Digital Humanities and the Power of Collaboration: Expanding Connections from Local to Global

What Next for Digital Himalaya? Reflections on 25 Years of Community, Continuity, and Collaboration in a Digital Humanities Research Project

Mark Turin (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

25 years ago, in 2000, a group of four anthropologists and historians at the University of Cambridge set out to explore new methods for collecting, protecting, and connecting historical multimedia collections relating to the Himalayan region in ways that would widen access to the materials through emerging digital platforms. We named this pilot project “Digital Himalaya.”

We began by digitizing older sets of ethnographic data held in university and personal collections across Europe to protect them from obsolescence and decay, forward migrate them as new standards emerged, and share them back with originating communities in the Himalayan region and with scholars everywhere through the web and other digital media, as appropriate.

In today’s visually rich presentation, I wish to explore the changing demographic of our users, the constructive criticism and welcome attention that we have received for the work in which we are engaged, the shifting expectations about what services and role we provide, and some reflections around the future of this collaborative partnership.

In this engaging and interactive lecture, I reflect on over two decades of digitally-mediated partnerships with communities whose ethnographic, linguistic and audio-visual legacies I have had the privilege of working. In particular, I focus on the missteps and baked-in naïve assumptions that have bedeviled the digital return projects in which I have been involved. As a researcher and teacher in a secure and privileged position, I propose that a realistic goal is not to make no mistakes (a hubristic foreclosure), but rather to make better ones.

2:00-3:00

The Internationalization of the Text Encoding Initiative and Our Understanding of Text

Elisa Beshero-Bondar (Pennsylvania State University at Erie, The Behrend College; TEI Technical Council)

This presentation will discuss significant projects and concepts that have helped to internationalize the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative since they were first drafted in the 1990s. As the TEI community has engaged scholars from many different textual and scholarly traditions, our international community has expanded our ways of thinking about texts, what is valuable to encode, and what is important for the support and sustainability of research in the long term future. The talk will feature TEI projects that are designed to investigate multicultural and multilingual texts, the problems and possibilities of the hierarchical encoding structures for which the processing of TEI and XML were built, as well as the concepts, encoding challenges, and problems that the active TEI community have contributed to our understanding of the digitization and curation of textual heritage around the world.

3:20-5:00: Discussion

共催: 人文学・社会科学のDX化に向けた研究開発推進事業（中核機関・人間文化研究機構、連携機関・慶應義塾大学）, 地域の言語文化ネットワークのモデル構築 (24K03232)

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