African Studies, AI, OCR, Textual Analysis, Visualization

Islam West Africa Collection: Dataset, Distant Reading, and Uses of AI for Discourse Analysis

Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), created and maintained by F. Madore, is an open-access database that provides access to press clippings from the mainstream press in West African (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria) as well as Islamic publications, and video recordings, all of those documents related to Islam. Complex tools enable discourse analysis and answer various scientific questions through keywords mapping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and spatial visualization. Continue reading Islam West Africa Collection: Dataset, Distant Reading, and Uses of AI for Discourse Analysis

Chinese Language, Japanese Studies, Korean Studies, Manchu Studies, Mongolian Studies, New Post, Online Resources, Tangut Studies

An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for East Asian Studies Reviewed by The Digital Orientalist Members

Since its founding in 2013, The Digital Orientalist has grown from a research blog by Cornelis van Lit to an … Continue reading An Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for East Asian Studies Reviewed by The Digital Orientalist Members

DH in General, Online Resources, Workflow

Alternatives to Google: Is DuckDuckGo Useful for Research?

Google’s privacy issues are fairly well-known—there is even a Wikipedia page about it. Even if we don’t know the details, … Continue reading Alternatives to Google: Is DuckDuckGo Useful for Research?

Archiving, DH in General, New Post, Online Resources, South Asian Studies

Sindhi Halchal Archive: Building on the PG Sindhi Library

In my previous post, I wrote about potentialities: I spoke about what might be doable for the Sindhi presence within … Continue reading Sindhi Halchal Archive: Building on the PG Sindhi Library

AI, DH in General, Japanese Studies, Teaching, Theory

Think Tasks Not Tools: Teaching AI Literacy in East Asian Art History

This guest contribution was written by Dr. Stephanie Santschi, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Zurich’s Department … Continue reading Think Tasks Not Tools: Teaching AI Literacy in East Asian Art History

Housekeeping, New Post

Introducing The DO 2025/26 Team

Welcome back to another year at The DO! This post kicks off the beginning of the 2025/26 year! Before looking … Continue reading Introducing The DO 2025/26 Team

Housekeeping, New Post

CFA: Join the DO Team 2025/26

The Digital Orientalist is pleased to announce its annual open call for editors, contributors, and team members for the 2025-2026 academic … Continue reading CFA: Join the DO Team 2025/26

African Languages, African Studies, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, New Post

The Demotic Palaeographical Database Project: A Digital Repository of Ancient Egyptian Demotic Script and Text Corpora

In my previous discussion, I examined AKU-PAL, the palaeographical database for hieratic script among ancient Egyptian writing systems. This article … Continue reading The Demotic Palaeographical Database Project: A Digital Repository of Ancient Egyptian Demotic Script and Text Corpora

AI, Central Asian Studies, New Post, Social Media

Hellenistic Central Asia through the Eyes of GenAI – Part 3: Deep Research

This is part three of a three-part series on the biases about Hellenistic Central Asia in generative artificial intelligence (AI) datasets. In this final part, I planned to discuss how Hellenistic Central Asia was biased in conversational AI models, such as ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 1.0, but newer “Deep Research” functions have since replaced and exponentially increased the capabilities of those legacy models. Continue reading Hellenistic Central Asia through the Eyes of GenAI – Part 3: Deep Research

AI, Chinese Language, DH in General, DH in Practice, LLM, Machine Learning, New Post, Sinology

Global DH vs. Area Studies: Rethinking “China and the West (Rest)” Beyond Lenticular Logic

In her essay “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,” Tara McPherson … Continue reading Global DH vs. Area Studies: Rethinking “China and the West (Rest)” Beyond Lenticular Logic