Last Friday I convened a Digital Friday webinar called Digital Humanities in Asia-Pacific with University Librarian of UC Merced Haipeng Li and Academic Librarian of New Jersey City University Min Chou. With Shu-han Rebekah Wong from Hong Kong Baptist University, both are co-editors of the newest edited volume called Digital Humanities and Scholarly Research Trends in the Asia-Pacific (IGI Global 2019). This new book covers two main sections: National/Region-Wide Overview of Digital Humanities Development and Individual Case Studies. Contributors come Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore.
I wanted to focus on this topic of discussion because it offered an opportunity for attendees to hear more about DH projects and trends in Asia-Pacific regions. During the conversation, both shared what was fascinating about editing the books, the projects they read about and the developments going forward in Asia-Pacific. These projects include multimedia arts, digital scriptures, folklore and more. There was a discussion on how libraries can support DH projects, but they are often led by scholars. There is also government funding support for DH projects in selected countries too. In higher education, DH projects still remain to be contested as scholarly content when evaluating one’s tenure portfolio too. It was a great opportunity to learn how Haipeng and Min Chou perceived the future developments and trends of DH in Asia-Pacific regions based on their editorial work.