On September 28, 2020 the East Asian Digital Humanities Working Group met for its inaugural meeting. Students, faculty, and staff at Princeton from a wide range of subjects were invited to join.
With 47 participants the event was very well attended with participation from undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, faculty, developers, librarians and museum curators from a wide range of subjects (including, but not limited to East Asian Studies, History, Art & Archaeology, Neuroscience, Politics, Sociology, Religion, and Comparative Literature). Despite not having widely announced the event outside of Princeton, six external participants (from Rutgers, Temple, Montclair State, Uni Jena, WUSTL, and New College Florida) joined the discussion.
The working group discussed its plans for the coming weeks and months. A number of Princeton students, faculty and staff shared in their ongoing or planned DH projects in short presentations.
Speakers were:
- Prof Anna Shields (Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies) – New Views of Middle Period Historiography through the Lens of the Tang History Database
- Chan Yong Bu (Graduate Student, East Asian Studies) – Theorizing Metallophone Through Digital Humanities
- Gian Duri Rominger (Graduate Student, East Asian Studies) & Nick Budak (Developer, Center for Digital Humanities) – DIRECT: Reading Words, Not Graphs in Ancient Chinese Texts
- Hannah Waight (Graduate Student, Sociology) – China Media Project
- Caitlin Karyadi (Graduate Student, Art & Archaeology) – East Asian Digital Humanities and Art History
- Joshua Seufert (Chinese Studies Librarian, East Asian Library) – Chinese Archival Handbooks 档案馆指南 – Geographic Referencing and Dataset Creation
In a lively discussion the group identified several areas of interest for future events, including dataset creation, optical character recognition (OCR) of East Asian texts, the application of geographic information systems (GIS), computer aided textual analysis, and topic modelling.
