Fostering transnationalism and interdisciplinarity, I am currently completing the Mito cluster to (re-)situate the significance of the controversial Japanese Mito school’s scholarly engagements in the context of East Asian intellectual circulations. Long treated as the intellectual background of the emperor-centered turn in 19th century Japan, the Mito school has been largely considered a nationalistic and even violent group by the existing scholarship. Taking a procedural perspective, my project cluster (involving a monograph and multiple articles, including an award-winning paper, and translations) explores the complexities of the transmission and transmogrification of Chinese Confucian ideas and practices in the historiographical activities of Mito to present a manifestation of what might be called the “intellectual history of history writing.” Combining philological close-reading with data visualizations and the digital analysis of their Dai Nihonshi (The History of Great Japan, 1657-1906), one of the most monumental historiographical endeavors in Japan, and other related primary sources, I examine the questions of 1) how an initially inclusive group of literati, who pioneered the integration of foreign concepts (and scholars) into their historiographical practices, subsequently became associated with xenophobia, 2) how the meaning of history, history writing, and being a historian changed in the 17th -early 20th century, and 3) what the critical analysis of Mito’s historiographical engagements as opposed to their political activities tells us about the textures of nationalism and xenophobia in a broader sense. My current priority is to finish the book manuscript and to also publish the translation of the 18th century personal reflections of Fujita Yūkoku, a leading scholar in Mito, entitled Shūshi shimatsu (The Story of the Compilation from Beginning to End) on the production process of the Dai Nihonshi.

Fostering linguistic inclusion, diversity, and collaboration to critically reconsider epistemic inequalities in digital humanities, my second project cluster is in the context of multilingual DH and extends from research and teaching to reviewing, journal editing (as co-guest editor for a special issue on Digital East Asian Studies and as current topic editor for Asian and Asian Diaspora Studies for Reviews in DH), international conference presentations and workshops, as well as advocacy. Moreover, I have also been part of an international scholarly collective which, combining digital multilingualism and multilinguality with UX methods, aims to disrupt (Anglophone) digital knowledge infrastructures through publications, innovative presentations, experimental workshops, and a planned book sprint.

Simultaneously, I recently participated in the pioneering collaborative initiative, the NEH-funded New Languages for NLP Institute (co-organized by Princeton University and DARIAH-EU – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), using the Dai Nihonshi corpus to create novel models in natural language processing as PI of the Kanbun-based project “Central Margins in Digital Japanese History.” The Institute project aimed to enhance the visibility of under-resourced languages such as Kanbun, classical Arabic, Kannada, Yoruba, Quechua, literary Russian, and Yiddish, stimulating global connections between seemingly scattered digital linguistic experiences. My contribution analyzed the references in the commentaries of the Dai Nihonshi to trace potential shifts in the usage of historical works by the compilers. I argued that analyzing the references that the authors themselves considered reliable sources in different time periods can facilitate the understanding of shifts in the Mito compilers’ historical thinking. The findings of this work now also constitute a part of my current book project. In addition, in order to further increase the visibility of non-Anglophone voices in DH, I have also established and chair the DARIAH Multilingual DH Working Group. As an “information hub”, our goal is to connect DH scholars of diverse linguistic and geographical embeddedness in and beyond Europe, to produce relevant collaborative projects (such as the Living Bibliography of Multilingual DH), and to offer tangible skill-building opportunities. As part of these initiatives, with generous funding from DARIAH-EU, we recently completed a multi-day workshop at the University of Hamburg, where -in collaboration with the DARIAH Research Data Management Working Group- we successfully produced multiple workflows on creating, managing, and archiving textual corpora in under-resourced languages. These workflows are now openly accessible tot he broader scholarly community on the SSH Open Marketplace platform (connected to DARIAH).

In addition, I am also convinced that effective text recognition (OCR/HTR) tools that work for various scripts and languages can significantly facilitate the linguistic diversification of DH, since these can provide the necessary basis of most DH projects – whereas the lack of proper tools can hinder the completion, or even the launch, of DH work in under-resourced languages and scripts. I am thus in the process of building a collaborative initiative to create openly accessible OCR/HTR models for East Asian (classical) languages and scripts to mitigate their under-representedness in DH.

Using the modern transmogrification of Mito and the Dai Nihonshi into popular media phenomena and nationalistic propaganda tools in various media outlets in imperial Japan as a starting point, my third project cluster will analyze the (in)effectiveness of propaganda in the transnational representation of Japan and its colonies through rhetorics, metaphors, “facts” and bias in the context of racial, sociocultural, political, and spiritual perspectives. This project cluster, including my second book, has begun with two forthcoming articles and multiple conference presentations on the representation of colonial Japanese-Korean relations (1910-1945) and on the image of colonial Taiwan in the Hungarian print media (1895-1945) and will be expanded to the digital and “analog” study of Asian and Western newspaper archives to contribute to the reorientation and reconsideration of Eurocentric approaches to the study of East Asia.