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Editors' Note: January 2025

Editors' Note on the January 2025 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities, guest edited by Setsuko Yokoyama and Miguel Escobar Varela

Published onJan 27, 2025
Editors' Note: January 2025
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Editors’ Note

Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano

Welcome to our sixth year of publishing Reviews in Digital Humanities. At a time of global chaos and uncertainty, we hope that our monthly issues bring you a moment to reflect on and celebrate the incredible digital scholarship that’s being produced around the world. This month, we take you to Singapore to hear about the thriving digital humanities community there with our special issue, “Digital Humanities in Singapore / Singapura / 新加坡 / சிங்கப்பூர்,” guest edited by Setsuko Yokoyama and Miguel Escobar Varela.

In our work on Reviews, we’ve been conscious that our positions as two academics located in the U.S. naturally lead to the journal skewing towards the U.S. We’ve been consistently trying to expand our networks and to adopt practices to address this problem. This special issue is a great example of how bringing in collaborators can broaden the content of the journal.

Through our regular content audits, we recognized that Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, is a region that doesn’t receive as much coverage in Reviews. We then reached out to Setsuko and Miguel to see if they would be interested in editing a special issue. They suggested a focus on Singapore, given how large and diverse Asia is, and we were excited to follow their lead. The result is an excellent issue that delves into the multicultural, multilingual landscape of digital humanities in Singapore. We’re grateful to Setsuko and Miguel for their work on this issue, both their editing and the fantastic guest editors’ note below, which offers important insight on the current state of digital humanities in Singapore.

Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Want us to review your project? Contact the editors, Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, by email or through the Bluesky or Mastadon hashtag #ReviewsInDH.  


Guest Editors’ Note

Setsuko Yokoyama and Miguel Escobar Varela

What is our “DH accent”? In November 2022, a small group of humanities scholars from across the disciplines got together to explore what makes our digital humanities endeavors in Singapore distinct. Deliberating on Roopika Risam’s 2017 concept of “DH accent”— an invitation to be cognizant of the regional difference among the otherwise global field of digital humanities —participants discussed what our local digital humanities dialect has been and what we wish its future cadence to be.  

This special issue, “Digital Humanities in Singapore / Singapura / 新加坡 / சிங்கப்பூர்,” is born out of that 2022 gathering which, in retrospect, marks the transitional phase of digital humanities in our postcolonial city-state in Southeast Asia. Most of the projects collected in this volume were first featured in a 2019 survey conducted by Miguel Escobar Varela, Andrea Nanetti, and Michael Stanley-Baker, and can be now considered the first-wave digital humanities works. These projects mirror how early adopters saw digital humanities as a means for public scholarship to celebrate multilingualism and embrace the multimodal affordances of digital media. Back then, digital humanities was yet to be institutionalized–except for the Digital Humanities Minor program at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) launched in 2018 — so these early projects offer organic contours of local digital humanities envisioned by librarians, researchers, artists, and K-12 teachers.  

This initial lack of formal institutional homes meant that digital humanities thrived in many corners of the local universities, covering a range of cultural contexts, scales, and themes. Some of the projects featured here are premised on deeply felt cultural issues. Singapore is a place of rapid urban development, where decisions about which parts of the built heritage to preserve and which ones to change pose problems for city planners, historians, and civil society. The Bukit Brown Cemetery Documentation Project, directed by Natalie Pang and Cheng Shao Meng Merlin and reviewed by Quan Gao, focuses on preserving underground artifacts from Singapore's historic Bukit Brown cemetery. Following a 2011 highway construction announcement that led to the exhumation of 4,000 tombs, the project used 3D photogrammetry to digitally preserve vulnerable artifacts, including personal items like dentures, jewelry, and symbolic objects.  

As the title of this special edition suggests, Singapore is a deeply intercultural country with four official languages (English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil). However, not all languages have always received the same level of attention. Tamil, for example, is the least widely spoken of these languages and perhaps the one that gets the least academic attention. For this reason, Tamil Digital Heritage, led by Arun Mahizhnan and reviewed by Shanmugapriya T, is particularly significant. This archive provides free online access to materials related to the Singapore Tamil community's cultural heritage, specifically focusing on literature, theatre, dance, and music. Initially conceived to commemorate Singapore's 50th anniversary and focusing only on literature, the project expanded to include other cultural domains. This project serves as a historical record of Tamil creative arts in Singapore and was created by over 300 volunteers. It also required careful attention to copyright agreements and technical challenges, particularly in converting Tamil texts into editable formats. 

Other projects take a multicultural perspective and extend beyond Singapore. That is the case of Polyglot Asian Medicines, directed by Michael Stanley-Baker and reviewed by Vivienne Lo. At its core are two major components: a collection of richly tagged digital text corpora of Chinese and Malay medical manuscripts, and an innovative drug synonymy database. The text collection includes searchable transcriptions of important historical texts and 392 rescued manuscripts from the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. The synonymy database bridges traditional and modern medical knowledge by connecting drug names across Chinese and Malay traditions with contemporary scientific nomenclature. What makes this resource particularly valuable is its inclusion of historical provenance data, enabling researchers to trace the evolution of drug knowledge across different languages, times, and locations.

Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) led by Andrea Nanetti and reviewed by Laura Morreale, also employs a broad comparative framework, examining patterns across different eras and locations. Launched in 2015, the project provides open access to primary historical sources including maps, travel accounts, chronicles, codices, and paintings in multiple languages, making them more accessible through 3D models, animations, and interactive visualizations. The project has attracted over a hundred researchers globally, spawned more than 20 applications adopted by leading institutions, and earned international recognition including a nomination for the UNESCO Jikji Prize. 

In short, the projects reviewed in this issue show the range of cultural sites and practices that can be examined through digital tools, from history and literature to architecture and medicine. These projects also showcase the range of scales at which digital humanities can operate, from a single heritage site at a key inflection point in its history, to projects that span regions and centuries. 

We wanted to revisit these projects because we are currently witnessing the renewed interest in digital humanities in higher education. As of this writing, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is developing a Master’s program in Digital Humanities to be housed in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) has just launched the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities. As we imagine digital humanities will be increasingly characterized as a vehicle for interdisciplinary interventions to address our pressing, complex societal issues — be they the proliferation of machine learning models, weaponization of emerging technologies in geopolitical conflicts, or the unchecked power relations that sustain our global IT industry — we decided to first hearken back to the earlier wave of digital humanities projects so that they may help us navigate the global legibility of our local interventions by asserting our accented digital humanities vantage point.   

References 

 Escobar Varela, Miguel, Andrea Nanetti, and Michael Stanley-Baker. “Digital Humanities in Singapore.” In Digital Humanities and Scholarly Research Trends in the Asia-Pacific, 91–117. IGI Global, 2019. https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/digital-humanities-in-singapore/220624

Risam, Roopika. “Other Worlds, Other DHs: Notes towards a DH Accent.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 377–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv063

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