Digital humanities in China has moved, in barely two decades, from a scattered “prehistory” of full-text databases and ad-hoc digitization to a self-conscious field with dedicated centers, journals, curricula, and increasingly grand infrastructural ambitions. This talk offers a critical account of that trajectory, organized around three interlocking problems: emergence, infrastructure, and discontent. Drawing on a body of work by myself and with collaborators tracing the paradigm’s arrival in the Greater China region, it first charts how humanistic inquiry became fused with computational method—largely through library and information science, historical GIS, and landmark database projects such as the China Biographical Database—and how this shaped the field’s distinctive contours.
Lik Hang Tsui: Histories of Digital History in the Chinese World: Infrastructure, Method, and Its Discontents
