Toward a Digital Future in East Asian Studies

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the role of digital humanities (DH) in and beyond East Asian/Asian studies, the breadth of possibilities for DH within area studies is still unclear for many researchers and students. This article introduces three projects by scholars of China, Japan, and Korea: the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT) software for Chinese historical materials, Hoyt Long's Aozora Search platform and scholarship on computational linguistics in Japanese literature, and Javier Cha's work with and on open access datasets of digitized Korean sources. These projects, ranging from collaborative mapping and textual analysis to big data, raise important, if open-ended, questions about what DH can look like and how it manifests in the East Asia corner of area studies. The diversity and depth of these projects demonstrate how fostering innovative, digitally inflected work, if taken seriously, can complement and enhance East Asian studies scholarship.