A Brief Introduction to Digital Sinology

Jidong Yang gives a talk at Stanford University on the impact of technologies and standards in digitizing pre-modern Chinese texts on sinological research.

Jidong Yang, Head of East Asia Library

Chinese Studies both in China and around the world irreversibly entered the digital era. Online library catalogs, Internet based bibliographies and indexes, electronic journals and books, and fulltext databases, many of which were beyond the wildest imagination of scholars of the previous generation, have now become indispensable tools for daily research. What has this development impacted on sinological research?

The lecture will cover technologies and standards in digitizing pre-modern Chinese texts, mainstream full-text databases in the field, differences between print and digital-age scholarship, how to avoid negative impact of digital technology on sinology, how to look for research literature in various languages in the digital age, etc.