#chartingdsea — Public Fediverse posts

Finally, at #ChartingDSEA, I had the opportunity to present on my own research at the intersection of #arthistory #eastasianart #digitalhumanities and #GIS.
I am looking forward to developing the topic further, and your questions and feedback allow me to make it even better!
Thanks to @stabi_berlin for having hosted us this week, for the workshops and the conference!

https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/charting-european-d-sea

Today I completed my third (or 2.5th) presentation at #ChartingDSEA @stabi_berlin , this time as part of the OCR panel - I contributed with a case study on why it is challenging to OCR Kanbun. Thank you for the great workshop + conference experience and the amazing atmosphere, hope to keep the ball rolling! #multilingualdh #multilingualism #eastasia #Japanese #japan
@multilingualdhwg @mldh

Following, at #ChartingDSEA :
Federica Casalin on 'Mapping China Studies in Italy (1861-1949): A Digital Archive (MaCSI-DA)'.
"Mapping" as surveying and overcoming "multifaceted blindness" as establishing a history of knowledge inbetween scientisms and context of power.
Tackle Distant and Close Viewing limitations through careful corpus, topic and glossary construction, for which different sets of #DigitalHumanities tools can be used.

Now, Yangyang Lan on ' Building a digital map of Chinese religious texts: The Project of Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRTA)'. different religion's texts (incl. scrolls, morality books, gazetteers, periodicals, etc.) become available on one platform.
ChinaText: Users can search materials and metadata in a Wiki-type visualisation.
Goal: assess the texts' impact on identity formation.
#ChartingDSEA

Finally, at #ChartingDSEA, two panels on geospatial project. First speaker: Gang Li, on Mapping Islamic Religious Sites in China. He reminds us that to conduct digital scholarship, we need to have the data to do so - scholarship needs to be aware of data availability biases on our research! And by combatting digital disappearance, we manage to put marginalised objects back "on the map"!

And the last speaker on the #ChartingDSEA OCR panel: Matthias Arnold on: "Towards fulltext of Republican Chinese newspapers" - how can segmentation work in complex newspaper layouts? Crowdsourcing, machine learning, annotation, OCR classification as processes forbrecognising registers and contents.

~ "Ground truths" essential for working with neural networks! ~

Representing Japanese OCR and the complexities of Japanese script which ranges from character and syllable alphabets to sinitic scripts and kuzushiji - Alíz Horváth on challenges and opportunities in pre-modern J-OCR which has so far produced tools like Miwo and KuroNet, but also faces the major issues of Kanbun (directionality, variation, reading aids, commentaries, character size). Some tools which offer solutions remain proprietary.
#ChartingDSEA

Next at #ChartingDSEA - millions of pre-modern Chinese titles and archival documents face digitisation backlog. To counter, Colin Brisson suggests CHAT_models, guiding us "Towards Massive Production of Open Digital Corpora for the Study of Pre-Modern China".
He urges: datasets need to become reusable (XML TEI), not constantly recreated - and models to be published with code!

The following #ChartingDSEA panel is on #OpticalCharacterRecognition in East Asian scripts. First, Wayne de Fremery on 'Authoring Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Solutions for East Asian Special Collections', who's warns that failure to reproduce historical scripts digitally endagers survival of these languages! OCR is an infrastructure which represents how we think and argue humanity. To conduct humanities research, we must be able to apply OCR to various scripts and styles.
 

And concluding this panel, Nobutake Kamiya and
Tamako Kitaoka ask how students, researchers and teachers can find and use their desired information among vast collections of Japanese resources. They propose the 'Collaborative Resource Guide for Japanese Studies and Humanities in Japan', and highlight the collaboration necessary to maintain such infrastructure and update the research guide, at #EAJRS and the National Institutes for the Humanities.

#ChartingDSEA

In "Launching a Decade-Long Project Model Building in the Humanities through Data-Driven Problem Solving'", Nobuhiko Kikuchi demonstrates how projects using the Union Catalog Database of Japanese Texts at the National Institute of Japanese Literature strengthen infrastructures that can be utilized to research premodern texts and circumvent the associated challenges - API endpoints, image viewers, machine-learning supported image analysis, open data sharing, etc.)
#ChartingDSEA

Folled by Taka Oshikiri, stressing a comparative approach to studying cultural and literary modernisation in Japan, Russia and Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century by developing a database ( #Nonwestlit) on cultural and literary criticism in Meiji-period literary magazines.
#DigitalHumanities tools help to understand the discourse on enlightenment and innovation in these journals, and overcome access, scan quality, copyright restrictions, and Japanese language-related issues.
#ChartingDSEA

Next, Anatole Bernet on how #DigitalHumanities tools help understand Imperial Japan's swift transformation of medical science, as visible in the annual reports by the Sanitary Bureau - a mine of information and statistics so extensive that computational analytics (OCR, table detection, results visualisation) necessary to look beyond its annual framing, and that contextual analysis can then help understand the patterns.

#ChartingDSEA

Second day at #ChartingDSEA ! In the panel on Digital Resource Building in Japanese Studies, Kazumi Hasegawa on Global Christian Missionary Archives, and how both the Japanese section of the archive as well as Japanese collections abroad functions as local contributions to global and transcultural research questions.

Today I presented at the #ChartingDSEA conference on digital East Asian studies in Berlin on the state of the field of #digital #Japanese studies in Europe and together with @cosima_wagner we discussed the importance of our data-driven user personas in multilingual DH and even enacted two of them as part of a non-standard "theatrical performance". #multilingualdh #multilingualism #chartingdsea @multilingualdhwg @mldh (Photo courtesy of @cosima_wagner )

Last but not least to speak this morning:

Heng Hu, introducing the Research Center for Digital Humanities at Renmin University - reflecting on how traditional Chinese culture and emerging computational tools mutually benefit each other and the #DigitalHumanities community!

~ Teach - Research - Practice ~

#ChartingDSEA

@cosima_wagner has previously stressed libraries' role for hosting and transmitting #DigitalHumanities related processes ranging from persona creation, tools hosting and teaching, resource provision, archiving, and so much more.
#chartingDSEA

The #DigitalHumanities situation in #HongKong : Ryun Lee on the Hong Kong Literature Database (HKLit), incl. how its SPARQL retrieval system enables author chronology timelines and social network analysis.
Again, crucial role of libraries for DH in and outside academia! Together, we're strong.
#ChartingDSEA

Next up at #ChartingDSEA, #Taiwan : Jen-jou Hung on Taiwanese #DigitalHumanities consolidation from the first digital archives in the 1980s, the digitization activities by the National Project for Digital Archives in the 2010s, to today's Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (DADH) conferences and the Taiwanese Association of Digital Humanities (TADH)'s activities.
Focus on education, fostering collaboration and exchange!

@ste_santschi more #MultilingualDH colleagues to connect with! #ChartingDSEA

Lyndsey Twining, on #DigitalHumanities in #Korea: unique local challenges & applied humanities, partially motivated to bridge the gap between the general public and humanities resources, for academic and commercial/creative industries use.
Quo vadis? Trend towards diverse topics and tools between history, literature and linguistics, mirroring global DH + backdrop of Education relevant.
#ChartingDSEA

@ste_santschi @alizhorvathaliz @djwrisley @multilingualdh @mldh and also here: Horváth, A., C. van Lit, C. Wagner, and D. J. Wrisley. 2024. “Centring Multilingual Users: Thinking through UX Personas in the DH Community,” in “DH Unbound 2022, Selected Papers,” ed. Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, Emmanuel Château-Dutier, special issue. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 13(3): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9608 #chartingdsea

@ste_santschi thank you very much for documenting the #chartingdsea conference, the first Digital Scholarship conference aiming at charting an overall status quo about #DigitalHumanities in East Asian studies disciplines in Europe (and beyond!)‼️

Reading texts - and images - in relation to each is not a digital-only practice, but scaled through emerging "humanities-external" tools:
Peter Bol (Harvard University) on DH in Chinese text studies proposes participative cyberinfrastructure as a core element for ensuring sustainable implementation of the two main DH processes - analysing texts vs. extracting data from texts (and images).
#ChartingDSEA

"Who are multilingual digital humanists?"
Cosima Wagner and Alíz Horváth present a fictional roundtable of personas - with various skills and interests - whose requirements and expertise can help enhance multilingual and multiscript research infrastructures.
#ChartingDSEA

#ChartingDSEA
Clemens Neudecker (Berlin State Library) on the contribution of library and heritage institutions to digital research:
provide the infrastructure for conducting research, incl. machine learning - with the goal of creating better digitized data (OCR, segmentation, similarity search, multimodal prompting, entity linking) which can then be used for research.
~ Machine learning, not generative AI ~

#ChartingDSEA
Alíz Horváth on recent digital trends in Japanese studies in Europe: many platforms available as digital collections combine curated content with explorative tools that researchers can use to access digitized contents.
Challenges around integrating Japanese scripts as non-Latin scripts persist. Natural language processing can mitigate these limitations and build linguistic diversity.
Practical training and tools literacy as a way forward!

#ChartingDSEA

First up: Prof. Christian Henriot on "Taming the Digital Dragon". His key message: develop and provide infrastructures, not platforms for research to build the corpus -> extract data -> analyse data.

Happening now!
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/charting-european-d-sea
#ChartingDSEA