Digital Humanities and Religions in Asia - An Introduction

In pre-modern religions from Asia we encounter unique scripts, number systems, calendars, and naming conventions. These make the Western-built world of consumer technology an ill fit to our needs. Even tools specifically developed for Digital Humanities often do not support our needs. The problems we face are particularly specific, and therefore solutions are not going to come from anyone but ourselves. However, the barrier to entry is still high for graduate students and scholars without prior experience of digital methods. Our volume aims to guide the enthusiastic colleague through the first perilous phases of folding digital tools into their toolset. We shall explain how to set the right expectations, what type of work can be easiest automated or digitized, how you set up and execute a digital project, and what the specific pitfalls are that we need to look out for. We cover five religious domains: 1) Judaism and Christianity, 2) Islam, 3) Hinduism and Jainism, 4) Buddhism, and 5) Shintoism and Daoism. Concomitantly we have identified eight topical domains: 1) mapping, 2) databases, 3) cataloging, 4) corpus analysis, 5) encoding and editing, 6) online media, 7) manuscript tagging, 8) reflections on the methodological shift.