By Audrey Lin
The field of Digital Humanities is primarily centered in North America, which renders many data processing and visualization tools inaccessible for non-Anglophone scholars, history professor Christina Han recently told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
Han and digital humanities specialists in East Asia have been working hard to change that by developing new platforms for multilingual research.
Hangukgojeonjonghap DB 한국고전종합DB, from Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics, is a digital database of South Korea’s premodern and prehistorical records.
“Over 90 percent of [South Korea’s] premodern, prehistorical records have been professionally digitized and are accessible for you to use online,” Han said. “This was possible because the South Korean government spent over two decades of funding focused on building digital research infrastructure.”
Han’s talk, “Poetry Networks & Everyday Lives: Rediscovering Premodern Korean Society Through Digital Humanities,” was sponsored by UCSB’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies as the 2025 Hyung Il Pai Memorial Lecture in Korean Studies.
Han compared her pursuit of an intercultural, transnational digital humanities to the work of the late professor Pai’s work, who taught in the department, particularly advanced Korean Studies at UCSB.
Christina Han is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ont. and researches the 17th-century Sihwa ch'ongnim 詩話叢林 Compendium of Poetry Talks.
Han served as a curatorial consultant and researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto for over 15 years and is now an associate professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Brantford, Ont.
Digital humanities specialists in East Asia have been developing new platforms for multilingual research, such as MARKUS, a system that facilitates tagging and text analysis.
Currently, Han is researching Korean sihwa 詩話 poetry discourses with the help of MARKUS, among other tools. She is a translator of the 17th-century Sihwa ch'ongnim 詩話叢林 Compendium of Poetry Talks — hybrid poetry, storytelling and critique.
“Poetic exchange was a vibrant social practice that crossed boundaries of class, gender and geography. By mapping these networks, we can uncover the lived realities of poets and their communities, offering a more nuanced and interactive way to understand the past,” Han said.
Han used a data visualization map, composed of 1,784 nodes and 2,401 relationships, to articulate her research intent. The map was made with neo4j, a graph analytics software, and the nodes represent people, items, locations, etc. and illuminate patterns in premodern Korean texts.
Digital Humanities scholar Christina Han presenting a data visualization map of Sihwa ch'ongnim 詩話叢林 Compendium of Poetry Talks. The graphic is composed of 1,784 nodes and 2,401 relationships. It was made with neo4j, a graph analytics software.
“The large, eclectic and non-linear text of sihwa makes it an ideal candidate for machine reading,” Han said. “Unveiling and visualizing the evolution of themes and styles, spatial and temporal distribution, and social networks mediated through homes, can offer new perspectives of the social and cultural history of Korea.”
Historian Christina Han, right, at the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway. Photo courtesy of Wilfrid Laurier University.
Han described her 2023 trip to the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway and the Arctic archive’s data preservation techniques. While her work requires digitization, she is part of the Big Data Studies Lab at the University of Hong Kong, which conducts experimental research in digital humanities. She says she’s highly cognizant of a potential “digital dark age” in that she values physical archives and sustainable storage techniques.
Han’s current project is a multilingual Linked Open Database of sihwa, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Ultimately, Han hopes digital archives will become nexuses of cross-cultural and transnational scholarship. She believes that researching premodern Korean literature sheds light on previously erased and marginalized voices. Han and UCSB East Asian Studies professor Thomas Mazanec emphasized the importance of digital humanities and invited any UCSB students interested in collaborating to reach out to them.
Audrey Lin is a second-year Writing & Literature major at UC Santa Barbara. They are a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.