DH Projects in East Asian Studies

The ‘Digital Humanities’ is still a young and highly contested area.  Furthermore, as Tom Mullaney has argued, within Digital Humanities is an “Asia deficit”which is no small part the outcome of more entrenched divides within the platforms and digital tools that form the foundation of DH itself.   This divide between East and West runs very deep, and is not primarily a question of scholarly interest or orientation.  I was pleasantly impressed at the progress made in DH learning more about these projects.

A couple of projects that I had come across recently came from a presentation by Michael Hunter of Yale University.  He introduced the The Life of the Buddha (LOTB) project which addresses this challenge by presenting and analyzing for the first time monumental Tibetan murals depicting the Buddha’s life, their related literature, and their architectural and historical settings. LOTB also offers scholarly and learning communities the first tool to research and engage image, text, architecture, and history as an integrated and meaning-rich whole. The project’s impact for the humanities and the study of Buddhism are thus twofold: the largest study to date on visual and textual Buddha narratives in Tibet, and a new digital tool for synthetic teaching and research of Buddhist images and texts in context.  These murals date from the first decades of the 17th century and are among only a handful of fully preserved narrative paintings in Central Tibet. They are also among the few murals in Tibet explicitly linked to an extant collection of narrative, poetic, ritual, and technical painting literature about the Buddha. Practically nothing has been written about the Jonang murals, and no complete visual documentation has ever been attempted.

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project (廣廈千萬間項目) is a project led by Michael Hunter, and is a collaborative workspace (but not a database) for pre-modern textual studies.  Building on the Mirador Viewer developed by Stanford University, the platform allows users to upload images of manuscript, print, inscriptional, and other sources and then organize projects around their transcription, translation, and/or annotation. Both as a workspace for crowd-sourcing core textual research and as a publishing venue for scholarly contributions that are less well suited to conventional book formats, the Ten Thousand Rooms Project is really one of the early DH projects at Yale that establishes an international online community committed to making the East Asian textual heritage more accessible to a wider audience. All users are free to view projects on the site, and registered users can create their own projects and also to others as well. 

In all, the future of DH in Asian Studies is coming along now, certainly at a pace that suggest much is happening, either at conferences, digital podcasts, and the network of scholars and practitioners coming together in a vibrant community of practice in an area of scholarship that's long overlooked.

Horizon Report 2017 - Will Be Missed. Rest in Peace NMC

Happy holidays and New Year to you all.   While I look forward to 2018, I'm sad that the New Media Consortium, after so many years of great work, has ended. Best known for producing its “Horizon Reports” on the future of technology at K-12 schools, universities, and museums, I remember every year about this time anxiously anticipating the release of the latest technology trends that the report releases.  Unfortunately, alas, the NMC has abruptly shut down this month after officials discovered the organization was out of money. It's an embarrassing end to an illustrious organization. How "because of apparent errors and omissions by its former Controller and Chief Financial Officer, the organization finds itself insolvent" is beyond me.  I'm too surprised to be even angry at this point, though I think we should be upset at this development. Not even time for us to say good-bye, or a proper sendoff.

Started in 1994, the NMC has served hundreds of college and university organizations, organizing conferences and events, and published reports in its goal of encouraging exploration and use of new media and technologies for learning and creative expression, particularly in 2002 when it began publishing its must-read Horizon Reports.  With that said, I hope these technology trends for academic libraries will not be the last time that we'll see the report coming out with findings.

1. Big Data Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

2. Digital Scholarship Technologies Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

3. Library Services Platforms Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

4. Online Identity Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

5. Artificial Intelligence Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

6. The Internet of Things Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

Though it's filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, it's still too early to say that the NMC is completely gone since the NMC’s assets may still be sold as part of the bankruptcy process and another entity (maybe another nonprofit?) may yet go forward with the annual summer conference. Who know's, it's still too early to say. Maybe that will be our goal moving into 2018 - to wish the NMC back into existence.

An academic press reimagining the scholarly publication process

I've been following the work of Tom Mullaney, historian at Stanford University for a while now. Stanford University Press, with the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is exploring new publishing channels for digital scholarship. From development, to peer review, to marketing, Stanford's digital publishing initiative supports its scholars in conveying their ideas using emerging media and digital tools.  By advancing this new publishing process the purpose is to establish the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books typically receive, this hopefully supports the efforts of scholars in the humanities and social sciences that have for so long have worked so hard on digital scholarship that was outside the traditional road to tenure and promotion without reaping the rewards.  This recognition is an important development in the academic and scholarly publishing world.

Mullaney’s project, The Chinese Deathscape, integrates interactive maps with accompanying scholarly analysis, examining the spatial relocation of graves in China over time.  His work, scheduled to be published in spring 2018, is one of six digital-only projects Stanford University plans to release in 2018 and 2019.  The press, in a partnership with Stanford University Libraries, has also been exploring how to copyright the interactive works and ensure that they are archived and accessible in the face of a constantly changing publishing landscape.  This is an exciting development in the field of digital scholarship, and the humanities.  As the initiative proposes:

The nascent fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences have ballooned in recent years. Emergent technologies and scholars’ increasing fluency with these technologies are providing academics with new ways to visualize, analyze, and interpret data. Yet, there are no formal channels for publication or consistent peer review standards for digital projects. Our initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, allows us to advance a publishing process that helps authors develop their concept (in both content and form) and reach their market effectively to confer the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books receive.

At my institution, I'm following similar developments with the collaboration between the UBC Press and the University of Washington Press developing a digital publishing platform in Indigenous studies thanks to a three-year grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Together, UBC Press and the University of Washington Press will develop a digital platform for Indigenous multimedia books. Based on Scalar, an authoring and publishing platform, it will offer a suite of tools for linking data and analyses to digital content from around the world and for interacting in culturally sensitive ways with heritage materials.  It's even hired a Digital Publishing Coordinator and Digital Developmental Editor to build the infrastructure.  It's exciting times ahead at UBC and Stanford.