Distinguished Scholars and Librarians Share Insights on Digital Humanities
Supported by the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, the Faculty of Arts and the University Library of Hong Kong Baptist University co-organized a Mini-Conference on Digital Humanities on 24 October at
HKBU. The major purpose of this conference was to attract attention and initiate discussions about Digital Humanities, which are an emerging movement of research and teaching that uses digital technologies
to serve as research tools, facilitate community building and information sharing, and help yield new findings. This interdisciplinary movement generates interests across diverse academic areas such as arts,
communication, computer science, education, and social sciences, because of their interest in new media, coding and web design, and research and instructional technology.
This conference attracted around 100 participants, mainly faculty members and librarians in local universities. The conference featured one keynote presentation and three panel discussions. Professor Franklin
Luk, Acting President and Vice-Chancellor, and Professor Douglas Robinson, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, delivered welcoming remarks. Mr. Andy Lee, Vice-President (Administration) and Secretary, represented
the University to present a souvenir to the keynote speaker, Professor Anne Balsamo.
Professor Anne Balsamo is the Dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York City. Previously she was a Full Professor at the University of Southern California where she held joint appointments
in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Through her speech entitled "The Digital Humanities and Cultural Innovation," she defined the current roles
of Digital Humanities, emphasized inter-disciplinarity and collaboration as a foundation, and touched on the several major milestones of this movement. She ended her presentation by exploring the impact of Digital
Humanities in today’s scholarly world via examining several important Digital Humanities projects that she had involved. Her presentation successfully initiated an in-depth interaction with the audience in her Q&A session.
The first panel speaker, Mr. Haipeng Li, the University Librarian of HKBU, talked about "Digital Humanities and Libraries: Partnership and Collaboration." He defined Digital Humanities from a library’s perspective and
introduced a number of important, international Digital Humanities projects that were co-developed by university libraries and the academic.
Professor Christopher Keyes, Professor of the Department of Music, placed an emphasis on digital arts, through his speech "Human vs. Machine Decision Making in the Digital Arts and Humanities." He explored the
potentials and limitations of digital arts and provided some interesting live demonstrations of composing music by computer programs.
Dr. Loretta Kim, Assistant Professor of the Department of History, and Ms. Rebekah Wong, Senior Assistant Librarian, shared their current collaboration in the last panel presentation named "Data Curation and History
Research." This presentation demonstrated how the academic and the library can work together to achieve and accomplish digital humanities goals.
All presentation slides and conference photos are now available on the conference website. Presentation videos
will be made available on HKBUtube at a later stage.
University administration and all speakers were standing in the front for a photo.
Professor Anne Balsamo gave the audience an inspiring presentation.
This conference attracted around 100 participants.
