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 Southeast 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, Hedren Sum:
Although “Southeast Asia” is a modern regional category, we use it here as a flexible frame rather than a fixed historical container. It names not a static region, but a dynamic field of movement, encounter, and exchange, shaped by islands, seas, rivers, ports, borders, diasporas, trade routes, religious networks, linguistic plurality, ecological change, and cultural adaptation.
This dynamism makes it a compelling place from which to rethink the digital. Its materials often resist neat organisation: they may be multilingual, multiscript, oral, performative, fragmentary, mobile, community-held, unevenly digitised, or mediated through colonial, institutional, and inherited categories of knowledge. These conditions are not merely challenges for digital tools to overcome; they can also generate new ways of thinking about data, archives, metadata, interfaces, mapping, visualisation, access, translation, circulation, and care.
For this subject area, we are particularly interested in de-centred approaches to digital methods. Rather than asking only how digital tools can be applied to Southeast Asia, we ask what kinds of digital practices, methods, resources and infrastructures might emerge from Southeast Asia’s dynamic worlds of movement, plurality, translation, and connection.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- De-centred digital methods: postcolonial, vernacular, local, Indigenous, community-led, or regionally grounded approaches.
- Languages, scripts, and translation: multilingual, multiscript, oral, and low-resource language materials, including OCR, HTR, NLP, AI, and translation workflows.
- Archives, data, and metadata: digitisation, cataloguing, dataset creation, metadata design, archival silences, colonial categories, and alternative ways of organising knowledge.
- Resources, platforms, and workflows: reviews of digital collections, databases, repositories, tools, interfaces, visualisations, teaching resources, and practical research workflows.
- Mapping, movement, and circulation: maritime, archipelagic, diasporic, transregional, environmental, and infrastructural connections.
- Performance, media, and visual culture: theatre, music, dance, ritual, festivals, film, photography, manuscripts, ephemera, images, and born-digital culture.
- Community, memory, and heritage: participatory archives, local knowledge practices, public history, museums, cultural heritage platforms, and preservation.
- Ethics, access, and sustainability: ownership, representation, repair, infrastructure, digital inequality, environmental costs, and long-term care.
We welcome contributions from anyone working in or across these areas. 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.
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.