Event

Course Description:
This workshop focuses on current and emerging digital projects and methods for East Asian studies, which use primary sources written in classical and modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. While it is open to all disciplines and areas of interest, it is recommended that participants have reading knowledge of at least one of these languages specific to their own work. The workshop will include a broad overview of the state of the field, presentations of methods and hands-on sessions with tools and projects, and active discussion about pedagogy, self-directed learning, and future directions for DH research and projects in East Asian studies broadly. Because East Asian studies encompasses a wide range of methods, we will cover topics ranging from corpus preparation and text analysis to APIs, IIIF, and digital resources relevant to materials in these languages.

Instructors:
Dr. Molly Des Jardin became an expert in East Asian DH through a convoluted career path, beginning undergraduate studies as a computer science major at Pitt but taking a detour for Japanese language study, and then pursuing a PhD/MSI at University of Michigan; she is now the Japanese Studies Librarian and liaison for Korean Studies at the Penn Libraries. She has long worked at the intersection of information science and cultural studies in her professional career, first as a digital archive project manager at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute, then at Penn, where she founded and organizes the text analysis learning group WORD LAB and, in 2018, taught the first seminar offered in English focused on East Asian DH as a field. She has also taught in-depth text mining workshops at Emory University and DReAM Lab, as well as a two-day East Asian DH workshop at Arizona State University.

Dr. Paul Vierthaler, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures and a M.A. in Asian Studies from Yale University. He also has a B.A. in Chinese and Political Science from the University of Kansas. Prior to coming to William & Mary, he was an Assistant Professor of the Digital Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 2016 to 2019, where he also helped establish the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities. He has also held postdoctoral fellowships at Boston College (in digital humanities), and Harvard University (the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies). His research focuses primarily on late imperial Chinese literature. His current monograph project tracks how historical information in late imperial China was transmitted and deformed through novels, dramas, and unofficial histories (“quasi-histories”) using traditional critical analysis and computational analytics (natural language processing, corpus linguistics, machine learning, and other data analyses). He is interested in both big data analytics and minimal computing.