The following is the schedule of the Digital Orientalist’s 2025 Virtual Conference “AI and the Digital Humanities for the Study of Asia, Africa, and Oceania” happening on May 31, 2025 from 9.30AM CEST. You can find titles and abstracts here; the conference is open to anyone, please register here. The details provided here are subject to change.
The following is based on CEST time. Please use this time converter for your convenience. Technical support by Mariana Zorkina. Conference Manager and Editor, Hirohito TSUJI 辻󠄀 博仁.
Morning Session
9:30AM Opening Remarks
Keynote 1
9:40AM Elaine Lai (Stanford University), TBC.
Panel 1: AI Analysis of Literature, Characters, and Language
10:10AM Ziyi Qin (Beijing Foreign Studies University), Comparing Sentiments in Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi’s Poetry: A Computational Analysis Across Time and Space
10:30AM Moeka Kiyohara (Independent), Suggesting a language-specific gender perspective into AI translation research
10:50AM Peter Francis Smith (University of Oxford), Handwritten Text Recognition of Chinese Manuscripts: Complexities, Human Input, and Machine Learning
11:10AM Discussion and Break
Keynote 2
11:30AM Antonia Karaisl (Waseda University), TBC.
Panel 2: AI, Digital Histories, and Visual Archives
12:00PM Lin Du (National University of Singapore), From Information to Metaphor: Tracking Photographic Editing in Chinese Wartime Magazines Through Digital Historical Forensics
12:20PM Tiziana Pascuito (University of Turin), From Historical Encounters to Digital Records: The REDMIX Archive of Red Sea Mixedness
12:40PM Stephanie Santschi (University of Zurich) and Drew Richardson (University of California, Santa Cruz), From Print to Place: Creating an Integrative Geolocalization Workflow using Citizen Scientists and Computer Vision AI
01:00PM Discussion and Break
Afternoon Session
Keynote 3
02:00PM Ephrem A. Ishac (Central European University), TBC.
Panel 3: AI and Geography/Geopolitics
02:30PM Yutong Li (University of Bologna), Reimagining Cultural-Led Urban Regeneration in East and Southeast Asia: A Digital Humanities Perspective
02:50PM Enes Yılandiloğlu (University of Helsinki), Mapping the Orient: Computational Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing
03:10PM Prince Kumar (Université de Franche-Comté), LLM-Assisted Geospatial Mapping of 17th-Century European Travel Writings on India
03:30PM Discussion and Break
Panel 4: Ethical and Critical Perspectives on AI
03:50PM Hong-Yu Hsien (Independent), AI Bias-cancelling for the interpretation of a Late Qing Dynasty text
04:10PM Stephen Forrest (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Labor, Ethics, and Automated Text Recognition in the Classical Japanese Classroom
04:30PM Shuohong Lyu (University of East Anglia), Artificial Intelligence Hegemony: How Researcher’s Independent and Critical Thinking Capabilities Are Eroded
04:50PM Gal Forer (UC Berkeley School of Law; Harvard Kennedy School), Towards a “Beijing Effect” in AI Governance?
05:10PM Discussion
05:30PM Closing Remarks
