Digital Humanities is the child born out of employing rapidly advanced information technologies to systematically manage and explore the enormous amount of data accumulated from various research fields. In general, Digital Humanities refers to the application of information techniques and the data manage system that comes with it, to investigate issues in humanities, in particularly those that are considered difficult, or even next to impossible to observe, describe, or analyze without the aid of information techniques. For example, digital technology can deal with the cross-area studies of broader geographical areas, or the diachronic and comparative researches in longitudinal dimension.

Through constant exchange of ideas between scholars of both humanities and information technologies, the development of Digital Humanities has now gone beyond simple data mining and exploring new research themes within one’s own research field. It is aimed to become an interdisciplinary approach that will intertwine knowledge from various research fields, and integrate different types of data and analytical techniques, in order to develop new research topics and methodologies, and to motivate both reflections on and paradigm shift of humanities.

Looking from a broader sense, information technologies and digital data have already had very profound impacts on contemporary culture and in our daily lives. Therefore, issues such as how exactly the application of information techniques and digital data have impacted which aspect of contemporary lives; how they have inspired creativities in societal movements, cultural forms, and artistic expressions; and what will our lives will be like living in a digital world in the future, have become important research themes in Digital Humanities.

The theme of this year’s conference, “Focusing on East Asia,” is founded on this area’s specific languages, histories, social lives, and cultures different from the Western and shape the unique DH research concerns and topics in East Asia. We welcome submissions on featured topics and researches based on the particularities of languages, texts, and social-historical contexts in East Asia. The aims of this conference are: to engage more researchers to participate in the ongoing dialogs that will eventually lead to the integration of expertise from various disciplines, to stimulate more new research themes, and ultimately to contribute to the growth and flourishing of the East Asia’s research community of Digital Humanities.

Organizer

Research Center for Digital Humanities, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Co-organizers

Department of Computer Science, College of Science, National Cheng- chi University, Taiwan
The Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, Taiwan