumeng Hou (Doctoral Researcher, EPFL)
3. Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models （GOLEM）Project and Use Case Study on K-pop and Japan Anime Research
Xiaoyan Yang (Phd Student, University of Groningen)
4. Progress Tracking of Proposals to Encode Small Seal Script in UCS
Jiajia Hu (Associate Professor, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, Beijing)
5. Barriers to Structured East Asian Digital Text
Yifan Wang (Fellow, International Institute for Digital Humanities)

Panel 212. Digital resource building in Japanese Studies (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. Toward Global Christian Missionary Archives across Europe, the Americas, and Asia
Kazumi Hasegawa (Lecturer, Nagoya Gakuin University)
2. The Sanitary Bureau’s Annual Report: examining Imperial Japan’s health statistics from an epidemiological standpoint.
Anatole Bernet (PhD student, Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po (CHSP))
3. Developing a database on cultural and literary criticism in Meiji-period literary magazines: Towards a comparative study of cultural and literary modernisation in Japan, Russia and Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century
Taka Oshikiri (Research Fellow, University of Bologna)
4. Launching a Decade-Long Project "Model Building in the Humanities through Data-Driven Problem Solving" Utilizing the Union Catalog Database of Japanese Texts (Recording)
Nobuhiko Kikuchi (Associate Professor, National Institute of Japanese Literature)
5. Collaborative Resource Guide for Japanese Studies and Humanities in Japan
Nobutake Kamiya (Liaison Librarian, Univ. Of Zurich)
Tamako Kitaoka (Project Associate Professor, National institutes for the humanities)

Panel 213. Digital implications (Room 320)
1. Integrating Digital Tools into the Undergraduate Curriculum: Three Pedagogical Cases
Yue Guan (Assistant Professor, Aarhus University)
2. Digital Content & Methodology in Teaching Korean Theatre
Jan Creutzenberg (Assistant Professor, Ewha Womans University)
3. Reconstructing the lived-in experience of a collection: researching and presenting the Skušek Collection with digital tools
Helena Motoh (Associate professor/Senior Researcher, Science and Research Centre Koper/University of Ljubljana)
4. Japanese Language Dictionary Applications for Language Learners
Tsvetomira Ivanova (Chief Assistant Professor, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski")
5. Digital Humanities: Origin, Scope, Development, and Future Directions
Wen Wang (PhD Candidate, Wuhan University)

Session 2    11:00-12:30
Panel 221. OCR in East Asian languages    (DBS)
1. Authoring Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Solutions for East Asian Special Collections
Wayne de Fremery (Dominican University of California)
2. CHAT_models: Towards Massive Production of Open Digital Corpora for the Study of Pre-Modern China
Colin Brisson (Ph.D. Candidate, Ecole pratique des hautes études (EPHE), Paris)
3. OCR in Japanese Studies: Challenges and Opportunities
Alíz Horváth (Assistant Professor of East Asian History and Digital Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University)
4. Towards fulltext of Republican Chinese newspapers
Matthias Arnold (Heidelberg Research Architecture Manager, Heidelberg University)

Panel 222. Digital resource building in Chinese Studies (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. Developing a Database of Chinese Mathematical Texts
Florian Keßler (PhD Student, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
2. Digital Han Kitab
Gang Li (Research Associate, Forschungszentrum für Islam, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
3. Rockefeller fellows in China: Introducing Rockefeller Fellowship Database
Yi-Tang Lin (Swiss National Scientific Foundation Professor / Assistant Professor, University of Zurich)

Panel 223. Social Media Analyses (Room 320)
1. Mass Web Opinion and Sentiment on “Motesolo” in China
Jiajia Hu (Associate Professor, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University)
2. Leveraging Text Data from South Korean Digital Space
Esther Song (Associate Professor, University of Bergen)
3. Unveiling the Unseen: Crafting Tools for an AI-Driven Exploration of Japanese Social Media Discourse Patterns
Stevie Poppe (PhD Candidate, KU Leuven)

Session 3    14:00-15:30
Panel 231. AI and Machine Learning (DBS)
1. New Possibilities of Imperial Examination Research: The Conceptualization and Construction of a Digital Imperial Examination Platform
Yanfei Zhang (Assistant Professor, School of History, Zhejiang University)
2. Beyond Manga and Marvel: Digitally Approaching Chinese Comics
Damian Mandzunowski (Postdoctoral Researcher, Heidelberg University / ERC-ChinaComx)
Aijia Zhang (PhD student, Heidelberg University)
3. Digital resource organization of traditional Chinese patterns based on deep learning
Shaojian Li (Student Researcher, Digital Humanities Research Center, School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China; IQSS Fellow, Harvard University)
4. A Study on the Standardization of Buddhist Personal Names Based on Machine Learning
Shaojian Li (Student Researcher, Digital Humanities Research Center, School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China; IQSS Fellow, Harvard University)

Panel 232. Social Network Analysis in Pre-modern East Asia (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. The Network Approach to Chinese Studies: The “Obvious” and Beyond the Obvious
Song Chen (Associate Professor of Chinese History, Bucknell University)
2. Local Gazetteers Reveal Contrasting Patterns of Historical Distribution Changes between Apex Predators and Meso-predators in Eastern China
Kaijin Hu (Ph.D., Sun Yat-sen University)
3. A New Perspective on Scholarly Exchanges in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912): Cluster Analysis and Reidentification of the Lower Yangtze Academic Community
Hao Zhu (PhD student, Ghent University)

Panel 233. Geospatial Analysis in Religious Studies (Room 320)
1. Mapping Islamic Religious Sites in China
Gang Li (Research Associate, Forschungszentrum für Islam, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
2. Building a digital map of Chinese religious texts: The Project of Chinese Religious Text Authority  (CRTA)
Yangyang Lan (Postdoctoral Researcher, ÉCOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES)
3. Mapping China Studies in Italy (1861-1949): A Digital Archive (MaCSI-DA)
Federica Casalin (Associate Professor, University of Rome Sapienza)

Session 4    16:00-17:30
Panel 241. Reflections on Deep Learning & Generative AI: Roundtable (DBS)
1. AI - Augmentation, not only Automation
Jing Xiang (Associate Professor, University of Chinese Social Sciences)
Calvin Yeh (IT Architect, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
2. Data extraction and standardization using LLM and traditional Transformers in the CBDB project
Hongsu Wang (Senior Project Manager, China Biographical Database Project, Harvard University)
3. Applications, Opportunities, and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Buddhist Textual Studies
Jen-jou Hung (Professor, Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts)

Panel 242. Social Network Analysis in modern East Asia (Simon Bolivar Saal)
1. Scattered and Secret: Addressing Challenges in Reconstructing Historical Bimodal Networks
Henrike Rudolph (Lecturer, University of Göttingen)
2. A Prosopographical Database of the Korean Cultural Field (1910-1953)
Jerome de Wit (Professor, University of Vienna)
3. Academic kinship among Imperial Japan’s health specialists: a Gephi-based network analysis
Anatole Bernet (PhD student, Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po (CHSP))

Panel 243. Geospatial Analysis in History (Room 320)
1. Viewed at a distance: geography in ukiyo-e prints
Stephanie Santschi (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Art History, Chair in East Asian Art History, University of Zurich)
2. Identifying Critical Infrastructures and Transport Hubs through Digital Simulations based on Archival Maps
Thorben Pelzer (Postdoctoral Researcher, Leipzig University)
3. The Distribution Changes of Large-sized and Middle-sized Wild Mammals Diversity in Eastern China During 1573~1949 — Quantitative Analysis Based on The Database of Wild Mammal Records in Chinese Local Gazetteers and GIS Methods
Kaijin Hu (Ph.D., Sun Yat-sen University)