Charting the D-SEA in Berlin

I have just returned from the 3-day workshop and 2-day conference, “Charting the European D-SEA (Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies),” organized by the Max Planck Institute and the Berlin State Library.

Together with my colleague Christian Henriot, we conducted an introductory workshop on the HistText application developed by the ENP-China project. Christian Henriot delivered a keynote titled “Taming the Digital Dragon,” which outlined the achievements of the ENP-China project over the past six years. I presented a paper titled “A comparative analysis of Japanese- and American-returned students in the Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (1904-1948)” in the “Digital Case Studies” panel 141 (slides and abstract available for download).

It is challenging and beyond the scope of this modest blog post to summarize the content of these five days of intensive discussion and brainstorming, given the richness and diversity of the program (full program available on the conference webpage). To share a few personal thoughts, I must admit this highly successful event helped reconcile the concept of area studies with the skeptics of this often misused notion (myself included). Many panels demonstrated the value of bringing together scholars from different disciplines specializing in China, Japan, and Korea, especially when addressing issues related to non-Western languages, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and transcription of sources in non-Latin scripts. Tools like Mon文on (AI authoring/Korea Text Initiative), eScriptorium, and Teklia, resulting from the longstanding efforts of colleagues devoted to these crucial issues, offer promising paths for individual scholars grappling with these challenges. Such venues are essential to bridge initiatives that are often conducted separately and unaware of each other.

Within the broad territory of East Asian studies, smaller communities are emerging around specific time periods, types of documents or data (ranging from health statistics to Buddhist inscriptions), or methodologies, such as text reuse (Jeffrey Tharsen), topic modeling (Christian Göbel), or network analysis (Song Chen). The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exemplified by ChatGPT and its competitors, on the humanities and social sciences was a key topic of the conference, and one that transcends the field of East Asian studies. The discussions around this topic during the conference undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of how AI is specifically impacting East Asian studies and how its potential uses may vary across countries and research objects.

Those who attended previous conferences and summer schools (Leiden 2016, Aix-en-Provence 2022, Harvard in 2023) can appreciate the rapid progress and evolving concerns of scholars in this field. Technology and methods are changing at an unprecedented pace. Paradigm shifts occur every six months in the field of computing, with an almost immediate impact on humanities practices, if not paradigms. The Charting D-SEA conference was held at a timely moment. It is vital to continue holding such events at least every two years to keep pace with changing techniques and practices.

Many thanks to the organizing trio Chen Shih-Pei, Jing Hu, and Brent Ho, for making this possible!

Cécile Armand

Ancienne élève de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2006), agrégée d'histoire (2009), docteure en histoire (2017), mes travaux portent sur la publicité, l'histoire urbaine, les migrations intellectuelles entre la Chine et les Etats-Unis et les méthodes computationnelles appliquées à la recherche historique. Mes recherches ont reçu le soutien des fondations Chiang Ching-kuo, Coca-Cola, Andrew Mellon (Program DHAsia, Stanford), de l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Access ERC, ENS-Lyon) et du Conseil Européen de la Recherche (projet ENP-China, Aix-Marseille).

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