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Copyright

Julian Walker; Miyuki Hughes; Madeleine Leehy; Peter Mauch;

Published On

2024-11-06

Page Range

pp. 273–290

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

14. Digital Humanities for a different purpose

Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 273–290)
This chapter explores the recent application of Digital Humanities (DH) methods to a database for Australia-Japan Research and Industrial Collaboration (DAJRIC) and assesses their potential utility to a project outside of traditional scholarly purposes. The primary objective of this chapter is twofold: (i) to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in serving our purposes, and (ii) to consider the scalability of the pilot database to accommodate numerous yet unfunded Japanese-Australian research projects. By developing a Heurist database, the project can harness the intuitive design principles that make DH methods so effective and appealing for scholarly purposes to users unfamiliar with these research fields. Throughout this process, the project team has discovered the challenges of raw data, ontology development, and bilingual functionality that face a project of this scale, whilst also realising the potential of Digital Humanities’ techniques in providing improved user interactivity and search functionality through record types and their connections with each other, and through data visualisation. These techniques, when applied with knowledge organisation techniques, enable a scalable database that can organically grow with the hundreds of projects to be entered in the future. As such, this project provides a valid example of how scholarly techniques within the Digital Humanities can be applied successfully to projects that act as a gateway between academia and other sectors.

Contributors

Julian Walker

(author)
Master’s Student at Western Sydney University

Mr Julian Walker is a Master’s student at Western Sydney University. His research interests are centred around the Korean Provisional Government and the dynamics of Governments in Exile during the early 20th century. He seeks to use Digital Humanities techniques to analyse the responses of governments in exile to international dynamics during the 1920s.

Miyuki Hughes

(author)

Ms Miyuki Hughes moved to Australia in 2013 and graduated from WSU with a Bachelor’s degree in Interpreting and Translation in 2022. She is an employee with NNA Australia, a Japanese business news media based in Sydney, and she maintains a strong interest in Japanese Australian business ties.

Madeleine Leehy

(author)

Peter Mauch

(author)
Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at Western Sydney University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9817-7968

Dr Peter Mauch is a Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies at Western Sydney University. A modern Japanese historian, he has published Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese American War (2011). He contributed to the Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015), and Planning for War at Sea: 400 Years of Great Power Competition (forthcoming). He has written essays in such journals as Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, the Pacific Historical Review, and War in History. He is a newcomer to the field of Digital Humanities.