Localizing Chinese Digital Humanities within the Globalized Community 全球化社区中中国数字人文的在地化研究

摘  要 (Abstract)

We live, work, and communicate with each other is an ever-shrinking globalized world. The boundaries of these different aspects of our existence are becoming blurred, the borders between the private and public spheres of our existence. Our collaborators are only a keyboard click away regardless of their location and time zone. How then do we make a claim to our place in such a global community? That is the focus of our paper with reference to the now globalized digital humanities community and the place of China within the network of global collaborations; for example, with its unique potential to act as a focal point and foundation for the strong global research in Digital Sinology, especially in Europe and North America.

The academic field that we now call Digital Humanities (DH) has not sprung up in isolation but has gradually developed over time building on precedents in text and linguistic studies. This is documented elsewhere and so will not be covered here. As a central body, we have ADHO, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, with claims to inclusiveness and diversity but questions have been raised about how genuinely inclusive and diverse it is possible for a western Anglophone organization to be^[1,2,3]. To promote diversity as constituent parts of ADHO, there is Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH), helping to break down barriers to communication and collaboration, giving particular attention to the so-called Global South (less well developed countries), together with ADHO’s Multi-lingualism and Multi-Culturalism committee.

The development of DH research in the western Anglophone world and China has followed similar trajectories. Both grew out of the large-scale digitization of manuscripts to create full-text databases, although no single model pervades. The differences in humanities data have led to differences in approach with the sources influencing the direction. The Sinitic languages presented many technical challenges, particularly with issues such as OCR and word segmentation, but these difficulties are not unique; consider the Latin scriptio continua and capitalis quadrata (all characters are in upper-case with no spaces or punctuation) although with significantly fewer characters to deal with. Nevertheless, in both cases the areas of study have moved away from a focus on text-based studies and where text is still the source data, working in different ways such as topic modelling, network and citation analysis, imaging, and creating visualizations. Both use mixed research methods and, through cross-disciplinary collaboration, have moved away from rigid academic boundaries. The preponderance of the English language and the pressure to publish in English, which is true globally, creates further unresolved issues for all regions.    

Within what has now become a global DH community, where might we situate mainland China? Within the Greater China region there has been extensive DH activity, although the early work was not framed as DH^[4], while in both Hong Kong and Taiwan DH that developed differently^[5]; indeed, there is already a Taiwanese Association for DH as a member organisation of ADHO. What is it then that is unique to DH in mainland China and how might that be leveraged to create a unique position within the global community?

One approach, to enable the capture of the varieties of DH practice, would be rather than having a central DH structure focusing on ADHO, our community might encourage a decentralized one, representing all participants with ‘localized expressions of scholarship that reinvigorate through exchange’^[1]368. To move away from a western Anglophone set of organizations and structures to allow regional ones to ascend and achieve inclusion rather than exclusion. Arguably, ‘the region is less important than other forms of constituency as an organising principle for the digital humanities [...] as a whole’^[6]500.

What then is unique and specific to DH in China? What is the story that mainland China can relate to the rest of the global DH community? The application of technology and computational methodologies to humanities material in mainland China extends back to the early 1990s^[4]. Just as in the west, there is no systematic record of DH in China, but its development can be traced by projects, beginning with large scale digitization in the 1970s and 1980s; the 1990s saw the launch of Digital Dunhuang, and the 2000s with the China Bibliographic Database, Chinese Classic Ancient Books, and the first DH Centre at Wuhan in 2011. Text and cultural heritage are common objects of study in DH but how are these framed within mainland China to focus on the local flavour of DH scholarship? There are similarities and differences across the entirety of the global DH community but while ‘DH is global, its practices are local’^[7]381. The features may be shared and common, but they would be conveyed ‘in different ways based on local influences’, in what Risam terms a DH ‘accent’^[8]80--the way in which the local reflects the global but in its own unique way. For example, current issues about Chinese DH in the global community include the usefulness and effectiveness of the scattered Sinitic databases for Chinese DH research and the need to build an understanding of the Chinese cultural context within the framework of that Sinitic research. These are the questions that will be raised in our presentation and addressed in the full paper.  

参考文献 (References)

1. EARHART A E. Digital humanities within a global context: creating borderlands of localized expression[J]. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018, 11(3): 357-369.
2. GALINA I. Is there anybody out there? Building a global digital humanities community[J]. Humanidades digitales, 2013, 21: 307-316.
3. MAHONY S, GAO J. Linguistic and Cultural Hegemony in the Digital Humanities[C]//Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2018. The Digital Humanities Institute, 2019.
4. TSUI, L. H. Charting the emergence of the digital humanities in China[M]//Chinese culture in the 21st century and its global dimensions. Springer, Singapore, 2020: 203-216.
5. WANG X, TAN X, LI H. The evolution of digital humanities in China[J]. Library Trends, 2020, 69(1): 7-29.
6. O'DONNELL D P, WALTER K L, GIL A, et al. Only connect: the globalization of the digital humanities[J]. A new companion to digital humanities, 2015: 493-510.
7. RISAM R. Other worlds, other DHs: Notes towards a DH accent[J]. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2017, 32(2): 377-384.
8. RISAM R. New digital worlds: Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy[M]. Northwestern University Press, 2018.