How Digital-Age Scholarship is Different
All fields are different, but the field I am most active in now (looking at early Southeast Asia through Chinese sources) is very different today than it was just 10…
Aromatic Bird Droppings and Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age
For years, I have been telling people that we are living in a new age. With the digitization of historical sources, something that has really only developed significantly in the…
Houses Built on Stilts in the “Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái” (+ChatGPT 5)
I recently read a new article by archaeologist Charles Higham and linguist Mark Alves on “The Southeast Asian Prehistoric House: A Correlation between Archaeology and Linguistics.”One of the things I…
Why Digital Humanities Doesn’t Work
Digital Humanities doesn’t work. That is what I, an initial believer and advocate, now think.Let me explain why.Back some fifteen years ago, as the Internet became ever more a part…
History in the AI Age: A Self-Reflection
In the spring of 1994, during my first year of graduate school, I took a seminar on Chinese Intellectual History. In that seminar, in addition to weekly readings and discussions,…
Hồ Chí Minh, Wikipedia, Blogs and Knowledge Production in the Digital Age
One of the reasons why I decided to start writing this blog back in 2010 was in order to share some of the things that I knew and thought, but…
Shit People Say About [Country Name] History – or, History in the Age of YouTube
A decade or so ago, whenever I was preparing to teach a class in a course that I had already taught a few times, I would always spend time on…
Crowdsourcing the Hồng Đức bản đồ
There are quite a few libraries these days that are using a technique called “crowdsourcing” to transcribe and digitize manuscripts that they have in their collections. Essentially what libraries are…
Visualizing Nationalists in 1945 Vietnam
I came across a report from October 1945 that was created by the US State Department. It contains biographies of nationalists in Indochina. In the fall of 1945, Ho Chi…
Visualizing Daoism in Trần Dynasty Vietnam
I’m reading a book called Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past by David J. Staley. This is how the book is summarized…