Digital humanities and East Asian studies in 2020

Although East Asian studies scholars have a long history of using technology to their advantage, starting in at least the 1970s, East Asian digital humanities lags behind digital humanities in other parts of the world. This gap is rapidly closing, and a variety of new resources, tools, and communities have developed in the last few years. At the same time, this progress has produced a remarkable flowering of research. This article provides a broad overview of some of the more recent and important trends in East Asian digital humanities. I discuss a variety of important datasets that include text corpora, geographic information, biographic data, images, and more. I also introduce a number of analytical tools, discuss community building efforts, and discuss some of the research that has emerged from this. Finally, I address efforts in digital humanities education, because although East Asian scholars are rapidly adopting digital tools, the field still faces a gap in knowledge driven by a lack of easily accessible training opportunities.