Fall 2017 Events

Anxieties of Abundance: Sources and Methods for Qing Studies in a Digital Age Workshop

​The workshop “Anxieties of Abundance: Sources and Methods for Qing Studies in a Digital Age” met at Johns Hopkins University on October 19-20, 2017.  It was the third in a series workshops sponsored annually by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinology, with additional support from the East Asian Studies Program at Johns Hopkins. 

The workshop brought a diverse group of scholars and library specialists together in order to showcase new materials, media, methods, tools, and questions inspired by the digital age we currently inhabit.  Participants came from the University of Leiden, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Kentucky, California Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, William Paterson University, Yale, University, and the University of Maryland at College Park, among others. Program participants represented a range of approaches and disciplines and variety of levels of commitment to or engagement with technology.  They presented a total of thirteen papers—plus a lively and thought-provoking closing round table.  The panels were titled: “Digital Tools and Technologies for Qing Studies,” “Rethinking the Qing Archive in the 21st Century,” “Classroom and Library in the Digital Age,” “The Historical Body in the Body of Texts,” and “From the Corners to the World—New Perspectives on Familiar Sources.” In a sense, the workshop allowed for a celebration of the state of the field—an anticipation of new trends and directions. At the same time, it also asked participants to grapple with questions of pedagogy and digital access, and to ponder the limitations and advantages of new technological tools and methods. Approximately 35 people participated in all or part of the proceedings, a robust turnout relative to the size of Johns Hopkins’s Asian Studies program.  

Group photo of presenters and participants at the “Anxieties of Abundance: Sources and Methods for Qing Studies in a Digital Age Workshop” at Johns Hopkins University, October 19-20, 2017.