Beijing Forum | “The Chinese History Studies in Digital Context” webinar is held

Peking: “The Chinese History Studies in Digital Context” webinar was held, kicking off the webinar series of Beijing Forum. Scholars gathered online to discuss how digital humanities would influence history studies in the age of information. The webinar was jointly held by PKU Digital Humanities Center, PKU Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, PKU Department of History, and Beijing Forum.

The webinar was broadcast live on several platforms, attracting a large number of audience and receiving support from the mainstream media. Focusing on global issues such as artificial intelligence, global health, biomedicine, the 2020 Beijing Forum webinar series aims to promote academic and social progress through intercultural discussions.

Professor Deng Xiaonan, director of PKU Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of PKU Center for PKU Research on Ancient Chinese History, appreciated the role of digital humanities on multidisciplinary studies. She believed that the digital approach has become the most open and outstanding interdisciplinary research methods in the field of humanities.

Peter K. Bol, professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, said in his speech that digital humanities would promote new discoveries of geographic information and social background in historical biographical data.

Dagmar Schäfer, director of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and honorary professor in History of Technology at TU Berlin, pointed out that digital humanities opened up new areas of history studies. She mentioned that through the reorganization of historical data, the digital humanities method would give us new understandings of historical events.

Hilde De Weerdt, professor of Chinese History from the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), said that the digital humanities brought historians not only new challenges but also new chances. Open imagination could be the impetus of digital humanities in the future.

Chen Hsi-yuan, research fellow of the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica and director of Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures, emphasized the importance of text analysis and image analysis in digital humanities methods and expressed his hope for the comprehensive development of digital humanities.