Novelties

The summer of 2023 has been particularly eventful as I participated in three conferences and completed a research trip in three different countries. I started with the DARIAH annual conference in Budapest, for which we organized a working group meeting with my co-chair to gather those interested in multilingual DH. This was followed by a presentation at the always exciting World History Association conference in Pittsburgh and an intensive research trip at Yale's Film Archive and Library to complete the last chapter of my book. Last but not least, I complemented these engagements with the week-long DH2023 conference in Graz, Austria, where I co-led two successful 4-hour workshops with full house: "Amplifying unheard voices in Digital Humanities: an OpenMethods edit-a-thon" with Ulrike Wuttke (FH Potsdam) and Christopher Nunn (University of Heidelberg) and "Who are the Users in Multilingual DH? A Community Exploration" with Cosima Wagner (FU Berlin) and David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi) with a special focus on applying UX persona creation to DH. 

I also served as chair for the panel "Digital Methods" in a short paper section for five excellent and linguistically diverse projects.

I am happy to report that our proposal, created with Maroussia Bednarkiewicz at the University of Tübingen, to establish a new working group for multilingual DH has been approved by the board of DARIAH! You can now find more information about us, the working group, and our contact information here: https://www.dariah.eu/activities/working-groups/multilingual-dh/

As part of our initiatives, we have launched the Living Bibliography of Multilingual DH as a Zotero group library. This project aims to fill an important gap by collecting the existing scholarship of multilingual DH. Recognizing the diversity of platforms and self-expression that scholars use to make their insights and projects available, we are inclusive in terms of genres and languages from scholarly articles and monographs to tutorials and syllabi. You are welcome to join the team of contributors by reaching out to us directly or by sending us a request on Zotero: https://www.zotero.org/groups/4917236/the_living_bibliography_of_multilingual_dh/library

We perceive our working group as a "mediation hub" with the specific goal of serving as a platform for exchange and to connect otherwise disparate communities, scholars, and other stakeholders involved in the strengthening of language diversity in DH. You are welcome to join our efforts, for example by signing up to our mailing list (accessible on our DARIAH website) and by attending our Bimonthly Short online meetings.

We are also available on social media: Mastodon: @multilingualdhwg@fedihum.org, Twitter: @MultilingDHwg

We are planning specific events for the new season, so stay tuned for more updates.

My contribution to the edited volume, Global Debates in the Digital Humanities is now available also in open access! You can find my chapter "Digital Brush Talk: Challenges and Potential Connections in East Asian Digital Research" on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/3144060

And on Jstor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2d6jsjh

The print version is available on the University of Minnesota Press' website: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/global-debates-in-the-digital-humanities

and on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Debates-Digital-Humanities-Domenico-Fiormonte/dp/1517913268

Just received the proof of two forthcoming articles on East Asian/multilingual DH - I do not think I will ever get tired of the moment of excitement when I first get to see my work in a decently designed form, just before it becomes visible and accessible to others as well. Stay tuned!

New book review! My review of Thijs Weststeijn's (ed.) Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounter between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590-1800 (Brill) is now available online on the International Institute for Asian Studies' website and, as an added form of joy, in a printed format in the latest IIAS Newsletter. Happy reading!

Presenting as part of the Werkstattgespräch series of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library), which has one of the most impressive East Asia collection I have ever seen, was a great conclusion of my 1 month stay there in August as a research grant holder. Traveling to Berlin was my first trip abroad since the pandemic began and was also my first time in the city itself, but it turned out to be one of my most memorable research trips so far (in a positive sense)! Danke für die Erfahrung.

My latest peer-reviewed article, entitled "Finding the Self through the Other: The Role of Rituals in the Dai Nihon shi (The History of Great Japan)," has been published in Studies on Asia. The original version of this paper has won the prestigious MCAA Percy Buchanan Graduate Prize for the Best Paper in the Northeast Asia Category, and its revised version is now available in an open access format here.

My latest book review (actually more of an experimental piece intertwining a book review with an interview) has been published in Távol-keleti Tanulmányok (2020/2). I already have its printed version in hand, but it will also be available online (open access) soon. The title of the paper is "Masaoka Shiki világa: Re/view - Inter/view" ("The World of Masaoka Shiki: Re/view - Inter/view"). This piece includes the review of Robert Tuck’s Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Columbia UP, 2018) and the Hungarian translation of Masaoka Shiki’s 120 haiku poems (Napkút Kiadó, 2020), accompanied by an interview with the translator, Adrienn Czifra.  

Our digital technology roundtable with Ligeia Lugli, Steven Braun, and Shih-Pei Chen on the role of data visualizations in Asian humanities has been selected to appear (again) on the program of the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in 2021. Last year's conference got cancelled due to the pandemic, but with two new members and novel insights from the "old" members, our panel should be even more relevant and fresh than the previous version! See you in the online realm in March 2021!

I have been invited to speak at the OPERAS Conference 2020 (Opening up Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe: From Promises to Reality) on November 2, 2020. This was the first time I talked about my podcast, Humanista, at a conference within the framework of the panel "How to advocate for social sciences and humanities". 

A new special issue on Digital Humanities and East Asian studies is brewing! I have been invited to serve as guest editor of the new special issue of the International Journal of Digital Humanities with Hilde De Weerdt. Stay tuned for further updates!

What is the modern role of libraries? What are they and what could they become? These are the key questions that the new episode of my podcast explores with Cosima Wagner (Freie Universität Berlin Library) - out now on humanistathepodcast.com

My latest solicited review on Wang Yuanchong's Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616-1911 has recently been published in the English Historical Review (Oxford UP).

Following DH Benelux, I joined the DARIAH-EU supported OpenMethods project and now serve as member of the core Editorial Team. I am particularly committed to help give a voice to the underrepresented community of those working with non-Western and non-Latin scripts in DH. My upcoming post on the platform will be dedicated to MARKUS, a multifunctional digital tool with a focus on Chinese and Korean texts. I also proposed a novel series to the editorial team in the form of "maker interviews" - stay tuned for the first part of this category with the initiator of MARKUS!

The pandemic forced a number of conferences and workshops to the online realm which has also allowed me to attend more professional events than I would have otherwise been able to. Here is a list of the conferences and workshops I recently participated in: 

ADHO's DH2020 (on Humanities Commons) - was happy to see a growing number of non-Western topics among the presentations

Before and Beyond Typography - E-conference on Youtube - very innovative platform organized by Tom Mullaney at Stanford

Venice Digital Summer Program in Digital and Public Humanities - the inaugural workshop of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca'Foscari University in Italy went online as well. I won the highest amount of scholarship to attend, so it would have been great to be able to participate in-person, but the 5-day course in Digital Public History still offered a multifaceted training in topics, such as history and/in TV, the analysis of tweets, the future of public humanities, etc. One advantage of the online version was that it allowed me to attend all four parallel tracks of the program (since most sessions were recorded), so I gained novel insights about digital art history, digital textual analysis, and digital archeology as well.

Network analysis - 2 day event organized by the Center for Digital History Aarhus. One of the beautiful aspects of DH (and research in general) is that there is always something new to learn. This practical workshop introduced me to the usage and capabilities of two platforms: Vistorian and Pajek. 

Disrupting Digital Monolingualism - King's College London's much-needed workshop on the needs of DH practitioners in a non-Western context

DH Benelux - having spent the past 6 years focusing on the US DH scene, it was great to dive deeper into the realm of European DH. This was also the platform that led me to the DARIAH-EU supported OpenMethods project, where I currently serve as member of the core Editorial Team.

DataVizLive - Online conference of the Data Visualization Society - It is often mentioned that while data visualizations are used extensively, there is still limited communication between its practitioners inside and beyond the academic realm. This conference featured a number of designers, data visualization specialists, etc. whose multilayered approach to what dataviz is and what it could be was very eye-opening to me. This event inspired me to include more design-related concepts into my DH syllabi as well for students to consider.

Having attended King's College London's Disrupting Digital Monolingualism workshop, I have been invited to the theme group "Linguistic and Geocultural Diversity in Digital Knowledge Infrastructures". The goal of this international collaboration is to formulate a set of guidelines for universities, libraries, and software developers to raise their awareness of the needs of those working with non-Latin scripts in the context of digital humanities and the development of digital infrastructures. This is an ongoing project, so stay tuned for the next stage of our collaboration! Project summary: https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/disrupting-digital-monolingualism/Themes/themeone/summary/  and Participants: https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/disrupting-digital-monolingualism/Themes/themeone/biographiesOne/