Charting the Emergence of the Digital Humanities in China

Abstract

This chapter seeks to chart the emergence of the digital humanities paradigm within the Chinese humanities, especially its more recent developments from the mid-2010s onwards. These developments include the setting up of centres devoted to digital humanities research within universities in the Greater China region, more training in the form of courses and workshops provided to interested parties, the proliferation of digital humanities platforms online for scholarly use, and increasing numbers of digital humanities studies in scholarly publications. Many mainstream scholars remain cautious towards this new research paradigm, but they have begun to reflect on its developments in writing. The "digital humanities" (translated as shuzi renwen 數字人文 in mainland China, shuwei renwen 數位人文 in Taiwan, and usually shuma renwen 數碼人文 in Hong Kong) have received a lot of attention in Chinese academic circles since about 2009. Bearing in mind that the term "digital humanities" in the Euro-American world blossomed from 2004 to 2008 (Jones, 2013: 4-9), it did not take long after then for the concept to appear in the academic circles in the Greater China region, but it certainly took several more years for Chinese scholars to devote discussions to it. As I have phrased it elsewhere, the digital humanities are "a way to ask, redefine, and answer questions with a more intelligent set of tools." (Gold, 2012: 70) This "set of tools" of course includes computational tools, but more importantly it involves how humanistic inquiry could be productively fused with computational power.