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Early Access Launch: The Newspaper Research Companion

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(Deutsche Version: siehe unten)

Dear CrossAsia users,

We are excited to share that our new service, the Newspaper Research Companion (NRC), is now available in early access!

Built by the CrossAsia Lab over the past year, the NRC is an AI-powered research platform that transforms how large digitized newspaper archives can be accessed and explored. It opens up historical press to intelligent, cross-lingual discovery for the first time.

What Is the Newspaper Research Companion?

The NRC enables researchers to query, read, and analyse historical newspaper collections across multiple languages through a single interface, working entirely in their own language. In its current version, the NRC covers over 32.9 million article chunks drawn from 66 newspaper titles in German, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified, and Classical), English, and Russian, spanning the years 1785 to 2014. To view the full list of included titles, see the Resources table on NRC homepage.

Rather than matching keywords, the NRC understands the intent behind a question and retrieves material that is genuinely relevant to the research need, much like asking a knowledgeable colleague who happens to have read millions of historical newspaper articles across multiple languages.

Why Early Access?

The NRC is the first iteration of a service we will be continuously improving, expanding the available materials and refining its design and features over time. Some of the underlying licensing agreements are still being finalised, which means the current collection does not yet reflect the full scope of what the NRC will eventually cover.

Key Features of the NRC

  1. Ask real research questions. Owing to our AI-powered semantic search, rather than entering isolated search terms, users can pose complex, interpretive questions. How did German and Chinese newspapers cover the same event? How did the framing of a political figure shift over decades? How did Russian, German, and Chinese press traditions diverge during the same international crisis? The NRC synthesizes answers drawn from across the corpus, grounded in the actual sources it retrieves. Users can browse all sources or filter by region, time period, source language, or specific publication. Questions can be posed in any language, including mixed-language queries, so key terms need not be translated. Users can set the language of the results, choosing between English, German, French, Korean, Japanese or Traditional Chinese, or the original language of each material.

 

NRC search box with open filter feature including the result language setting and the resources table dropdown below.

 

  1. Access what was previously out of reach. A question posed in English can surface relevant articles from Russian, Chinese, or German-language sources, without the need for external translation support. The AI model captures meaning across languages rather than relying on surface-level word overlap.

 

  1. Understand sources at a glance. Every retrieved article is accompanied by an AI-generated summary in the user’s chosen language, making it possible to immediately assess the relevance and content of articles in Classical Chinese, Russian, or any other collection language, without having to read the original in full. Each result links directly to its original source, ensuring transparency and allowing CrossAsia users to verify the information and explore further with a single click.

 

 

  1. Auto-generated synthesis. Beyond individual articles, the NRC generates a short research report drawing on retrieved sources, with full references to the underlying originals – suitable for annotation, integration into research workflows, or as a foundation for further enquiry. The report can be downloaded as a PDF.

 

How Does It Work?

When a user poses a question, the NRC’s AI pipeline interprets the underlying information need, identifies historically significant terms across languages and time periods, and generates multilingual equivalents of key concepts to broaden coverage across the corpus. It then retrieves material across all supported languages simultaneously and filters results for relevance before generating a response grounded exclusively in the material that has passed the relevance check. Each step is transparently shown to the user as the system progresses:

 

 

All processing takes place within the IT infrastructure of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Licensed materials are never shown to unauthorized users. The NRC surfaces semantic context and links back to original sources without reproducing or replacing them. To learn more about our methodology, visit About Our Method on the NRC homepage.

Try It Now

We warmly invite you to explore the early access platform and share your impressions with us. Your feedback is invaluable for its continued development!

If you would like to take part in a 15-minute user interview and help shape the NRC’s future, please email x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

We hope you enjoy discovering the NRC!

Your CrossAsia Team

 

 

Liebe Nutzer:innen,

wir freuen uns, Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass unser neuer Service, der Newspaper Research Companion (NRC), ab sofort im Early Access verfügbar ist!

Der im CrossAsia Lab entwickelte NRC ist eine KI-gestützte Rechercheplattform, die den Zugang zu großen digitalisierten Zeitungsarchiven grundlegend neu gestaltet. Erstmals wird die historische Presse einer intelligenten, sprachübergreifenden Recherche zugänglich.

Was ist der Newspaper Research Companion?

Der NRC ermöglicht es Forschenden, historische Zeitungsbestände in mehreren Sprachen über eine einzige Oberfläche abzufragen, zu lesen und zu analysieren – und das vollständig in der eigenen Sprache. In der aktuellen Version umfasst der NRC über 32,9 Millionen Artikelabschnitte aus 66 Zeitungstiteln in deutscher, chinesischer (traditionell, vereinfacht und klassisch), englischer und russischer Sprache aus den Jahren 1785 bis 2014. Die vollständige Liste der enthaltenen Titel finden Sie in der Quellentabelle auf der NRC-Startseite.

Anstatt bloß Schlagwörter abzugleichen, versteht der NRC die Intention hinter einer Frage und findet Material, das für das Forschungsanliegen tatsächlich relevant ist – ganz so, als würde man eine kundige Kollegin fragen, die zufällig Millionen historischer Zeitungsartikel in mehreren Sprachen gelesen hat.

Warum Early Access?

Der NRC ist die erste Ausbaustufe eines Services, den wir kontinuierlich weiterentwickeln werden, sowohl durch die Erweiterung der verfügbaren Materialien als auch durch die Verfeinerung von Design und Funktionen. Einige der zugrunde liegenden Lizenzvereinbarungen befinden sich noch in der finalen Abstimmung, sodass der aktuelle Bestand noch nicht den vollen Umfang dessen widerspiegelt, was der NRC künftig abdecken wird.

Die wichtigsten Funktionen des NRC

 

1. Stellen Sie echte Forschungsfragen. Dank unserer KI-gestützten semantischen Suche müssen Nutzer:innen keine isolierten Suchbegriffe mehr eingeben, sondern können komplexe, interpretative Fragen stellen: Wie berichteten deutsche und chinesische Zeitungen über dasselbe Ereignis? Wie veränderte sich die Darstellung einer politischen Persönlichkeit über Jahrzehnte hinweg? Wie unterschieden sich russische, deutsche und chinesische Pressetraditionen während derselben internationalen Krise? Der NRC erstellt synthetisierte Antworten aus dem gesamten Korpus, die auf den tatsächlich gefundenen Quellen beruhen. Nutzer:innen können alle Quellen durchsuchen oder nach Region, Zeitraum, Quellsprache oder einzelnen Publikationen filtern. Fragen können in jeder beliebigen Sprache gestellt werden, auch gemischtsprachig, sodass zentrale Begriffe nicht übersetzt werden müssen. Die Sprache der Ergebnisse lässt sich frei wählen: Englisch, Deutsch, Französisch, Koreanisch, Japanisch oder traditionelles Chinesisch – oder die Originalsprache des jeweiligen Materials.

NRC-Suchfeld mit geöffneten Filtern, darunter die Einstellung der Ergebnissprache, sowie darunterliegender ausklappbarer Quellentabelle.

2. Erschließen Sie bislang Unzugängliches. Eine auf Englisch gestellte Frage kann relevante Artikel aus russisch-, chinesisch- oder deutschsprachigen Quellen zutage fördern, ganz ohne externe Übersetzungshilfe. Das KI-Modell erfasst Bedeutung über Sprachgrenzen hinweg, anstatt sich auf oberflächliche Wortübereinstimmungen zu stützen.

3. Verstehen Sie Quellen auf einen Blick. Jeder gefundene Artikel wird von einer KI-generierten Zusammenfassung in der gewählten Sprache begleitet. So lässt sich die Relevanz und der Inhalt von Artikeln in klassischem Chinesisch, Russisch oder jeder anderen Sprache der Sammlung sofort einschätzen, ohne das Original vollständig lesen zu müssen. Jedes Ergebnis verlinkt direkt auf die Originalquelle. So können CrossAsia-Nutzer:innen die Informationen transparent nachvollziehen und mit einem einzigen Klick überprüfen oder vertiefend weiterrecherchieren.

4. Automatisch generierte Synthese. Über die einzelnen Artikel hinaus erstellt der NRC einen kurzen Forschungsbericht auf Grundlage der gefundenen Quellen mit vollständigen Verweisen auf die zugrunde liegenden Originale. Dieser eignet sich zur Annotation, zur Einbindung in Forschungsworkflows oder als Ausgangspunkt für weiterführende Untersuchungen. Der Bericht kann als PDF heruntergeladen werden.

 

Wie funktioniert das?

Wenn eine Frage gestellt wird, interpretiert die KI-Pipeline des NRC zunächst das zugrunde liegende Informationsbedürfnis, identifiziert historisch bedeutsame Begriffe über Sprachen und Epochen hinweg und generiert mehrsprachige Entsprechungen zentraler Konzepte, um die Abdeckung im Korpus zu erweitern. Anschließend ruft das System Material aus allen unterstützten Sprachen gleichzeitig ab und filtert die Ergebnisse nach Relevanz, bevor es eine Antwort generiert, die ausschließlich auf dem geprüften und als relevant eingestuften Quellenmaterial beruht. Jeder Schritt wird den Nutzer:innen während der Verarbeitung transparent angezeigt:

Die gesamte Verarbeitung findet innerhalb der IT-Infrastruktur der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin statt. Lizenzierte Materialien verbleiben bei ihren jeweiligen Anbietern und werden nicht autorisierten Nutzer:innen zu keinem Zeitpunkt angezeigt. Der NRC stellt semantischen Kontext bereit und verlinkt auf die Originalquellen, ohne diese zu reproduzieren oder zu ersetzen. Mehr über unsere Methodik erfahren Sie unter „About Our Method“ auf der NRC-Startseite.

Jetzt ausprobieren

Wir laden Sie herzlich ein, die Early-Access-Plattform zu erkunden und uns Ihre Eindrücke mitzuteilen. Ihr Feedback ist für die Weiterentwicklung von unschätzbarem Wert!

Wenn Sie an einem 15-minütigen Nutzerinterview teilnehmen und die Zukunft des NRC mitgestalten möchten, schreiben Sie uns gerne an x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Wir wünschen Ihnen viel Freude beim Entdecken des NRC!

Ihr CrossAsia-Team

 

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

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Dear users,

On June 23rd at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the sixth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will be led by Dr. Rafal Felbur (Heidelberg University), titled “Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations.” In this talk, Dr. Felbur will introduce a project aimed at creating a born-digital historical research dictionary of the language used in the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist texts. The abstract is as follows:

Over the course of first millennium, thousands of Buddhist texts were translated from Indic languages into Chinese. Through this process, Chinese intellectual and religious life encountered entirely new worlds of thought and practice. In scale and significance, this translation movement constituted the largest transfer of culture between two major civilisations in the premodern world.

The earliest phase of this enterprise (148–401 CE), spanning roughly 250 years, was particularly dynamic, creative, and formative. Comparable in many respects to the development of Christianity in the Roman Empire before Constantine, this period witnessed the production of hundreds of translated works amounting to approximately four million Chinese characters—equivalent to some 20,000 pages in modern English translation.

This presentation introduces a project (currently in the planning stage) to create the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art online historical research dictionary devoted to the distinctive idiom that emerged in the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist literature.

About the speaker:

Dr. Rafal Felbur is Akademischer Assistent to the Chair of Buddhist Studies at Heidelberg University. He works on the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics of the encounter between India and China in the first millennium CE.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.
image source provided by Dr. What does it mean to be a historian in the age of AI? AI is not the first such shift. The digital turn quietly reshaped how historians work. It raised accessibility. A historian today starts a project at a search engine, pulls sources from a digital archive, and turns archive photographs into research data at home. As Ian Milligan puts it, “we are all digital now.” If the digital turn brought accessibility, AI brings something accessibility alone could not: machine reading at the scale of the archive itself. Why scale? Historical research moves through stages: reading, extracting, structuring, analyzing, visualizing, asking new questions. Each works on a single document but breaks at archive scale. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty hold roughly 384,000 articles across five centuries. Reconstructing the careers of even one generation of officials requires linking and reasoning across more material than a single researcher can manage. In this talk I draw on several ongoing projects, including a vision-language model fine-tuned for Manchu and an agent-based record-linkage system across the Annals and the Bangmok (civil-examination rosters), to argue that AI does not replace any step in this sequence; it changes the scale at which each becomes possible. The Manchu model does not read more carefully than a Manchu specialist, but it makes an entire archive legible. The linkage system does not match identities more carefully than a historian by hand, but it tracks the same person across sources that no individual could reconcile end to end. Once reading, linkage, and structuring scale up, questions of a different order become askable: not one official’s career, but a generation’s; not one local pattern, but the structure of bureaucratic mobility across five centuries. The historian’s craft is unchanged; what changes is what becomes askable. To be a historian in the age of AI is to treat discovery, when the data itself begins to suggest the questions, as a stage of the craft.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts

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Dear users,

On June 9th at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the fifth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will feature a presentation by Dr. Donghyeok Choi titled “From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts.” In this talk, Dr. Choi explores how the craft of historical research is changing in the age of AI through several of his ongoing digital humanities projects focused on premodern East Asian texts. The abstract is as follows:

What does it mean to be a historian in the age of AI? AI is not the first such shift. The digital turn quietly reshaped how historians work. It raised accessibility. A historian today starts a project at a search engine, pulls sources from a digital archive, and turns archive photographs into research data at home. As Ian Milligan puts it, “we are all digital now.” If the digital turn brought accessibility, AI brings something accessibility alone could not: machine reading at the scale of the archive itself. Why scale? Historical research moves through stages: reading, extracting, structuring, analyzing, visualizing, asking new questions. Each works on a single document but breaks at archive scale. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty hold roughly 384,000 articles across five centuries. Reconstructing the careers of even one generation of officials requires linking and reasoning across more material than a single researcher can manage.

In this talk I draw on several ongoing projects, including a vision-language model fine-tuned for Manchu and an agent-based record-linkage system across the Annals and the Bangmok (civil-examination rosters), to argue that AI does not replace any step in this sequence; it changes the scale at which each becomes possible. The Manchu model does not read more carefully than a Manchu specialist, but it makes an entire archive legible. The linkage system does not match identities more carefully than a historian by hand, but it tracks the same person across sources that no individual could reconcile end to end. Once reading, linkage, and structuring scale up, questions of a different order become askable: not one official’s career, but a generation’s; not one local pattern, but the structure of bureaucratic mobility across five centuries. The historian’s craft is unchanged; what changes is what becomes askable. To be a historian in the age of AI is to treat discovery, when the data itself begins to suggest the questions, as a stage of the craft.

About the speaker:

Dr. Donghyeok Choi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. He holds a Ph.D. from KAIST’s Graduate School of Culture Technology (2024) and a B.A. in History and a B.E. in Computer Science Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University. He applies computational and quantitative methods to East Asian history and builds AI-assisted research infrastructure for the humanities. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

Neue Lizenzen: Korea Pro

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(English below)

Liebe Nutzer:innen,

Wir freuen uns, Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass wir Korea Pro abonniert haben – eine Plattform mit englischsprachigen Nachrichtenartikeln und Analysen zur südkoreanischen Außenpolitik, Politik und Wirtschaft.

Zusammen mit unseren bestehenden Abonnements von NK News & Pro sowie KCNA Watch steht CrossAsia-Nutzerinnen und -Nutzern nun das vollständige Angebot der Korea Risk Group zur Verfügung.

Wir freuen uns über Ihr Feedback zu diesem neuen Abonnement.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Ihr / Euer

CrossAsia Team

 

Dear Users,

 

We are excited to announce that we have subscribed to Korea Pro, a platform providing English-language news articles and analysis on South Korea’s foreign policy, politics, and economy.

Together with our existing subscriptions to NK News & Pro and KCNA Watch, CrossAsia users can now access the full range of resources offered by Korea Risk Group.

We look forward to hearing from you if you have any feedback on this subscription.

 

Yours

CrossAsia team

The 2026 European Network of Korean Resources Specialists Workshop, June 3–6

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Dear users,

 

From June 3–6, 2026, CrossAsia and Freie Universität Berlin will co-host the 2026 European Network of Korean Resources Specialists (ENKRS) Workshop, the annual meeting of information specialists working for Korean materials and Korean Studies collections.

Founded in 2018, ENKRS held its inaugural workshop at Freie Universität Berlin. Over the past eight years, the network has developed into Europe’s leading professional community for Korean Studies librarianship. Following its relaunch after the pandemic, ENKRS has held annual workshops in several countries including the Netherlands, France, and the Czech Republic.

The 2026 workshop returns to Berlin under the theme, Heritage and Horizons: From Historical Collections to the Age of AI. The programme will examine the relationship between historical collections, digital scholarship, and emerging technologies in the field of Korean Studies, bringing together about fifty librarians, archivists, and researchers from Europe, the Republic of Korea, and North America.

The full programme is now available at:
https://www.enkrs.net/2026-berlin

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Korea Foundation for its continued support of ENKRS. Its sponsorship has been essential to the development of the network and to fostering international collaboration in Korean Studies librarianship across Europe.

Those interested in attending conference sessions are invited to contact Dr. Jing Hu (jing.hu@sbb.spk-berlin.de) for further information. We look forward to welcoming colleagues and guests to Berlin for four days of discussion and exchange.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

CrossAsia Talks: Patrick Hällzon 28. Mai 2026

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(See English below)

Freuen Sie sich mit uns auf Dr. Patrick Hällzon (Uppsala University) und seinen Online-Vortrag am 28. Mai 2026 ab 18 Uhr (Berliner Zeit) zum Thema „The use of domestic and wild animals in public performances in the oases of Eastern Turkestan„.

This online presentation deals with public performances involving animals in Eastern Turkestan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several traditional pastimes in the region, such as pigeon fancying, falconry, and various games related to horsemanship fit into this description. The focus of this presentation, however, will be on the usage of domestic and wild animals in performed entertainment in public places.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf Mastodon und BlueSky an.

—

Dr. Patrick Hällzon (Uppsala University) will give a talk on 28 May 2026 at 6 pm (Berlin time), offering an insight into his current research under the title ‘The use of domestic and wild animals in public performances in the oases of Eastern Turkestan’. The lecture will take place online.

This online presentation deals with public performances involving animals in Eastern Turkestan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several traditional pastimes in the region, such as pigeon fancying, falconry, and various games related to horsemanship fit into this description. The focus of this presentation, however, will be on the usage of domestic and wild animals in performed entertainment in public places.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will also be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas

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Dear users,

On May 21st at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the fourth session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. This session will feature a joint presentation by Dr. CHEN Shih-Pei and Dr. Mariana Favila Vázquez, titled “Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas.” In this talk, Dr. Chen and Dr. Favila Vázquez will present and compare their digital approaches to analyzing geographical knowledge in early modern China and the Spanish Empire.

How did early modern empires come to know their vast territories, especially the remote regions at their peripheries? In a recent book titled “Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue”, scholars explore how the Spanish and the Chinese empires developed comparable ways to gather, organize, and use knowledge about their local worlds. The Spanish Empire compiled the Relaciones Geográficas (trans. relational geographies) that surveyed the indigenous peoples, lands, and natural resources of its newly acquired, remote territories. In parallel, the Chinese officials compiled difangzhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) since the 12th century to document the local landscapes, people, flora, and fauna of each regions within the vast empire.

In this CrossAsia DH Lunch talk, two authors who contributed to this book will talk about how they each designed digital analytical tools to help grasp the overall structures of these two genres, given their large amount and rich contents. Shih-Pei Chen will introduce a quantitative analysis based on the section headings of local gazetteers within LoGaRT (Local Gazetteers Research Tools). She argues, the sections headings of each local gazetteer are conscious selection made by its compilers as to how to best describe and document a region, and thus they should be treated as knowledge categories. In this session, she will show how it looks like when analyzing all the section headings from 4000 gazetteers together: it reveals a dynamic structure of “local knowledge” of historical China that is jointly defined by imperial guidelines and local officials across geographical regions over 800 years.

Mariana Favila Vázquez will introduce the case of the sixteenth-century Relaciones Geográficas, a documentary corpus produced in response to a questionnaire of fifty questions circulated in 1577. The questionnaire was commissioned by King Philip II and distributed through the Council of the Indies as part of a broader effort by the Spanish Crown to gather systematic information about its American territories. The instructions and interrogatory were prepared under the direction of the royal cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco and sent to local authorities in New Spain, who were responsible for compiling the responses.

This session will present a case study based on the information contained in the responses from the former Bishopric of Michoacán, with particular attention to references to inland bodies of water. It will also outline the methodology of Geographical Text Analysis, which enables the creation of digital annotations using historically relevant semantic categories and the linking of identified toponyms to their corresponding geographic coordinates, making it possible to conduct subsequent spatial analyses.

The works featured in this talk can also be found at “Part 2: Structures of Knowing” in Knowing an Empire, which is open access and can be read online at Fulcrum.org.

About the speakers:

Dr. CHEN Shih-pei is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and a specialist in Digital Humanities. She desgins digital research methods, tools, and infrastructures to help historians engage with digitized historical materials from new perspectives. She has led the development of several DH projects, including the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT); CHMap as a website hosting open-access historical maps of China (in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University);  RISE & SHINE as an API protocols for the standardized exchange of digital texts among digital tools and content providers. At MPIWG, she is now leading another research project: “Common Knowledge and Its Sources in the Sinosphere, 14th–20th Centuries,” which investigate how the Chinese daily-use encyclopedias to examine how “common knowledge” in Chinese history evolved and diverged from elite and literati genres.

Dr. Mariana Favila Vázquez is an archaeologist, and holds an MA and a PhD in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research focuses on pre-Hispanic and colonial navigation, cultural landscapes, and the use of digital technologies and spatial analysis in historical research. She is the author of Veredas de Mar y Río. Navegación prehispánica y colonial en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz (UNAM, 2016) and Navegación prehispánica en Mesoamérica (BAR Publishing, 2020), as well as several articles and book chapters. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Lancaster University and at UNAM’s Institute of Geography. She is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City Unit, in the area of Ethnohistory, where she is developing a project on lacustrine landscapes and digital humanities. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNII), Level 1.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia Talks: Anna Turanskaya und Alexander Zorin

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(See English below)

Wir freuen uns, dass am 23.04. ab 18 Uhr Dr. Anna Turanskaya (University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot) und Dr. Alexander Zorin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in ihrem Onlinevortrag „From Dzungaria to Berlin: Tibetan and Mongolian Folios in the Holdings of the Staatsbibliothek“ neue Erkenntnisse zu den mongolischen und tibetischen Kanjurfolios aus Ablai Kit aus den Beständen der Staatsbibliothek vorstellen werden.

Between 1717 and 1721, two Oirat monasteries—usually called Sem Palat (Russian for “Seven Chambers”) and Ablai-kit—were encountered by Russian expeditions in what was then the frontier zone of Dzungaria and is now eastern Kazakhstan. The monasteries had been abandoned by the Oirats following internal conflicts, and most of their cultural treasures were lost. Only a small number of artefacts survived, among them approximately 1,500 folios of Buddhist texts in Tibetan and Mongolian.

While the largest portion of these materials is preserved in Saint Petersburg, several European institutions also hold folios originating from these monasteries. These manuscripts represent some of the earliest Tibetan and Mongolian texts to enter European collections. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin preserves a particularly notable group: 23 Mongolian and 23 Tibetan folios, almost all of them from Ablai-kit.

In this talk, we will trace the history of these manuscripts. In particular, they are connected with the work of German scholars of Asian languages, Johann Christoph Christian Rüdiger and Bernhard Jülg, as well as with the most influential historical Tibetan typeface, produced by Ferdinand Theinhardt for Heinrich August Jäschke’s Tibetan Dictionary (1881). We will also discuss the significance of these folios for the study of the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist canons.

Die Vortragssprache ist Englisch. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie uns unter: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Der Vortrag wird darüber hinaus via Webex gestreamt und aufgezeichnet*. Sie können am Vortrag über Ihren Browser ohne Installation einer Software teilnehmen. Klicken Sie dazu unten auf „Zum Vortrag“, folgen dem Link „Über Browser teilnehmen“ und geben Ihren Namen ein.

Zum Vortrag

Alle bislang angekündigten Vorträge finden Sie hier. Die weiteren Termine kündigen wir in unserem Blog und auf Mastodon und BlueSky an.

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We are delighted that on 23 April at 6 p.m., Dr. Anna Turanskaya (University of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot) and Dr. Alexander Zorin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will present new findings on the Mongolian and Tibetan Kanjurfolios from Ablai Kit in the Staatsbibliothek’s holdings in their online lecture „From Dzungaria to Berlin: Tibetan and Mongolian Folios in the Holdings of the Staatsbibliothek.“

Between 1717 and 1721, two Oirat monasteries—usually called Sem Palat (Russian for “Seven Chambers”) and Ablai-kit—were encountered by Russian expeditions in what was then the frontier zone of Dzungaria and is now eastern Kazakhstan. The monasteries had been abandoned by the Oirats following internal conflicts, and most of their cultural treasures were lost. Only a small number of artefacts survived, among them approximately 1,500 folios of Buddhist texts in Tibetan and Mongolian.

While the largest portion of these materials is preserved in Saint Petersburg, several European institutions also hold folios originating from these monasteries. These manuscripts represent some of the earliest Tibetan and Mongolian texts to enter European collections. The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin preserves a particularly notable group: 23 Mongolian and 23 Tibetan folios, almost all of them from Ablai-kit.

In this talk, we will trace the history of these manuscripts. In particular, they are connected with the work of German scholars of Asian languages, Johann Christoph Christian Rüdiger and Bernhard Jülg, as well as with the most influential historical Tibetan typeface, produced by Ferdinand Theinhardt for Heinrich August Jäschke’s Tibetan Dictionary (1881). We will also discuss the significance of these folios for the study of the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist canons.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will also be streamed and recorded via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find all previously announced lectures here. We will announce further dates in our blog and Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

*Mit Ihrer Teilnahme an der Veranstaltung räumen Sie der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz und ihren nachgeordneten Einrichtungen kostenlos alle Nutzungsrechte an den Bildern/Videos ein, die während der Veranstaltung von Ihnen angefertigt wurden. Dies schließt auch die kommerzielle Nutzung ein. Diese Einverständniserklärung gilt räumlich und zeitlich unbeschränkt und für die Nutzung in allen Medien, sowohl für analoge als auch für digitale Verwendungen. Sie umfasst auch die Bildbearbeitung sowie die Verwendung der Bilder für Montagen. / By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence

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Dear users,

On April 21st at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the third session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Beibei Zhan and is titled “Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence.” Dr. Zhan will share her experience developing a structured pedagogical approach for integrating AI and digital methods into humanities teaching in the era of “Digital Intelligence.”

In the „Digital Intelligence“ era, the rapid evolution of AI and Big Data is fundamentally reshaping the production and dissemination of knowledge, necessitating a transition in humanities education from traditional paradigms to an integrated, technology-enhanced ecosystem. This lecture proposes a transformative framework for cultivating humanities students under the „New Liberal Arts“ initiative, aiming to bridge the gap between classical erudition and computational science through a Six-Dimensional Structural Model. This model integrates problem-solving, knowledge synthesis, tool literacy, task practice, organizational collaboration, and ethical governance into a cohesive strategy, driving research through authentic socio-cultural inquiries while balancing technical proficiency with rigorous responsibility.

Central to this pedagogical shift are the practical innovations at Yuelu Academy (Hunan University), specifically the „Digital Intelligence Micro-course Cluster“ and the „Humanities-AI Seminar“. The Micro-course Cluster operates on a three-tiered conceptual framework: first, establishing General Digital Literacy to foster computational thinking and a critical understanding of AI tools; second, developing Discipline-Specific Core Reflection, where students utilize digital methods such as metadata encoding and text mining to innovate traditional tasks like version tracing and semantic analysis; and third, encouraging Interdisciplinary Frontier Exploration, which empowers students to lead original research in cutting-edge fields such as Linguistic Intelligence, Cultural Visualization, and Digital Geography (GIS). Complementing this structured approach, the Humanities-AI Seminar offers a self-organized, „Human-in-the-loop“ community where students, experts, and industry engineers co-create knowledge through real-world case studies, such as utilizing OpenAI APIs for structured knowledge extraction from historical archives. By synthesizing systematic training with open-ended collaborative research, these models demonstrate how humanities students can evolve into versatile scholars capable of navigating and shaping the global digital landscape.

About the speaker:

Dr. Beibei Zhan is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, holding dual doctorates in Computer Vision (Kingston University) and Sinology (SOAS University of London). Her research focuses on the intersection of Ming-Qing history, Digital Humanities and Humanistic Intelligence. She currently serves as an Executive Member of the Technical Committee on Computing Applications, China Computer Federation (CCF), and as a Council Representative of the Digital Humanities Development Alliance of China.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

Zwei neue Testzugänge: Manhua Digital Archive und The Chinese Soviet Republic

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Bis Ende Mai können wir Ihnen zwei neue Testzugänge von East View anbieten: Manhua Digital Archive und The Chinese Soviet Republic.

Die Zeitschrift Manhua 漫画; 漫画月刊 wurde 1950 von Mi Gu 米谷 (1918–1986) gegründet, dem damaligen Leiter der Kunstredaktion der Shanghaier Ausgabe der Jiefang ribao 解放日报, und erschien bis 1960. Das Manhua Digital Archive enthält eine vollständige Sammlung der Zeitschrift, insgesamt 164 Hefte. Es bietet eine vollständige Digitalisierung auf Seitenebene, die originalen Grafiken sowie durchsuchbaren Volltext.

Die Datenbank The Chinese Soviet Republic umfasst nahezu 2.500 Einträge aus der Zeit von 1922 bis 1956. Der Schwerpunkt der Sammlung liegt insbesondere auf der Phase zwischen der Gründung der Chinesischen Sowjetrepublik (CSR) im November 1931 und ihrem faktischen Zusammenbruch im Jahr 1934 infolge des Einkreisungsfeldzugs der Armee der Kuomintang (KMT). Die Sammlung enthält Verfassungen, Richtlinien und Resolutionen, die die Grundlage der Regierung der CSR bildeten. Darüber hinaus enthalten sind Militärberichte und Gerichtsurteile, die den Kampf um den Erhalt der CSR während des Krieges widerspiegeln sowie die größte Anzahl digitalisierter Ausgaben der Zeitschrift 紅色中華 (insgesamt 195 Ausgaben), der offiziellen Zeitung der provisorischen Zentralregierung der CSR. Die Materialien dieser Sammlung gehören somit zu den wertvollsten und seltensten Quellen aus den frühen Jahren der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas.

Ursprünglich als Chen-Cheng-Sammlung bezeichnet, benannt nach 陳誠(1897–1965), dem ehemaligen General der Kuomindang und Vertrauten Chiang Kai-sheks, der die Dokumente nach Taiwan brachte, wurden diese Unterlagen in Nordamerika durch die Hoover Institution der Stanford University zugänglich gemacht und später im Rahmen einer Initiative der Harvard-Yenching Library detailliert katalogisiert.

 

Wir wünschen viel Spaß beim Ausprobieren und freuen uns über Ihre Rückmeldungen an x-asia!

Ihr CrossAsia-Team