This presentation will share our views and activities undergoing in the Center for Digital Humanities at Peking University (PKUDH). Although it is still a young institution, it already won a high public recognition in PKU campus and in DH community of China. We view DH not merely as a technique of applying digital methods to humanities studies, but a new paradigm of humanities research & education in digital environment. We promote the ideas and practices of DH from five aspects: 1) Tools: to develop digital tools and platforms to help scholars to conduct data-driven humanities research works. 2) Education: to hold online workshops & summer schools as so to cultivate a new generation of humanities scholars who are apt to digital world. 3) Community: to hold a series of online seminars on the topics of “intelligent ancient text processing”, to bring people of all related fields together. 4) Collaboration: to produce standard testbed and call for the public evaluation of ancient text processing in NLP communities, thus promoting the collaboration between humanities scholars and technical persons. 5) Marketing: to promote the public recognition of digital humanities by holding the DH Work Exhibition and to build a public reading platform for classical literature with the support of the ByteDance Company.

The presentation suggests strategies and principles for setting up a digital Buddhist research center in a university. The first set of ideas relate to traditional views and include digital archiving of Buddhist texts and artifacts, as well as utilizing digital technologies for digital humanities and e-learning in Buddhist studies. The second set of ideas focus on administration and suggest developing a clear mission statement, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, engaging with the Buddhist community, evaluating the impact of the research center, and seeking funding. The presentation also explores the potential of using General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in Buddhist research. This involves integrating the right knowledge and understanding for GAI applications, testing and verifying GAI responses for accuracy and reliability, and considering ethical and legal issues related to the use of GAI in Buddhist research. The role of GAI in supporting learning, writing, and training in Buddhist studies is also discussed, along with ethical considerations and best practices for its use. Copyright and legal issues related to the use of GAI in Buddhist research are also highlighted.

This talk will present a full picture of the projects in the Center for Digital Humanities at Peking University, including: 1) "历代史志目录集成系统" ( http://bib.pkudh.org ): an integrated ancient catalog analysis system for all the 8 historical official catalogues, from 汉书艺文志 to 清史稿艺文志. 2) "识典古籍" ( http://www.shidianguji.com ): a public web platform for Chinese ancient books. 3) two interactive ebooks for ancient works:《永乐大典》( http://www.yongledadian.org.cn ) and 《国家珍贵古籍名录》(http://rarebib.pkudh.org) 4) "吾与点"智能标注系统 (http://wyd.pkudh.xyz): an intelligent annotation system for ancient texts. 5) 古文献源流分析系统 (http://evolution.pkudh.xyz):a platform for tracing the transmission and evolution of ancient ideas over a large volume of ancient literature.

Since 2014, the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) has continued to build the Database of Pre-Modern Japanese Works, a portal site for digital materials on Japanese classics, as a 10-year project, and renewed and opened it to the public on 1 March 2023, bringing the target of 300,000 materials to be made public within sight. The NIJL has established the Centre for Data-Driven Research on Premodern Japanese Texts, which is responsible for its succession plan based on the results of this achievement. In our presentation, we will introduce the renewed database as well as the various projects of the Center for Data-Driven Research on Premodern Japanese Texts. In doing so, we aim to present the current situation and the future of the NIJL, which is both the foundation and a major center for digital humanities research in Japan.

Hanyang Time Machine Project, which reconstructs Hanyang, the capital of Joseon (1392-1910), in the digital virtual world aims not only to show the appearance of the buildings, but also to know who lived in the city, what relationships they maintained, and what culture they enjoyed. To achieve this goal, we created an organization where digital engineers and humanities researchers collaborated and tried to convert humanities knowledge related to cultural heritage into digital data. The way we chose to convert humanities knowledge into digital data is to create Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples by extracting the contextual elements and relationships from the text recorded in the old literature. The RDF data we are creating is a conversion of humanities knowledge from a form that was ambiguously contained in written human language into explicit data that computers can recognize. This can be used as primary learning data for the deep-learning process of AI. However, which I think more important than this utilization effect, is that were able to see the possibility of a new learning method that allows young students of the digital native generation to explore Korea's traditional culture in a digital language familiar to them. Traditional cultures of China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea, which used Classical Chinese as the language of global communication, have many similarities and relationships with their uniqueness. Classical East Asian studies conducted in a digital environment will enable the exploration of East Asian culture in a convergent open space. If we have a vision for trans-East Asian classical studies, future researchers who will realize it should be educated to have the capabilities of digital-based learning and research. I hope the experience of the Hanyang Time Machine project can be a reference for this task.

The presentation is divided into two main sections. The first section provides an overview of the Library and Information Center of Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, including resources, access services and tools, a linked open data platform, and potential challenges and opportunities for the future. The second section introduces the Comprehensive Buddhist Electronic Text Archive (CBETA) Foundation, including a brief history of the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) series, the mission and goals of the CBETA Foundation, and the status and future development of the CBETA Foundation.

The primary mission of ASCDC is to work together with other domestic and foreign institutes to facilitate the digital turn in humanities research. To achieve the mission mentioned above, ASCDC has formulated four major development strategies (1) Linked Knowledge Bases for Digital Humanities, (2) Innovative Cyberinfrastructure and Digital Tools, (3) Academic Research in the Digital Humanities:, and (4)Outreach Initiatives: Publication and Exhibition. Core work objectives include the development of text and image research platforms, digital technology and tools, Linked Open Data (LOD) research and practice, digital museums, publication and book fair operations, database and knowledge base operation and maintenance, strengthening of international connections and collaboration, etc. Open calls for proposals are also held for “Digital Humanities Research Project” subprojects. Through these proposals from both institutes and individual researchers, we jointly advance Academia Sinica’s research in the field of digital humanities and establish digital humanities knowledge bases.

To support CBDB's data demand, an automatic data mining method based on NLP models is proposed. We argued the benefits of NLP over Regex from several aspects, trained the model and optimized the workflow.

This presentation will introduce a set of tools developed in collaboration with the Cambridge Institute for the Study of Korea and its Project Mo文oN. These tools enable scholars studying East Asia to build their own, problem specific, assistive artificial intelligence solutions. The presentation will describe how these tools enable scholars to quickly gather and curate high-quality data, as well as use the data they curate to create custom artificial intelligence solutions for domain specific problems. In short, attendees will learn about tools that enable East Asianists to author their own AI solutions that support their own specific research aims.

Intertextuality has been a significant concern of scholarly communities around the world for centuries; fields like Redaktionsgeschichte in Germany and jiaokanxue 校勘學 in China have long provided evidence-based foundations for debates on the relationships between works, editions and authors. With the advent of digital texts and computational tools, new avenues for research into intertextuality have recently emerged. To this end we developed TextPAIR, a language-agnostic open-source unsupervised approach to detecting “text reuse” in any language or script. TextPAIR enables new forms of algorithmically-based research into and visualizations of relationships between textual communities, traditions and sources, detection of correspondences (from direct quotations to imperfect citations to allusions) across multiple languages and through various intellectual traditions, new ways to map the development of ideas and concepts over the longue durée, and insights into the sources of many of our most classic works, long obscured by time, space and/or lack of prestige.

How can digital humanities invite decolonial interpretive frameworks for historical texts? I examine a 1909-1910 multilingual visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies that comprises 4,356 drawings, 4,428 captions in French, and 2,904 captions Vietnamese chữ Nôm (a logographic Sinitic writing system of Vietnamese language). I use a hybrid method of close reading, visual analysis, content analysis, and vector space models to uncover a nuanced understanding of Vietnamese social life and material culture in early twentieth century urbanizing Hanoi. As a focused case study, I reimagine and recontextual social worlds through a layered analysis of visual-textual representations of female labor and childcare. This project envisions decolonial interpretive frameworks that center historically marginalized agency, invisible authorship, and non-linear narrative forms.

I share possibilities and challenges of using computational methods to investigate changes in word usage and meaning in the Hoji Shimbun Digital Archive, the world's largest collection of Japanese diaspora newspapers. I focus on newspapers from San Francisco, Honolulu, São Paolo, and the greater Beijing/Dalian area over a four decade period. I demonstrate how tracking word frequencies, collocations, and semantic embeddings can permit trans-regional and trans-temporal comparison.

Applying computers to identify informative words, phrases, and linguistic structures in texts have proven to be very helpful for digital humanities, including Asian Studies. Looking forward. We would hope that computers can help us find information of higher levels, e.g., semantic information or information that are related to human values. In this brief talk, we discussion issues in this direction, using examples for analyzing classical Chinese poems.

Chinese printed texts can be formatted horizontally or vertically. In older Chinese newspapers, it was also quite common to format the title of a news article horizontally while formatting the actual news vertically. Another issue is the reading order of a text. For journal articles and newspapers, it is not uncommon to have captions of images done in a way that seems to be mixing with the rest of the text. When extracting full texts from Chinese literature (such as using OCR), resolving these formatting issues often involves significant manual overhead. In this presentation, we shall describe the progress being made in the digitization of Chinese literature at Airiti, a Chinese content aggregator and technology provider. Emphasis will be made on how we resolve the two issues mentioned above, and how we use our results to expedite the full-text digitization of Chinese textual materials.

In March 2021, Dr. Philip Stoker and Dr. Jiang Wu received a College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA) Grassroots Seed Grant. Their project, “Visualizing Regional Religious System: Mapping Buddhist Temples in a Digital Atlas of Religion,” has been approved for funding totaling $7,000 and has been supported by the Center for Buddhist Studies and the College of Humanities IT team. In the past year, Dr. Stoker and Dr. Wu, with the help of a group of graduate students, have developed and designed a new website for digital atlas of the Buddhist temples in the Hangzhou area of China. The broader goal is to create a full atlas for all provinces in China, but this seed grant provided the catalyst to start this project and help to secure future funding and support. The current project builds upon two previous projects: the Regional Religious System Project Maps and the Buddhist Geographical Information System (BGIS). These projects created a searchable database of Buddhist monasteries to promote studies about the geographical distribution of Buddhism, pilgrimage networks, and their relationship to other social and cultural events and phenomena. However, this dataset has not been designed nor produced for a broad audience. The funding from CAPLA has been used to support the design and geo-visualization for this atlas. In this presentation, Dr. Philip Stoker and his assistant Glenn Ingram will unveil the new design and geo-visualization of the project website (rrs.arizona.edu) and its related datasets. Geo- visualization is currently the trend among cartographic professionals to better organize geodata for decision-making and knowledge storage. The new RRS website design embodies some of the most essential geo-visualization principle and aims to present regional religious systems in the Hangzhou area with a fresh look. Their presentation will also introduce the style sheet for geo- visualization in order to create standardized maps for all datasets. This is a team effort between Dr. Jiang Wu, Professor of East Asian Studies, Director of the Center for Buddhist Studies and Dr. Philip Stoker, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning. The collaboration will bring together the information and data that Dr. PNC 2022 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings Wu and his team have developed and the cartography and design capacity of Dr. Stoker and his team. Dr. Stoker has been teaching GIS and map design in CAPLA for four years. Dr. Stoker is President of the UA GIS Users group on campus and has led campus wide cartography brown bag workshops. Dr. Stoker’s maps have been published in nationally recognized publications like the Journal of the American Planning Association, Landscape and Urban Planning, and Sustainable Cities and Societies. Dr. Wu has conducted research by applying GIS methods to study religious sites since 2003. He has developed multiple databases and datasets of Chinese religion, especially in the Hangzhou area. The Buddhist Geographic Information System (BGIS) project he initiated is a comprehensive database of Buddhist monasteries in China that can be extended to other areas of East Asia as well. He has also developed a sophisticated methodology for studying the distribution of religious sites and their correlation with other socioeconomic factors, namely the concept and method of Regional Religious Systems (RRS). A summary of his finding can be found in a Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Religious_System. He has also organized an international conference on RRS in 2016. An anthology of the conference papers on the concept and method of RRS (The Formation of Regional Religious Systems in Greater China) has been published by Routledge in 2022 in the Spatial Humanities Series edited by David Bodenheimer. Keywords: Geo-visualization, Regional Religious Systems (RRS), Hangzhou, Buddhist Temples, Digital Atlas

In this talk I will introduce CHMap as: (1) the main hosting platform for 4,088 land survey maps of China produced by ROC and Japanese Army during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. They are digitized by Shanghai Jiaotung University. (2) An integrated service that collects and displays 300+ 3rd-party open access maps on historical China.

China Historical Geographic Information System 中國歷史地理信息系統, a joint project of Fudan University Center for Historical Geography and Harvard, provides spatial layers for the period 221BCE to 1911CE Including administrative units down to the xian 縣 level. The CHGIS time series covers 221BC-1911CE. The complete times slices for 1820 and 1911 include towns. CHGIS also provides spatial datasets from G. William Skinner for 1820, 1893, 1915, and 1990 and uncorrected spatial layers from Robert Hartwell.

The study of literati moves, or the patterns and movements of intellectuals and scholars in history, has long been a topic of interest in humanities research. Incorporating spatiotemporal analysis of literati moves presents a unique challenge that requires specialized tools and techniques. In this presentation, we will explore the importance of spatiotemporal data in literati moves analysis and present a solution using KNIME Analytics Platform, Webportal, and Geospatial Extension. Our goal is to demonstrate how our solution with KNIME, Webportal, and Geospatial Extension can benefit spatiotemporal research and teaching, and enhance our understanding of literati moves and other historical phenomena. By showcasing the capabilities of these tools, we hope to inspire new avenues of inquiry and analysis in humanities research.

We know next to nothing about literati culture of the Kitan Liao dynasty due to the loss of most writings in that period. That said, we can recover part of this far northern literati community through the lens of Jurchen Jin textual sources. I examine the presence of literati with former Liao family pedigrees in two seminal writings by Jin elites, Zhongzhou ji 中州集 (ZZJ) and Guiqian zhi 歸潛志 (GQZ). Under the umbrella term of “Jin literati,” the poets with Liao background were often grouped indiscriminately with descendants from the Northern Song. In my research, by periodizing and georeferencing all poets and literati recorded in ZZJ and GQZ, I visualize and foreground the poets from the pre-Liao territory onto the map generated by QGIS. Ultimately, I argue that the palimpsest of Liao literati culture can be perceived by their burgeoning literary practice in the Jurchen regime.

This presentation discusses two DH projects that are based on each other. The Singapore Ecological History Map created an online GIS to investigate Singapore’s ecological history through a focus on land-use change (e.g. deforestation, plantation spread, and urbanization), extreme weather events, and malaria epidemics. We employed newly digitized historical source materials (historical maps, rainfall data, etc.) to visualize the transformations of Singapore’s environment over time. Methodologically, we created and incorporated about 60 georeferenced GIS layers into our online platform to enable overlay analysis. Currently, we are adding the layers to a second project. Data mining concerning non-native (or alien) species in Singapore serves to compile a digital database (Singapore and Southeast Asia Historical Biodiversity Database) on the history of such species. Visualizing and integrating this data into another online platform enables us, in combination with the land use layers, to investigate vectors (or pathways) of species introductions through spatiotemporal correlations.

This project aims to create comprehensive and detailed digital maps of the historical border forts and walls within and around the Ordos Plateau, covering the time period from the 1st century BCE to the 16th century CE. The primary objective is to provide a clearer understanding of the changing spheres of influence of various Chinese and non-Chinese empires in the region. These maps will differ from traditional historical maps by incorporating topographical data to reflect the relationship between the locations of official settlements and the local terrain, as well as archaeological findings to improve accuracy and detail. The resulting digital maps will provide a visually appealing representation of the historical changes in the sphere of influence of the Chinese and non-Chinese empires in the Ordos Plateau, making them a valuable resource for researchers, historians, and anyone interested in the history and geography of the region.

The full title of CR/10 is Cultural Revolution 10. It is an oral history project initiated by East Asian Library, University of Pittsburgh Library System. This presentation will be presented by Haihui Zhang, CR/10 project initiator, and Dr. Rongqian Ma, a former member of CR/10 team and now Assistant Professor at the Department of Information and Library Science of the Luddy School of Information, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. This presentation will focus on tools used in CR/10 process, and accessibility and maintenance.

This presentation introduces how the Harvard Kennedy School’s Global Vietnam Wars Studies Initiative has been collecting, documenting, and archiving uncensored audio-visual interviews as new digital scholastic materials. These oral histories delve deeply into the unheard voices and unrested war memories of veterans from all sides including military commanders, political officers, spies, enlisted men and women civilians whose voices have never been heard within the Vietnam War history. Video-recording such hidden memories from the opposing and allied sides elaborated genuine texture to the war’s poignant consequences, and concurrently provided new perceptions of the post-war Vietnam. Using oral history materials as primacy sources and employing first-person memory as both source and subject, this digitalized oral history video database will offer state-of-art pedagogical substance to innovate history disciplines, promoting new interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches and multiple perspectives, e.g. military, political, socio-economic, cultural, and religious, to study and teach Vietnam War histories against the backdrop of the 21st century realities.

In this workshop, I will introduce the current data status of the China Biographical Database project (CBDB). The different methods of using CBDB for different research purposes.

This talk introduces the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), a suite of research tools designed for studying Chinese local gazetteers based on the philosophy that any comprehensive genre, when accompanied with tools that aim to bring a collective lens to the genre, can greatly enrich the ways that scholars approach the genre and can transform it into a research infrastructure that enables new types of research. We report on how LoGaRT opens up new perspectives for studying Chinese history by showing case studies and the scholarly breakthroughs made by our research group. We think that our research methodology and the user workflow designed in LoGaRT is applicable to other genre/collection of primary sources when certain criteria are met.

This presentation will introduce Japan Past & Present, a global information hub and repository that promotes research and teaching in the Japanese humanities across disciplinary, temporal, and geographic borders. It will discuss JPP’s mission, infrastructure, and current projects under development.

The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, created and managed by the Japanese Diaspora Initiative at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University, aims to preserve and make pre-WWII overseas Japanese newspapers available. Its full-text searchability and cross-search capacities allow researchers to make transnational inquiries and follow individual diasporic footsteps. Its extensive text data, albeit OCR text conversion challenges, also has prompted scholars to conduct text mining analysis. Despite its linguistic predominance in Japanese, the collection is uniquely American, not only bridging Japan and Asian American studies but serving American society at large, more specifically, people of color. Longevity, sustainability, and engagement are the pillars of this digital collection. For these purposes, the HSDC promotes collaborations in multiple areas: collaboration with local and Japanese general public communities, scholars, and institutions. This presentation showcases different areas of collaboration and the importance of diverse community engagement in the project’s longevity and sustainability.

This presentation introduces the new digital humanities resource, Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography. I will cover the primary resources available on the website, including bilingual (English/Japanese) lecture videos, annotated bibliographies, image archives, and more, as well as responses to the site since its launch in the fall of 2022.

We introduce a novel machine learning approach to leverage historical and contemporary maps and systematically predict economic statistics. Our simple algorithm extracts meaningful features from the maps based on their color compositions for predictions. We apply our method to grid-level population levels in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and South Korea in 1930, 1970, and 2015. Our results show that maps can reliably predict population density in the mid-20th century Sub-Saharan Africa using 9,886 map grids (5km by 5 km). Similarly, contemporary South Korean maps can generate robust predictions on income, consumption, employment, population density, and electric consumption. In addition, our method is capable of predicting historical South Korean population growth over a century.

The project developing Online Romanization Tool for Korean is a collaborative effort to create a full automation tool for the romanization of Korean according to the ALA-LC Korean Romanization Rules. In this project, we will incorporate phonological rules and linear rule ordering used in K-Romanizer, and automatic tagging and word division used in KNPA Romanizer into one online tool.

This study aims to visualize Kyujangjŏnun, one of the most influential rhyme books published in Chosŏn Korea, paying particular attention to various network structures among the book's rhymes and their relationships with the rhyme families. By applying social network analysis as a main research method, this study delineates the compiler's intention, which has been embedded in the formal features of Kyujangjŏnun. King Chŏngjo, who initiated the compilation project, envisaged the establishment of a new literary canon of the day through the careful regulation of literary forms. Visualizing Kyujangjŏnun using social network analysis, in this respect, is intended to identify the major elements that the compiler chose to apply to constructing a new literary model. This study also serves as a preliminary study to support future research on the process of canon formation and literary censorship in late Chosŏn Korea.

In this study, machine learning methods for the analysis of terminology, quote, and bibliographic databases are used to investigate the Chinese Buddhist Canon. These methods enable researchers to access English translations of contemporary Chinese literature that discusses the canon as well as traditional academic study materials for the Chinese Buddhist canon on their digital desktops. The bibliographic database includes general references, parallels in Sanskrit and other languages, references to contemporary translations, and English translations of titles. With crucial bibliographical information surfaced for context, machine learning can assist the scholar in finding pertinent information in full text searches. Using bibliographical content and presented to a reader in an easily discoverable manner, the objectives of this project are to make study and translation of Chinese Buddhist writings easier and quicker.

Traveling around establishes the foundation of the monks’ cultivation of mind and knowledge, and is a means of propagating the Buddhist faith. In this workshop, I would like to introduce an academic website: “Religious Itineracy: Travel Narratives in the Biographies of Eminent Monks”, designed by the Ethereal Drip-Drops Lab, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 2023. The focus of this project is “action”. In the biographies of eminent monks in pre-modern China, it can be observed that monks often traveled for various reasons, such as studying with masters, summoning by emperors, or spreading Dharma, thereby promoting Buddhist teachings far and beyond, writing books, or compiling Buddhist scriptures. On the “Religious Itineracy” website, we introduce two digital reading methods —“event” and “Map”. We first use event extraction, text mark-up to build a database of travel events, including 10047 data rows. Through the employment of data visualization and GIS, user can explore the political, social, and cultural interactions between the changes in the monastic life history and the different conditions of time and space.