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Newsletter 37 – CrossAsia Sommernews: Halbjahres-Highlights und Ausblick auf einen spannenden Herbst

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Liebe CrossAsia Nutzer:innen,

mit einem Highlight sind wir in den Sommer gestartet: Seit Juni ist der Newspaper Research Companion (NRC) als ganz neuer Service von CrossAsia im Early Access verfügbar. Die KI-gestützte Rechercheplattform gestaltet den Zugang zu großen digitalisierten Zeitungsarchiven grundlegend neu.

Aktuell läuft noch bis zum 10. August unsere CrossAsia Community-Umfrage. Ihre Meinung zählt! Bitte nehmen Sie sich 10-15 Minuten Zeit für die Teilnahme und helfen Sie uns, unsere Informationsangebote weiter zu verbessern.

Und bereits heute ein „Save the Date“ für den Herbst: Am 3. November 2026 findet das nächste virtuelle CrossAsia User Meeting statt. Wir wollen wieder direkt mit Ihnen ins Gespräch kommen.

Dieses und noch sehr viel mehr im aktuellen Newsletter.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen und Stöbern und einen schönen Sommer wünscht Ihnen,

Ihr CrossAsia Team

Newspaper Research Companion: Early Access Launch


Im Juni ist mit dem Newspaper Research Companion (NRC) ein völlig neuer Service von CrossAsia an den Start gegangen. Die KI-gestützte Plattform ermöglicht es Forschenden, historische Zeitungsbestände sprachübergreifend zu durchsuchen, zu lesen und zu analysieren – und das durchgehend in der eigenen Sprache. Der NRC geht damit über einen reinen Schlagwortabgleich hinaus: Er interpretiert die Intention einer Frage und findet gezielt für das Forschungsvorhaben relevante Materialien, bietet kurze Zusammenfassungen der Artikel in der gewünschten Sprache und analytische Erkenntnisse unter Berücksichtigung der zentralen Treffer. Informationen zur Methodik und den wichtigsten Funktionen des NRC finden Sie auf unserem Blog und auf der Webseite Nach ersten Workshops und Schulungen folgen weitere Angebote im Wintersemester.

Der NRC befindet sich in der Ausbauphase. Wir erweitern die verfügbaren Ressourcen fortlaufend und optimieren Design und Funktionen. Dafür brauchen wir auch Ihre Expertise. Sie arbeiten in Ihrer Forschung oder im Studium mit Zeitungsmaterial? Wir suchen Testpersonen für Nutzungsinterviews (ca. 15 Minuten). Bei Interesse melden Sie sich gern per E-Mail bei uns: x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de. Ihr Feedback fließt direkt in die Weiterentwicklung des NRC ein.

Das Projekt wurde unterstützt vom Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.

CrossAsia Community Umfrage bis 10. August und User Meeting am 3. November 2026


Nach einer maximal zwölfjährigen Förderdauer der Fachinformationsdienste (FID) durch die DFG steht für den FID Asien/CrossAsia ab 2028 der Wechsel in das neue DFG-Programm „Fachinformationsdienste für die Wissenschaft – Plus“ an. Eine längere Förderperspektive sichert die Services und ihre kontinuierliche Weiterentwicklung besser ab. In Vorbereitung auf den FIDplus Antrag ist Ihr Feedback gefragt!

Bitte nehmen Sie sich 10-15 Minuten Zeit für die Teilnahme an der anonymen Umfrage und helfen Sie uns, die Informationsangebote und Services für die asienbezogene Forschung kontinuierlich zu verbessern. Die Ergebnisse der Umfrage veröffentlichen wir später auf unserem Blog. Leiten Sie den Umfragelink bitte auch innerhalb Ihrer Netzwerke unter Studierenden und Forschenden in den Asienwissenschaften weiter.

Außerdem wollen wir auch in diesem Jahr wieder persönlich mit Ihnen ins Gespräch kommen. Unser virtuelles CrossAsia User Meeting findet am 3. November von 18.00 – 19.30 Uhr statt. Gestalten Sie CrossAsia mit: Ihre Bedarfe und Anregungen fließen in unsere Planungen für die neue Förderphase mit ein. Einladung und Programm verschicken wir im September. Wenn Sie schon jetzt eigene Themenvorschläge einbringen wollen, schreiben Sie uns: x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

CrossAsia News: Datenbanken

 

  • Zwei neue Datenbanken von Adam Matthew lizenziert: Church Missionary Society Archive und Missionary Studies, zwei Volltextdatenbanken, bei denen der Blick auf die gescannten Archivalien möglich ist. Mehr zu den Inhalten dieser Forschungsressourcen finden Sie im Blogbeitrag.
  • Neu lizenziert: Korea Pro, 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-Nutzer:innen nun das vollständige Angebot der Korea Risk Group zur Verfügung.
  • Zwei weitere Segmente aus dem Bereich „JKBooks“ der Datenbank JapanKnowledge, wurden lizenziert: Die Nanbokuchō Ibun 南北朝遺文 und Teil 4 von Shiryō Sanshū 史料纂集 (第4期). Bei beiden Inhalten handelt es sich um Materialsammlungen historischer Dokumente aus unterschiedlichen Zeitperioden.
    Bitte beachten Sie: JapanKnowledge ist voraussichtlich vom 21.-24. August 2026 wegen eines umfangreichen Renewal nicht zugänglich. Weitere Informationen dazu finden Sie auf unserem Blog.
  • VIP Weipu 维普 als primäre Datenbank für chinesische Fachzeitschriften: Über den Wechsel von China Academic Journals (CAJ) zu VIP Weipu haben wir mehrfach berichtet. Alle wesentlichen Informationen und Nutzungshinweise haben wir in einem Blogbeitrag Einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Unterschiede zwischen CAJ/CNKI und Weipu finden Sie als PDF-Download in unseren Classroom-Materialien. Kontaktieren Sie uns jederzeit, sollten Sie Probleme bei der Recherche, dem Zugang oder der Funktionalität von Weipu haben.

CrossAsia Veranstaltungshighlights


CrossAsia Talks – Fortsetzung im September


Die CrossAsia Talks sind in der Sommerpause. Freuen Sie sich schon jetzt auf ein neues spannendes Programm ab Herbst.

Den Auftakt macht Svitlana Shiells (Freie Kunsthistorikerin) am 17. September 2026. In ihrem Onlinevortrag „Gustav Klimt and Hokusai: Reframing Japonisme in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna“ geht sie der Verbindung zwischen Gustav Klimt und Katsushika Hokusai auf den Grund und zeigt, wie tief die japanische Kunst das Schaffen des Wiener Secessionisten geprägt hat.

Am 24. September 2026 nimmt uns Prof. Trent Walker (University of Michigan) in seinem Onlinevortrag „Buddhist Narratives in Early Modern Southeast Asia: Insights from the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts“ mit in die faszinierende Welt der buddhistischen Erzähltraditionen im frühneuzeitlichen Südostasien.

Ab Oktober ist die Mongolei regionaler Schwerpunkt mehrerer CrossAsia Talks (siehe unten).

Am 3. Dezember 2026 beleuchtet Joshua A. Fogel (York University, Kanada) in seinem Onlinevortrag „Back to Babel: The Esperanto Movements in Japan and China“ die faszinierende Geschichte der Esperanto-Bewegung in Ostasien und ihre ganz unterschiedlichen Entwicklungen in Japan und China im frühen 20. Jahrhundert.

Kommende Vorträge und ein Überblick über alle bisherigen Veranstaltungen finden Sie auf unserer Webseite. Videos vergangener Vorträge finden Sie auch in unserer CrossAsia Talks Playlist auf Youtube zum Nachschauen und -hören.


Die Mongolei im Rampenlicht: CrossAsia Rahmenprogramm zur Ausstellung „Dschingis Khan und die Welt der Mongolen“


Vom 21. Oktober 2026 bis 18. April 2027 zeigt die James-Simon-Galerie auf der Museumsinsel in Berlin die Ausstellung „Dschingis Khan und die Welt der Mongolen“. Parallel dazu nehmen Werke aus der Mongolei von Oktober bis Dezember Platz in der Vitrine in der Schatzkammer des Stabi Kulturwerks. Bis Anfang Oktober ist dort übrigens noch die Abhandlung über die Typologie von Elefanten (Hs. or. 6570) zu bewundern, ein prachtvolles aus Thailand stammendes Leporello. Ein Besuch lohnt sich!

CrossAsia begleitet die Ausstellung mit einem Rahmenprogramm und rückt die Mongolei im Herbst und Winter thematisch in den Fokus vieler Veranstaltungen.

Tauchen Sie ein in buddhistische Unterwelten: Am 21. Oktober stellen wir mongolische und tibetische Höllenfahrtstexte vor. Die Objekte sind eindrucksvolle Zeugnisse religiöser Praxis und kulturellen Austauschs. Sie können die handgeschriebenen Manuskripte und Blockdrucke aus nächster Nähe betrachten und dabei Einblicke in ihre Überlieferungswege, Sammlungskontexte und wissenschaftliche Erschließung gewinnen. Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Reihe „Im Fokus: Auf Entdeckungsreise durch unsere Sammlungen“. Sie findet in der Stabi Unter den Linden in Berlin statt. Eine Anmeldung ist erforderlich.

Am 26. Oktober 2026 beleuchtet PD Dr. Philipp Kohl (LMU München) im CrossAsia Talk eine ebenso unerwartete wie aufschlussreiche Episode der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. In „Counter-Revolutionary Dinosaurs“: A Popular History of the Gobi Paleontological Expeditions under Socialism“ hören wir, wie Dinosaurierfunde in der Wüste Gobi zwischen sowjetischer Ideologie, mongolischer Literatur und polnischem Forschungsehrgeiz zum Politikum wurden.

Die Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin lädt herzlich zum Vortragsnachmittag „Aktuelle Entwicklungen in der Mongolei“ am 31. Oktober 2026 ab 13:30 Uhr im Simon-Bolivar-Saal (Stabi Potsdamer Str. 33) ein. Organisiert wird die Veranstaltung von der Deutsch-Mongolischen Gesellschaft, die an diesem Tag ihre Jahrestagung in der Staatsbibliothek abhält und ihren traditionellen Vortragsnachmittag für interessierte Gäste der Staatsbibliothek öffnet. Freuen Sie sich auf Einblicke renommierter Mongolist:innen in aktuelle politische und wirtschaftliche Themen.

Im Rahmen der internationalen Konferenz „Reframing Tibetan and Mongol Mapmaking Practices“ hält Isabelle Charleux (CNRS, Paris) am 26. November 2026 um 18 Uhr im Fontane-Saal der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Unter den Linden 8) eine öffentliche Keynote zum Thema „Representing the Sino-Mongol Frontier in the Late Qing Period: Mongol and Qing Chinese perspectives.“ Die Konferenz findet vom 26.–28. November 2026 statt, organisiert von der HU Berlin, der Georgetown University in Qatar und der Stabi Berlin.

Im CrossAsia Talk am 28. Januar 2027 spricht Bolormaa Blodbaatar (Universität Bonn) in ihrem Onlinevortrag „Imagery in the facade decoration of the Chinggis Khan Museum – the conveyed meaning“ über die Bildsprache und symbolische Bedeutung der Fassadendekoration des Chinggis Khan Museums in Ulaanbaatar.


Schlaglichter auf unsere Veranstaltungen im ersten Halbjahr 2026


Unsere diesjährige DH Lunchtalks Veranstaltungsreihe ist im Sommer erfolgreich zu Ende gegangen. Von Februar bis Juni präsentierten internationale Forscher:innen in sechs Vorträgen ihre aktuellen Forschungsprojekte und Tools für die digitalen Wissenschaften. Mit dieser Reihe bietet CrossAsia Raum, neueste Entwicklungen im Bereich der Digital Humanities sichtbar zu machen und sich zu vernetzen. Das setzen wir fort und informieren rechtzeitig über unsere kommenden Veranstaltungen und Initiativen.

Vom 3. bis 6. Juni haben wir zusammen mit der Freien Universität Berlin das Jahrestreffen des European Network of Korean Resources Specialists (ENKRS) in Berlin ausgerichtet.  Die Expert:innen diskutierten über die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen historischen Sammlungen, digitaler Forschung und neuen Technologien im Bereich der Koreanistik. Rund 50 Bibliothekar:innen, Archivar:innen und Wissenschaftler:innen aus Europa, Korea und Nordamerika haben teilgenommen.

Materialien der Stabi aus dem Kriegsgefangenenlager Bandō (Japan) waren am 10. Juni das Thema der bereits erwähnten Veranstaltungsreiche: „Im Fokus: Auf Entdeckungsreise durch unsere Sammlungen“, in der jeden Monat ausgewählte Objekte aus den Sammlungen der Stabi aus unmittelbarer Nähe angesehen werden können.

CrossAsia Classroom


Unser Schulungsprogramm geht im Wintersemesters 2026/27 weiter. Alle Informationen dazu veröffentlichen wir rechtzeitig zu Semesterbeginn auf unserer Webseite, über die Mailingliste und unsere Social Media Kanäle auf Bluesky und Mastodon.  Kommen Sie gern auf uns zu, wenn Sie Bedarf an speziellen Schulungen für Ihr Institut oder ein Seminar haben. Wir berücksichtigen es bestmöglich in unserer Planung. Aktuell evaluieren wir unser Classroom-Programm mit einem kurzen Online-Fragebogen. Den Link erhalten alle Teilnehmenden jeweils am Ende der Schulungstermine. Auch hier freuen wir uns über Ihre rege Beteiligung. Damit helfen Sie, unser Schulungsangebot möglichst passgenau an Ihren Bedarfen auszurichten.

CrossAsia Open Access Repository


Das CrossAsia Open Access Repository leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Förderung und stärkeren Verankerung von Open Access in den asienbezogenen Wissenschaften und steht allen Forschenden und insbesondere den universitären wie außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen offen. Das Repository wächst kontinuierlich. Derzeit sind insgesamt fast 550 Dokumente online. Zur Liste der seit Anfang 2026 hinzugekommenen Beiträge gelangen Sie über diesen Link.

Wir freuen uns über weitere Beiträge für das Repository. Bei Fragen finden Sie Informationen auf der Webseite oder schreiben Sie uns gerne direkt an x-asia@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

Einschränkungen im Benutzungsbetrieb während des Sommers


Am 1. Juli 2026 haben die Vorbereitungen für die Umzüge der Sondersammlungen der Orient- und der Ostasienabteilung im Rahmen der anstehenden Generalsanierung des Gebäudes an der Potsdamer Straße begonnen. Bis voraussichtlich einschließlich Oktober 2026 wird deshalb kein Benutzungsbetrieb für asiatische Handschriften, vormoderne Drucke und andere von uns bewahrte Sondermaterialien stattfinden können. Das betrifft auch Reproduktionsaufträge (wie z. B. über den CrossAsia Service Digitisation on Demand), die in diesem Zeitraum nicht oder nur stark eingeschränkt bearbeitet werden können. Wir bitten unsere Nutzerinnen und Nutzer für diese leider unvermeidbaren Einschränkungen um Verständnis. Über den Zeitpunkt der Wiederaufnahme des Benutzungsbetriebs – voraussichtlich ab November 2026 – werden wir rechtzeitig informieren.

Meet CrossAsia


Kommen Sie persönlich mit uns ins Gespräch! Nach unserer Teilnahme mit einem CrossAsia Stand an der Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference im März in Vancouver und der EACS Ende Juli in Venedig, auf denen wir viele interessante und anregende Gespräche mit vielen von Ihnen führen konnten, wird unser Team auch auf folgenden Konferenzen vertreten sein:

Visuelle Einblicke in unsere Sammlungen


*Unser Newsletterbild ist das neue Bild auf der CrossAsia Startseite. Die vier ausgewählten Seiten stammen aus Lehrheften zum Erlernen des Pidgin und Kreolischen. Zu sehen sind die Heftcover und je eine Beispielseite mit Vokabeln für Lebensmittel in der Kreolsprache Macaos (澳門番語雜字全本, Libri sin. N.S. 849) und dem Chinesischen Pidgin-Englisch (紅毛畨話貿易湏知, Hirth 96-5). Beide publiziert in 廣州 und von Takata Tokio in unserem Jubiläumsband erforscht.

Passend zum Sommer: Ein Feuerwerk auf dem Sumidagawa. In Japan gehören Feuerwerke zu den typischen Sommer Events. Das Bild zeigt einen Ausschnitt aus einer Darstellung des westlichen Ufers des Sumida Flusses in Edo (heute Tokio). Im Bestand der Stabi ist eine von zwei Rollen. Schauen Sie auch gern in unserem Themenportal „Japanische Querrollen“ vorbei und navigieren Sie durch die digitalisierten Objekte.

Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!

Vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse und Ihre Unterstützung. Wir wünschen Ihnen einen schönen Sommer und freuen uns auf einen vielfältigen Herbst mit Ihnen!

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.

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 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.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR

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Dear users,

On March 24th at 12:30 pm (CET), we are pleased to host the second session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard and is titled “Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR.” Dr. Erhard will introduce his the Divergent Discourses project, as well as TransYolo, a custom Python workflow to solve the layout analysis bottleneck in digitizing historical Tibetan newspapers.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) has matured rapidly in recent years, and for many document types, the core recognition task is largely solved. Yet when researchers turn to historical Tibetan newspapers, progress stalls — not because HTR models fail, but because the lines are never correctly identified in the first place. This talk argues that layout analysis, not transcription, is the true bottleneck in Tibetan newspaper digitization, and that no single off-the-shelf tool is adequate for the task.

Tibetan newspapers such as the Tibet Daily (TID) collection present a combination of challenges that expose the limits of general-purpose layout tools: dense multi-column page designs with inconsistent column spacing, mixed scripts (Tibetan, Chinese, Latin), varying typefaces and handwriting styles across issues and periods, and the physical realities of digitized print — page skew, gutter distortion, and uneven illumination. These properties interact in ways that defeat standard segmentation approaches, producing incorrect line detections, boundary bleed-across, and broken reading order — all before a single character is recognized.

Transkribus, the dominant platform for historical HTR in the humanities, offers built-in layout analysis through its field models. These work well for their intended use cases, but Tibetan newspaper material sits well outside that scope: column layouts confuse region assignment, high line density triggers false positives, and the platform’s limited configurability makes targeted correction difficult. The lesson is not that Transkribus falls short, but that specialized material demands specialized solutions.

To meet this need, the talk introduces TransYolo, a custom Python workflow developed within the Divergent Discourses project (AHRC/DFG). TransYolo uses a YOLO model trained specifically on Tibetan newspaper pages to detect text lines, assigns detections to text regions previously detected with Transkribus, reconstructs reading order, and exports Transkribus-compatible PAGE XML. The example shows what becomes possible when layout analysis is treated as a problem in its own right.

About the speaker:

Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard is a Tibetologist specializing in Tibetan literature, biography, and cultural history, with close to a decade of fieldwork experience in Lhasa. He is the Principal Investigator of the DFG/AHRC cooperative project „Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955–1962,“ which compiles and analyses the first modern corpus of historical Tibetan newspapers using digital humanities methods, including computational tools for text recognition and natural language processing, to trace how divergent narratives emerged and evolved in PRC and exile publications during one of the most consequential periods of Tibetan history.

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

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – AI for the Humanities: A Case of Manchu OCR

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Dear users,

On February 3rd at 12:30 pm (CET), we are pleased to host the first session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Yan Hon Michael Chung and is titled “AI for the Humanities: A Case of Manchu OCR.” Dr. Chung will introduce the development pipeline for creating an OCR model for Manchu-language documents and share his reflections on applying AI to humanities research.

Manchu, today an endangered language, was once the official language of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). The Qing state produced an enormous corpus of Manchu-language documents, many of which have been digitized and made publicly available by archives and libraries worldwide. Despite this abundance of scanned materials, there is still no reliable, publicly accessible optical character recognition (OCR) system for Manchu, posing a major bottleneck for historical research.

This presentation introduces an end-to-end Manchu OCR system developed by fine-tuning a vision–language model (VLM), and uses it as a case study to reflect on the broader challenges of applying AI to humanities research. It identifies three structural constraints that distinguish humanities-oriented AI development from commercial or industrial settings: the scarcity of labeled training data, the unusually high accuracy requirements demanded by scholarly research, and the limited computational resources available to most humanities scholars.

To address these constraints, the project adopts a small-model, data-centric strategy. The OCR model is trained using a combination of large-scale synthetic data and carefully curated historical samples. Specifically, a LLaMA-3.2-11B Vision model is fine-tuned using approximately 60,000 synthetic Manchu images alongside 20,000 Manchu word images extracted from real Qing-era documents. The resulting model achieves up to 96% accuracy on unseen, real-world scanned Manchu sources.

The OCR pipeline is further enhanced through a custom Manchu word detection and segmentation model, combined with a post-processing large language model for typographical correction. Together, these components form a complete, practical Manchu OCR system built with state-of-the-art vision–language and language models. Beyond presenting technical results, this presentation argues that carefully constrained, accuracy-driven AI systems offer a viable and sustainable path for AI research in the humanities.

About the speaker:

Dr. Michael Chung is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Chung received his PhD in history from Emory University in 2025, and his BA and MPhil from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012 and 2016 respectively. Chung’s research centers on the early Qing dynasty, with a focus on the transfer of European artillery technology and the formation of the Hanjun Eight Banners. As a digital humanist, Chung is currently developing a Manchu OCR system based on a fine-tuned vision-language model.

 

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

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks Launching in February 2026

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Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks will return in February 2026.

Originally launched between winter 2023 and spring 2024, the first DH Lunchtalk Series was warmly received by our community. Building on this success, the CrossAsia team and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) went on to co-host the international conference “Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies” in Berlin from 8–12 July 2024, bringing together around 120 participants from 19 countries and regions (read more).

In light of this strong engagement and our ongoing commitment to digital scholarship, we are pleased to relaunch the Lunchtalks as an online forum where scholars can share project updates, present new tools and methods, offer methodological insights, and showcase innovative research in Digital Asian Studies.

Between February and June 2026, the DH Lunchtalks will take place monthly. While the 2023–2024 season focused primarily on training in digital tools and platforms, the upcoming series will feature 60-minute lunchtime talks (including Q&A) by distinguished speakers presenting their latest digital research projects. The currently confirmed programme is as follows:

  1. February 3
    Dr. Michael Yan Hon CHUNG (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
    AI for Endangered Documentary Archives: Manchu OCR
  2. March 24
    Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard (Leipzig University)
    Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR
  3. April 21
    Dr. ZHAN Beibei (Yuelu Academy, Hunan University)
    Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence
  4. May 21
    Dr. CHEN Shih-Pei (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) & Dr. Mariana Favila-Vázquez (CIESAS–Unidad Ciudad de México)
    Structures of Knowing an Empire: Building Digital Analytical Tools for Chinese Local Gazetteers and Spanish Relaciones Geográficas
  5. June 9
    Dr. CHOI Donghyeok (Hong Kong Baptist University)
    From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts
  6. June 23
    Dr. Rafał Jan Felbur (Heidelberg University)
    Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

 

All DH Lunchtalks will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 (Central European Time) and will be held online via Webex. Further details for each session, including abstracts and access links, will be announced in advance on the CrossAsia blog. The first talk, by Prof. Michael Yan Hon Chung, will be announced shortly on CrossAsia.

If you have any questions about the DH Lunchtalks, or if you are interested in proposing a future talk and sharing your own digital research, please contact Dr. Jing Hu at jing.hu@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

We look forward to welcoming many of you to the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026!

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team