Course Description:
This course 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. Because East Asian studies encompasses a wide range of methods, we will cover topics ranging from corpus preparation and text analysis to OCR, IIIF, network analysis, and digital resources relevant to materials in these languages.
This class is an introductory one geared toward those with little to no DH experience and will prioritize applications from graduate students, postdocs, contingent faculty, and faculty developing departmental curricula.
Advanced scholars may also apply, but please be aware that the course is capped at 25 participants. Sessions will be 100% virtual and will not be recorded. Last year sessions were typically held between 10am and 3pm EST, though some variation may be expected based on the timezones of participants. Those who were accepted into the full 2021 East Asian Studies & Digital Humanities course are not eligible to apply again.
To apply, please fill out the following form by no later than March 14th, 2022, 8pm EST: https://bit.ly/EASDreamLab22
Note: This application is run separately from the Eventbrite system used for the rest of Dream Lab. Please use only this form and the deadlines provided here to apply for East Asian Studies & Digital Humanities.
Instructors:
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.
Dr. Paula R. Curtis is a historian of medieval Japan. She is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History at University of California, Los Angeles with the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Her current book project focuses on metal caster organizations from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and their relationships with elite institutions. She also works on the history of documentary forgery in premodern Japan. In addition, Dr. Curtis collaborates in several online projects, including the Digital Humanities Japan initiative; an online database for digital resources related to East Asia; the blog What can I do with a B.A. in Japanese Studies; and the digital archive Carving Community: The Landis-Hiroi Collection.
