As part of The Digital Orientalist‘s annual open call for the 2026–2027 academic year, we will be highlighting the different teams that make up our publication. Here, we spotlight our Northeast Asian Studies team.
These spotlights are intended to provide a sense of the breadth of work that fits within each area rather than to define strict thematic boundaries. We welcome proposals on any aspect of digital humanities and area studies.
A note from the team’s editor, James Harry Morris:
Like many of the teams at The Digital Orientalist, the Northeast Asian team is an internal construction that has been created to help us manage the different contributions that we receive. In recent years, the Northeast Asia studies team has generally published materials pertaining to Japanese studies and Korean studies, which mostly reflects the areas from which we receive applications for contributors. Whilst we want to continue to strengthen our publications focusing on digital humanities research pertaining to the histories of and materials from these places, we would also like to expand our coverage to include research on other areas traditionally included as part of Northeast Asia including pieces from Manchu studies and Mongolian studies, which we have intermittently published on in the past, and work focusing on the Russian Far East.
With a few exceptions, the contributions we have published from the Northeast Asian studies team have tended to focus on the early modern period through to the beginning of the 20th century. As such, I would really like to encourage those working on medeival, ancient, and pre-modern histories to consider applying to be part of the team. This would add a great deal of thematic breadth. We have also tended to focus on texts at the expense of artefacts and perhaps even people, and therefore I also want to encourage those engaged in archaeology, art history, historical anthropology, and folk studies to apply.
A final point that I would like to underline is that we welcome a wide range of contributions. Whilst we certainly welcome pieces on the “harder” end of the digital humanities focusing on OCR, GIS, text mining, and AI, we are also interested in the experiences of users; What digital tools and resources do you use in your daily research? How do you use them? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How do they compare to other solutions? These sorts of contributions have long constituted the bread-and-butter cotent not only of the Northeast Asian studies team, but of the whole publication. In a similar vein, we welcome contributions not only from those employed primarily as researchers or faculty, but students, librarians and archivists, and those working in museums. It is also worth reiterating the words of Hedren Sum in the spotlight for the Southeast Asia team; ‘Contributions do not need to present completed research. We are equally interested in experiments, works in progress, lessons learned, practical guides, project showcases, and general reflections.’
To summarise, we are looking for people contributions from those engaged in Northeast Asian studies (broadly defined). In particular, we would like to:
- Expand the Northeast Asian studies team to include voices from outside of Japanese and Korean studies.
- Publish more materials focusing on medieval, ancient, and pre-history.
- Increase our focus on non-textual materials.
- Continue to balance a deep engagement with digital humanities methods with user-centered contributions.
If this resonates with your work or interests, we invite you to apply to join us as a contributor!
For more information on the roles available and how to apply, visit our general call for applications here.
The deadline for applications is July 19th, 2026. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us directly at digitalorientalist@gmail.com.