Digital Humanities in Singapore Miguel Escobar Varela National University Singapore Andrea Nanetti Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Michael Stanley-Baker Nanyang Technological University, Singapore1 ABSTRACT In Singapore DH is inclusive of the larger spectrum of the humanities, including not only its traditional disciplines (e.g. languages and literature, philosophy, law, geography, history, art history, musicology) but also anthropology, heritage studies, museum studies, performing arts, and visual arts. Multilingual, interdisciplinary and audiovisual projects are particularly prominent. A community is growing around an emergent concept of DH, and it is developing results mainly in society-driven research projects. Although the DH label is relatively new, and DH dialogue across Singapore institutions is at its early stages, Singapore-based researchers have carried out digital research for decades. An increasing number of projects are home-grown, but several projects have also migrated to Singapore recently due to the high-degree of mobility at Singaporean institutions. Current trends suggest that the next stage of DH history in Singapore will include the development of more formal institutions and more participation in global DH conversations. Keywords: National Library Board (Singapore), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Multilingualism, Interdisciplinarity, Databases, Audiovisual resources, History, Heritage, Linguistics, AI, Machine-human, Ethics, Governmentality. INTRODUCTION The historical, financial and geographical characteristics of Singapore have made it an ideal place for the development of digital repositories and digital methods for the study of the humanities. However, until very recently the research teams active in this field did not explicitly label their efforts as Digital Humanities (DH). This has changed as the DH label has come to be 1 The naming convention used here reflects that Miguel Escobar Varela did the initial ground study, Michael Stanley-Baker was the corresponding author and closed the paper, and Andrea Nanetti made contributions and coordination. 1 seen as strategically useful, and as workshops and other activities have brought together researchers from different disciplines and institutions. There are two main initiators of DH projects in Singapore: individual researchers coming from specific disciplines and institutions (primarily libraries, archives and universities). Unlike in other countries, DH incubators and labs are only just beginning to be implemented. As of yet there are no specialized departments, research centers or tenure-stream faculty appointments expressly labeled as DH. Most people arrived to the field of DH incidentally, as a result of pursuing specific questions that required or benefited from digital methods, rather than from a commitment to DH as a discipline or field per se. Thus, most people engage in what Golumbia (2013) has termed the "narrow" view of digital humanities as "tools and archives" rather than DH as a critical analysis or perspective. As a result, DH projects and publications have been directed to the specialized readership of the researcher’s home discipline (e.g., philology, history, geography, literature, and theatre studies) rather than to a general DH audience. There is, however, an incipient group of scholars and information science professionals formed by members from across different disciplines and institutions – Digital Humanities Singapore – which runs a website and an online discussion list.2 The group also organizes periodic events, but it has yet to be constituted as a formal organization. This chapter offers an overview of DH in Singapore as an incipient label often used retroactively to contextualize longer histories of intellectual innovation. This bird's eye view of the field has been compiled by three Singapore-based researchers who are themselves actively developing interdisciplinary and cross-institutional dialogues around DH. We avoid giving our judgment about what DH should be, instead trying to report on as many views of DH as we have found in informal surveys, and a comprehensive investigation of online DH materials in Singapore. This overview starts with the two main initiators of DH projects in Singapore: researchers and institutions. The institutions considered include national bodies (archives and libraries) as well as universities. When analyzing the role of universities, we pay specific attention to the complex web portals they are developing with the specific aim of furthering digital scholarship. Next, we offer a comprehensive list of projects active in Singapore, distinguishing between those that were developed here, and those which originated elsewhere and then migrated to Singapore. Later we note the place of conferences and workshops, the role of teaching, and the place of Singapore-based DH in its immediate vicinity and the wider world. We conclude with a couple of observations. The first is that, the history we report here has been organic, driven by the intellectual curiosity and circumstances of isolated Singapore-based teams. Secondly, although there are many sophisticated digital projects in Singapore, researchers and institutions could do more than just strategically using the DH label, and actively participate in the global DH community via conferences and journal publications. Third, the next state of DH history in Singapore will need better institutional support, spaces for epistemological dialogue, and policies that can push the field forward. 2 http://digitalhumanities.sg, accessed June 28, 2018. 2 INITIATORS: LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES AND UNIVERSITIES The Singapore Digital Humanities group has brought together researchers with an express interest in DH. The researchers come from history, geography, computer science, theatre studies, literature, Chinese studies, media studies, and South Asian studies. Although we are aware of at least 20 university-level researchers with an interest in the field or actively pursuing digital humanities projects, only a handful of those researchers explicitly mention "digital humanities" in their official university web profiles, although many readily describe themselves as digital humanists in conversation. Some researchers have been working on digital methods for more than twenty years – before the field was thus christened – most notably on the historical disciplines. Later in this chapter, we offer a comprehensive list of the projects developed by these researchers. But first we consider four projects developed by libraries and archives, as well as the role of universities. The key institution we consider first is the National Library Board (NLB), which manages the National Library, 26 Public Libraries and the National Archives (NAS). The National Heritage Board has also expressed interest in DH under the terminology of digital culture.3 4 Libraries and Archives The National Library has several digital collections which could well be considered DH projects, even if they are not labeled as such. The most ambitious is a semantic database for Singapore historical facts: One Search.5 The objective of this portal is to offer "user-friendly and seamless access” across the digital collections of the NLB and NAS, including Archives Online, eResources, NewspaperSG and Singapore Memories. The materials are drawn from digital content in the databases of the NLB and NAS, and include photographs, maps, speeches, and more than 20 million newspaper articles covering Singapore’s history. Another very useful site for local Singapore history is the Spatial Discovery Portal at the National Library. It allows users to explore and search high resolution geo-referenced maps and related information across the NAS’s Maps & Building Plans Database and the National Library's Rare Maps Collection. The bulk of maps and building plans in the NAS database were transferred from government bodies; they include topographic maps, survey maps, general maps, aviation maps and hydrographic charts, and record Singapore’s changing landscapes over the years. The building plans in the database are dated before 1946 and relate to private properties. The National Library’s Rare Maps Collection forms part of the Rare Materials Collection held in its Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, and contains topographic maps and navigational charts covering Singapore, Southeast Asia and Asia, as well as town plans and street maps of Singapore and Malaya. The majority of the maps were printed by European map3 The Digital in Cultural Spaces, http://www.nhb.gov.sg/~/media/nhb/files/media/releases/new%20releases/media%20release_c ulture%20academy%20singapore%20organises%20digital%20conference_final.pdf, accessed June 28, 2018. 4 The Digital in Cultural Spaces, http://www.nhb.gov.sg/~/media/nhb/files/media/releases/new%20releases/media%20releas e_culture%20academy%20singapore%20organises%20digital%20conference_final.pdf, accessed June 28, 2018. 5 http://search.nlb.gov.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 3 makers before 1945; they illustrate the development of European mapping of early Southeast Asia, as well as the history of the region. At the time of writing, it contains over 2,500 maps, and more maps will be made available as digitization and geo-referencing are completed.6 MusicSG is a non-profit digital archive set up by NLB to digitize, archive and provide access to all forms of published Singapore musical works.7 It assembles a collection of the lyrics and scores for music composed or published by Singaporeans, music produced or published in Singapore, and music related to Singapore. MusicSG also contains digital music recordings, articles on topics related to Singapore music, and musician biographies. By bringing together a suite of content on Singapore music, MusicSG aims to raise the awareness of Singapore music and provide resources for research and discovery. This is also part of the nation-wide initiative to preserve Singapore heritage. MusicSG collects and provides the following digital contents on Singapore music: music recordings, articles on topics related to Singapore music, biographies lyrics and scores. The Tamil Digital Heritage (TDH) Collection contains digital versions of Singapore Tamil literature published during Singapore’s first fifty years of independence (1965–2015).8 It includes poems, short stories, novels, plays and literary essays by Singaporeans or Singapore Permanent Residents, or with content related to Singapore. This is the first such digital collection in Tamil. These four projects show the representative interest of digital projects led by memory institutions on issues of language, history and culture, motivated by Singapore's historical connections and its multicultural and multilingual context. Universities Besides libraries and archives, universities are the other key institutional players. Universities and university presses are uniquely interested in promoting DH and Digital Scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Singapore’s two leading universities have dedicated portals to digital scholarship. Support in these universities has predominantly come through library services, which collaborate with scholars to archive their materials, make them more accessible and attract international attention. This has taken place through DH portals that organize these projects and help users to discover their common themes and interrelatability. This is appropriate because the projects often bring together scholars whose work is normally separated by traditional university department structures. This enables linguists, computer scientists, visual and digital artists, historians and ethnographers (among others) to come together under a common digital umbrella and pursue multi-disciplinary research. Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Reference Resource emerged from a decadeslong project by Geoff Wade.9 This resource has been developed and is currently maintained by 6 7 8 9 http://search.nlb.gov.sg/spatialdiscovery/, accessed June 28, 2018. http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/music, accessed June 28, 2018. http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/printheritage/browse/Tamil_Digital_Heritage_Collection.aspx, accessed June 28, 2018. http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/, accessed June 28, 2018. 4 NUS Press and the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of NUS. The Ming Shi-lu 明實錄 (also known as the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty) is a collective name for the successive reign annals of the emperors of Ming China (1368–1644). Each of the shi-lu comprises an account of one emperor’s reign and was compiled after that emperor’s death on the basis of a number of sources created during the reign. These collected texts, which run close to 40,000 pages of unpunctuated manuscript in Classical Chinese constitute one of the most important primary texts of the Ming Dynasty, and contain a wealth of materials unrecorded in other sources. Among the unique materials contained within the Ming Shi-lu (MSL) are a wide range of references to polities and societies which are today considered part of “Southeast Asia.” Given the annalistic nature of the MSL and the difficulties of searching such a huge corpus, many of these references have remained long unknown. This digital edition identifies all of the references to Southeast Asia and provides them in English-language translation. In addition to the more obvious polities of the Southeast Asian mainland and maritime world, this database also includes references to the many Yunnan Tai polities which have been subsequently incorporated within the Chinese state. The fact that many of these references predate European sources on Southeast Asia underlines their importance to historians. The collection can be browsed chronologically by Western date or by reign date or searched by specific terms. To assist in searches, an index of personal and place names, with their Chinese equivalents appended, is provided separately. The Digital Projects portal at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) includes art projects, annotated bibliographies and historical documents from Singapore and Southeast Asia in a variety of languages.10 It captures the cultural and linguistic fusion of the Asia-Pacific region through interdisciplinary lenses by clustering research developed in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CoHASS), and by bringing together linguists, historians, designers, interactive media specialists, computer engineers, and museum curators from different parts of the university as well as external collaborators. The project aims to make accessible intangible heritage, especially in its linguistic dimensions, and to facilitate and bridge collaborative effort from different discipline. Projects include the history of Singapore textiles, documentary films on Singapore’s polyglot culture, emotional linguistics, digital exhibitions and archives, oral histories, and archiving of disappearing languages or their transformation in Southeast Asia. Some of the projects in this portal are one-off exhibitions or films, while others include long-term large collaborations which produce multi-media archives, such as Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia, which includes projects on Southeast Asian languages, religious diversity and textiles.11 Since 2018, DH has received more direct support at NTU in three forms. The first is the formation of the university library’s Digital Scholarship Support Team. The team advises on data-maintenance strategies and provides direct support in website creation, meta-data management and the in-perpetuity hosting of data at NTU Dataverse.12 The NTU Dataverse solves an important problem for the visibility of DH within metrics-based peer assessment that has been a stumbling block for early career Digital Humanists. It provides automatic DOIs for datasets, allowing for citation tracking. Moreover, NTU has arranged with Web of Science to track citations of Dataverse datasets, allowing digital work to be more visible. Second was the appointment of a DH Research Cluster within CoHASS organized by Francis Bond and Michael Stanley-Baker. This group is tasked with identifying common themes of 10 11 12 http://www.ntu.edu.sg/Library/Pages/digital-projects.aspx, accessed June 28, 2018. https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/diha/, accessed June 28, 2018. https://researchdata.ntu.edu.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 5 research and similar technical approaches, and with consolidating the visibility of DH at NTU.13 The Research Cluster will also host the International Digital Humanities and Library Science Conference, Pacific Neighborhood Consortium, in 2019, which will significantly improve the visibility of and communication about DH in Singapore, Asia and beyond. Third, with the appointment of NTU’s new President, Prof. Subra Suresh, a new Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH) was launched on 1 April 2018.14 NISTH will synergize and coordinate campus-wide activities at the intersections of technology, natural sciences, social sciences, arts, policy, regulation and governance, business, medicine and ethics. It will serve as a forum for discussion groups, research projects, symposia, educational activities and policy development across College and School boundaries. It is expected to facilitate exploration of how humanity will interface with science and technology in ways that enrich the human condition. This Institute will also work with a variety of industries, government organizsations and non-profits. As part of NISTH, funding and space has been put aside for a new DH laboratory, which will be available for resident and visiting scholars to come together, collaborate, and develop new ideas and approaches. The NUS Digital Scholarship Portal maintains a directory of DH projects from the National University of Singapore (NUS) that covers the performing arts in East and Southeast Asia, as well as social geography projects which describe the distribution of religious sites and Chinese clans and communities.15 The Digital Scholarship team at NUS also offers dedicated spaces for digital projects, high-performance facilities (workstations, big multi-touch screens, cloud data storage access, and specialized software), and appointment-based research assistance with subject or research data librarians. The team also coordinates reading groups, publishes lists of best practices and organizes workshops to bring librarians and researchers closer together.16 RESEARCHER-LED PROJECTS The projects are a highly diverse assortment of researcher-led DH projects. Here we describe some in detail to offer a sense of what DH is from the point of view of the projects. In contrast to the institutional projects described above, the content of the majority of these projects is not strictly related to Singapore itself. In part, this is because many established researchers began their digital research elsewhere – in some cases in the 1990s – and brought it with them to Singapore. Examples of international digital projects where researchers now based in Singapore have had leadership roles are described first. Migrated to Singapore The Armenian Church Project, headed by Michael Walsh of NTU, applies cutting edge visualization technologies to the historic city of Famagusta in the non-UN recognized country of 13 https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/dh, accessed June 28, 2018. http://nisth.ntu.edu.sg/aboutus/Pages/Welcome%20Message.aspx, accessed June 28, 2018. 15 https://libportal.nus.edu.sg/frontend/web/resources/library-initiatives/digitalhumanities, accessed June 28, 2018. 16 http://libds.nus.edu.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 14 6 Northern Cyprus, and is setting a model for cultural heritage preservation in post-conflict zones (Walsh, 2017).The project aims to study and protect the fragile cultural heritage of Famagusta with the full understanding that the applied VR, AR, immersive, interactive and 4D story-telling technologies are serious academic tools that contain immense, largely unharnessed, pedagogical potential. Having piloted this over the past 5 years (and having had it published in 2017) Michael Walsh is now turning his attention to Singapore and its heritage sites, in particular Waterloo Street. The Open Multilingual Wordnet based at NTU is a project by Francis Bond of the Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Programme in NTU’s School of Humanities. The project provides access to open wordnets in a variety of languages, all linked to the Princeton Wordnet of English.17 WordNet® is a large lexical database of a given language. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with a browser. Bond is a central figure in the wordnet community, and holds the goal of making it easy to use wordnets in multiple languages. He has written wordnets for Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia, and is a key developer of online grammars for Japanese and Korean.18 The Open Multilingual Wordnet and its components are open: they can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. Engineering Historical Memory (EHM), started by Andrea Nanetti in 2007, has been hosted since 2015 on Microsoft Azure, after having received several Microsoft research grants to focus on interactive global histories.19 EHM is both an experimental methodology and an ongoing research project for the organization of historical information in the machine learning age. EHM develops and tests new sets of shared conceptualizations and formal specifications for content management systems in the domain of DH, with a focus on how to engineer the treasure of human experiences to serve decision making, knowledge transmission, and visionarios. Research derived from this project develops and applies computationally intensive techniques (e.g. pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms derived from other disciplines, interactive and visualization solutions). The first results of EHM tests on highly cross-linked historical data (global and regional networks and man-heritage-landscape networks) have been published (Nanetti, 2008; 2010; 2011).20 The current focus of the project is to develop and test tools that can be readily adopted by users to visualize high volumes of data through maps, timelines, tag clouds, and/or interconnected graphs on different scales. Not only historians and art historians, but also artists, students and other users will be able to create and share their own narratives, by tagging, connecting and recognizing links among elements of the 17 18 19 http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/, https://wordnet.princeton.edu/, accessed June 28, 2018. Bond’s works are available through http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/, accessed June 28, 2018. http://www.engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/, accessed June 28, 2018. 7 historical landscape (Nanetti, 2013; 2015; 2016). This project is at the basis of the establishment of a theoretical framework for computational history (Nanetti & Cheong, 2018). Drugs across Asia, developed by Michael Stanley-Baker, examines the distribution of drug knowledge across multiple genres, sources, periods, and regions of China as part of an ongoing investigation into pre-modern plural medicine (Stanley-Baker & Ho, 2015).21 The tools it produces allow for broader applications, enabling researchers to track any kind of knowledge that can be identified by a representative vocabulary set (in this case, 12,000 traditional Chinese drug terms). Using new methods of post-search-classification (PSC), the engine called Docusky developed by National Taiwan University in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, refines these term distributions according to detailed bibliographic metadata.22 Researchers can sort search results by time, genre, author and geographic site of production. They can then use a suite of online tools for more refined study, including MARKUS, Palladio and DocuGIS. MARKUS, based in Leiden University, draws on multiple online geographical and biographical historical databases, such as Harvard’s China Historical GIS (CHGIS) and China Biographical Database (CBDB), as well as Dharma Drum’s Place and Name authority databases. Using Stanford’s Palladio, proximity between texts can be visualized from custom result outputs generated in Docusky. In DocuGIS, locations in marked-up texts can be rendered as geographical maps with dynastic map underlays, produced by Academia Sinica. This suite intersects the cutting edge of digital Sinology, clustering together techniques and tools that have been developed around the world within a closely coordinated digital ecology, to allow for a new generation of analyses of pre-modern source texts. By November 2018, this project will post the entire Buddhist and Daoist canons, and nearly 200 chapters of marked texts from the Six Dynasties (220–589 CE). Darwin Online is the largest and most widely consulted edition of Darwin’s writings, and it is probably the most extensive scholarly website devoted to any historical figure. This website contains over 212,000 pages of searchable text and 220,000 electronic images, and at least one exemplar of all known Darwin publications (reproduced to the highest scholarly standards, both as searchable text and as electronic images of the originals). The majority of materials available on the site were first edited and annotated on the site, making use of more than 4,900 original editorial notes. This website also provides the largest collection of Darwin's private papers and manuscripts ever published: some 20,000 items across some 100,000 images, thanks primarily to Cambridge University Library. This project was initially privately funded by John van Wyhe, but then received funding from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Currently, the project is based in Singapore and supported by private donation. Open Source Studio (OSS) is a collaborative, online software environment designed to meet the needs and dynamics of studio-based teaching in the media arts. OSS has been developed as a multi-site WordPress content management system situated on the university network. During the past four years, OSS has served undergraduate courses, Final Year Project (FYP) 21 22 www.michaelstanley-baker.com. Datasets developed from the initial project funded by Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, are hosted at https://researchdata.ntu.edu.sg/dataverse/DrugsAcrossEurasia, accessed June 28, 2018. http://docusky.digital.ntu.edu.tw/DocuSky/ds-01.home.html, accessed June 28, 2018. 8 groups, graduate research and collaborative projects, offering an online social space that encourages transparency and cooperative learning. The project also incorporates live forms of remote teaching, critique, guest lectures, and online events via Webconferencing using Adobe Connect. Open Source Studio is thus a multi-faceted set of Web tools that integrates physical classroom/studio space with the online environment for critical writing, process documentation, portfolio presentation, online conferencing, asynchronous discussion and social media. The fluid, improvisatory nature of the artistic process is integral to the design of OSS, a virtual “studio of the future” that embraces the network as a medium of creative expression and new pedagogies. It enables interdisciplinary, inter-institutional and cross-cultural opportunities for students, faculty and researchers to explore networked collaborative courses and special projects that dissolve distance and geography. These projects are not directly related to Singapore, but the researchers who lead them have benefited from the funding opportunities and exposure available to them from Singapore. This is one of the strategic advantages of Singapore's institutions which are able to attract leading researchers from around the world to relocate, bringing with them their digital projects. Home-Grown in Singapore Other projects have been based in Singapore since their inception, taking advantage of local access to Southeast Asian societies as well as its hi-tech infrastructure, cultural funding and international networks. A consistent theme among these projects can be glossed as “heritage;” they are concerned with questions of cultural transformation, loss or admixture, and seek to preserve for posterity, track transformation, or generate innovative new visions of Southeast Asian languages and cultures. A second distinct theme concerns literary development. Literary projects in Singapore are mostly concerned with English-language literature (either locally developed or part of the international canon) or with the application of literary criticism to the study of new media. Heritage The Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia (DHIA) portal incorporates archival projects which record tradition and transformation in language use and textiles. Among these, Exploring the Crossroads of Linguistic Diversity: Language Contact in Southeast Asia addresses gaps in our knowledge of endemic multi-lingualism by documenting four endangered languages while simultaneously exploring four language contact situations in Southeast Asia.23 The work produces an empirically-based predictive model of language contact that will inform linguistic theory and guide future research in the field, and the grammatical descriptions will preserve the languages for the communities that speak them and research scholars alike. Also associated with DHIA, AILCA 2.0 – The Archive of Indigenous Languages and Cultures of Asia is the first digital archive for endangered languages to be set up in Asia, using Singapore's ideal location as a strategic choice. 24 Noting that about 3,000 of the world’s languages will disappear by the year 2100, the primary mission of AILCA is the long-term 23 24 https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/diha/language-contact-in-southeast-asia/, accessed June 28, 2018. https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/diha/project/ailca-2-0-the-archive-of-indigenous-languages-andcultures-of-asia/, accessed June 28, 2018. 9 preservation of endangered Asian languages. Emphasis is placed on the maintenance or even revitalization of languages through the creation of educational material and by supporting local/regional language centers; data from the language centers is also safeguarded for posterity, made available and in other formats, either online or by creating complete copies of materials and returning these to the communities. The site is accessible through three vectors: research, education or public access. The Asian Intercultural Digital Archives (AIDA) is a group of digital archives of East and Southeast Asian performance materials based at NUS.25 AIDA focuses on the interculturality of regional performance practices and features archiving practices through which performances may be enjoyed and studied by online viewers. This group originated in 2007 with the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A). A|S|I|A, led by Yong Li Lan is a multilingual online archive of up to 70 performances of Shakespeare pieces from East and Southeast Asia.26 The archive contains full-length videos with translated scripts, multilingual switching support, user annotation functions, and rich data on creators, art/forms, reviews, cultural context and more. In 2009, Yong Li Lan led the research project Relocating Intercultural Theatre, which launched two further archives, the Contemporary Wayang Archive (CWA), led by Miguel Escobar Varela, and Theatre Makers Asia (TMA), led by Alvin Lim and Ken Takiguchi. The archive teams also began collaborations in online teaching, and published numerous essays on the archived performances, digital archiving and translation. The Contemporary Wayang Archive (CWA) is a video collection of re-elaborations of Java’s oldest performance tradition, wayang kulit (shadow puppetry). These performances have combined with global popular culture, and most recently with hip hop music, since at least the 9th century. The online archive includes translations, notes and performance data. The database runs on a semantic model and all texts (Javanese transcripts as well as English and Indonesian translations) are fully searchable. A related project is the Digital Wayang Encyclopedia, a data-driven dictionary of wayang kulit characters that includes the quantitative analysis and interactive visualizations of a co-occurrence network of the characters in the fictional universe of wayang (Varela & Schauf, 2018).27 Singapore Historical GIS (SHGIS) is a comprehensive historical GIS in Singapore Studies, led by Kenneth Dean and his collaborators.28 This project combines Chinese and English archival sources into a searchable database, by combining and linking archival sources together with large amounts of recently gathered field data on contemporary Chinese socio-cultural institutions. The common GIS platform and searchable database enables users to generate a custom map of the distribution of features found within the database. The SHGIS website is envisioned as a long-term continuously developing research tool and an accumulating, searchable digital archive. Aung Soe Illustrations is an open-access online database of periodical and book illustrations by Bagyi Aung Soe (1923–1990), Myanmar’s trailblazer of modern art and most prolific 25 http://aida-web.org/, accessed June 28, 2018. 26 http://a-s-i-a-web.org, accessed June 28, 2018. 27 Portal available at https://villaorlado.github.io/wayangnetworks/html/, accessed June 28, 2018. 28 http://shgis.nus.edu.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 10 illustrator of the twentieth-century.29 It seeks to conserve the memory of this artistic, cultural and intellectual heritage, uncover and reinterpret the (hi)story of a country’s modern art through digitization, visual analysis, ontology creation, data curation, database design and data visualization of 6,000 illustrations and 60 texts sourced from private and public libraries. This project is a collaboration between Yin Ker, at NTU’s School of Art, Design and Media, and Hedren Sum Way Yuan of the Office of Information, Knowledge and Library Services. Singapore Places of Worship (新加坡多元宗教之美) is an interactive map of 381 art pieces by Ho Chee Lick, comprising Chinese shrines of Buddhism, Taoism, popular religion and sectarian religions, churches, Hindu temples, Islamic mosques, Sikh temples and others.30 Map of Origins: Chinese Clans in Singapore (新加坡华人宗乡之情) is a comprehensive listing of Chinese Clan Associations in Singapore. This is a project by Feng Yikang and Amy Lin of the NUS Libraries. Using Google Maps, these associations have been mapped out for geographic exploration.31 Perform Contemporary Tradition is an open-access multimedia archive of contemporary traditions in Japan and Southeast Asia, led by Lim Beng Choo. It combines academic and theatrical work relevant to contemporary traditions.32 The 'Must Listen' List of North Indian Classical Vocal Music is a developing project by Rajeev Patke of NUS which archives a selection of classical Hindustani Music.33 Eschewing complex interactivity in favor of a minimal approach, this project seeks to ensure maximum sustainability of the recorded materials. The Archaeological linguistics and the Prehistory of Northeast India currently being developed by Alexander Coupe digitizes a corpus of language materials collected in Nagaland. This includes annotated texts that are time-aligned to transcriptions, plus electronic dictionaries from a number of minority language communities. The kind of textual data that the project will make publicly available can be sampled through the Pangloss platform.34 Materials will also be archived in DR-NTU (Data).35 This project focusses on terminology related to technologies, agricultural practices and crops, but will also provide some dictionary workshops to develop 29 https://www.aungsoeillustrations.org/, accessed June 28, 2018. https://libportal.nus.edu.sg/frontend/ms/sg-places-worship/about-sg-places-worship, accessed June 28, 2018. 31 https://libportal.nus.edu.sg/frontend/ms/sg-chinese-clans/about-sg-chinese-clans, accessed June 28, 2018. 32 http://performct.nus.edu.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 33 https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/miscellany/must%20listen%20list-index.htm, accessed June 28, 2018. 34 For an example, see http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/corpus/show_text_en.php?id=crdoNJO_COCK_AND_LEOPARD_SOUND&idref=crdo-NJO_COCK_AND_LEOPARD., accessed June 28, 2018. 35 https://researchdata.ntu.edu.sg/, accessed June 28, 2018. 30 11 scripts for some unwritten languages. This project builds on an earlier iteration titled “Grammatical Description and Digital Documentation of Endangered Languages of Nagaland, Northeast India.” Literary Studies The field of literary studies is typically considered in other countries as a core discipline of DH because of its foundational role with the introduction of distant reading and topic-modelling methodologies (Moretti, 2013). This field has not received as much emphasis in Singapore as it has elsewhere, but nevertheless, a number of literary projects have also been developed here. Koh Tai Ann’s compilation, the comprehensive Singapore Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography, attempts to be a complete archive of English-language Singapore literature, identifying, classifying and describing books, periodicals and other materials.36 Based at NTU and created in collaboration with the NTU library, it is Singapore's first digital bibliography of national literature in one of the official languages; it may be the first of its kind in Southeast Asia. As it aims to be a current bibliography, it is continuously updated. It enables different modes of searching and it is aimed at both specialized researchers and the general audience. The Epigraphs project by Graham Matthews and Francis Bond investigates the intellectual genealogies of English-language literary works as ascribed by their authors in epigraphs —the short quotations (sometimes misquotations) of other authors in the initial pages of a published work.37 By tracking the epigraphs’ appearance through recording the meta-data in thousands of books, the project seeks to trace networks of influence and their geographic distribution over time. Michelle Chiang of the English Department at NTU takes the approach of literary criticism to examine how VR breaks down the fourth wall. By analyzing the way virtual reality environments like Unity Engine and Oculus reposition the viewer within the field of dramatic action, she reevaluates Beckett’s use of the absurd and Deleuze’s multiplicity of differential processes. Through describing the subject position of the viewer within the virtual environment as a virtual position, akin to that of a ghost, she develops the framework of what she calls a “hauntology” for analyzing VR performance, and audience interactivity. These projects bear witness to the diversity of interests and disciplinary background of research teams based in Singapore. They tend to emphasize linguistic, audiovisual and geographic dimensions of cultural forms that connect Singapore to a wider region. They also tend to offer a blend of computationally amenable data made available to researchers interested in computational methods as well as public-facing interfaces for general or specialized audiences interested in the specific topics of such thematic collections. Many other people have stated they are working on DH work informally, or they announce in their profile pages that funding has been secured to develop DH work. A web search of "digital 36 37 https://eps.ntu.edu.sg/client/en_US/SingaporeLiterature/, accessed June 28, 2018. http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/projects/epigraph/, http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/pdf/2018lrec-epigraph.pdf, accessed June 28, 2018. 12 humanities in Singapore" also reveals many job vacancies, which means that the field might become more institutionalized and more active in the future. EXCURSUS: EMERGENT DIGITAL CULTURES AND DIGITAL ARTS Singapore DH (as a digital solution to traditional questions of the humanities and to the new questions arising from the application of digital tools to the humanities themselves) seems to move in the larger spectrum of the humanities, including not only its traditional disciplines (e.g. languages and literature, philosophy, law, geography, history, art history, musicology) but also anthropology, heritage studies, museum studies, performing arts, and visual arts. A community is growing around a non-well-defined concept of DH, and it is developing relevant results mainly in society-driven research projects. Here we are not claiming what DH is or should be. We are including projects from people who self-report as digital humanists. In some cases, there are additional projects similar to those mentioned above (such as the art projects and performances of Ho Tzu Nyen and Steve Dixon). This omission is not a statement on the quality of their work but a mere reflection of the way different artists and researchers position their work, and of the communities they try to reach. Labeling one's work as DH indicates more than the usage of certain tools and theoretical affiliations. DH is a powerful signal that one is open to dialogue with others outside one's discipline and that one is interested in how digital methods are changing the humanities more generally. Emergent Digital Cultures In addition to archiving traditional arts, practices and culture, the study of emergent digital cultures is also a central theme within Singaporean DH. The following projects investigate how digital communication and information dissemination technologies and projects impact people’s daily lives, citizen identities and philosophical foundations. While not necessarily producing online digital tools or resources, they study the ways in which modern Southeast Asian’s humanity is being altered by digital praxis. In some cases, we list researchers whose work is relevant to the field, rather than specific research projects: Mobile Communication in Myanmar, a project headed by Rich Ling of NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, and Rajiv Aricat at the School of Social Sciences, investigates the ways in which digital technologies structure the imagination and social networks of communities in Myanmar, extending to trishaw drivers and other small-scale entrepreneurs, civic engagement, and the imagination of future aspirations (Aricat & Ling, 2016; Lai, Chib & Ling 2015; Ling, et al., 2015; Ling, et al., 2017; Oreglia & Ling, 2018). Loo Geok Pee investigates how knowledge workers use IT. This includes questions such as how doctors work with AI robots (whether they think AI and robots are collaborators or tools), what motivates contributors to participate in crowd-sourcing projects, and post-sale customer loyalty innovations on websites (Pee, 2018; Pee, Forthcoming). These projects investigate how 13 patterns of human-machine interaction are changing, and how the digital is transforming human culture. Lee Kwan Min of NTU’s School of Communication and Information, NTU specializes in UX (user experience) research and design, social and psychological effects of information and communication Technologies (ICT), and human machine interaction including human computer interaction (HCI), human robot interaction (HRI), and human automobile interaction (HAI). His recent research has described differential cognitive effects of reading on paper or on screen, residual cognitive effects of violent video games, and user response to voice control systems for navigating computer networks (Hou & Lee, 2017; Jung, Park & Lee, 2015; Jung, Lee & Biocca, 2015). Alton Chua is investigating the spread of Fake News, and how rumors spread in different languages across different platforms, such as Twitter and other web platforms. His research asks how Fake News spreads through word of mouth, how quickly rumors spread through digital media compared to word of mouth, and how clickbaits function to anticipate cognitive, affective and pragmatic responses (Chen, Chua & Deng, 2018; Chua & Banerjee 2018; Pal, Chua & Goh, 2018). Hallam Stevens and Shirley Sun are studying data.gov.sg to investigate the Singapore government’s intentions and vehicles to become a leader in data science and analytics (see Stevens, 2016; Sun, 2016). In 2011, the government created the website to make large quantities of data available to the public in various formats. Presently, the site includes data on demographics, traffic, crime, economics; geographic/GIS data; health data and a wide variety of other kinds of data.Data.gov.sg represents a commitment to openness and availability of data (“Data shall be made easily accessible;” “Data shall be released in a timely manner;” “Data shall be as raw as possible”). But just because data is made available does not mean that it will be used by everyone, or that it will benefit everyone equally. If data is not collected, maintained, analyzed, and used carefully, there is a risk that data can contribute to entrenching existing social, political, and economic structures. This project asks what steps Singapore can take to ensure not only that everyone in Singapore has equal access to data, but also that the benefits of data use are distributed as equally as possible and that everyone is represented as equally as possible within data sets. This project aims to explore the ways government data are collected, stored, and analyzed in Singapore so as to develop strategies for socially responsible and just data use. Melvin Chen is coordinating a research group on AI from the perspective of analytical philosophy and ethics. Examples of the questions his group is pursuing include: should ethical decision-making in AI systems be modelled on human beings? Should ethical decision-making in AI be fully autonomous or should there always be an element of human oversight? Conversely, might AI systems be developed to help detect and reduce human biases and prejudices? This group is planning symposia to bring together researchers dealing with these issues, as well as to develop a Delphi study of expert opinion, white papers and journal articles on various aspects of the ethics of AI. These will also provide a foundation for the legal and 14 social components of the project that will give policymakers guidance on the key ethical issues and challenges surrounding AI. The Serious Games project headed by Cai Yiyu has developed numerous interactive 3D visualization projects for broad application, state-of-the-art research on simulation and serious games for education in three major educational domains: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); Special Needs Education; and Humanities and Social Science Education (Cai & Goei, 2014). This has developed more recently into a host of applications in heart science and engineering education, as well as immersive VA environments for the education of children with Autism disorders (Lu, et al., 2017).38 By developing game-like environments for autistic spectrum children to strategize their daily tasks and goals, Serious Games for ASD Children seeks to enable them to develop reasoning strategies for navigating real life situations, benefitting both the children and their families and carers. Theng Yin Leng is the Acting Director of the Ageing Research Institute for Society and Education, and Research Director for Arts, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at NTU. Her research interests are mainly in user-centered design, interaction design and usability engineering, using scientifically-based experimental Human-Computer Interaction in understanding users and their interactions, especially for Information Systems, with a recent focus on interactive systems/devices for Healthcare and Education. Her main research interest is to develop innovative tools, techniques, methods and models to assist in the design and evaluation of interactive systems/devices, making research relevant and impacting society. In her forthcoming Spatial Ethnography project, Kristy Kang investigates how ethnic communities are changing in cities. Building on insights from her previous project, Seoul of Los Angeles, this project focusses on Singapore, asking how migration and movement are changing our experience of cities and their peoples? And, how is our sense of identity and place affected as a result? Examining the rich and complex cultural history of Singapore and its multiethnic communities, this project aims to tell the story of how overlapping stories of migration transform the way we understand urban ethnic communities. It explores how these communities have become hybrid in unexpected ways and have developed strategies for sharing a sense of place. Situated in the emerging field of the digital and urban humanities, this project serves as a digital platform for community storytelling. It aims to reveal overlooked histories embedded in the geographies of place; to help disturb histories of forgetting; and to help disturb the negation of unrepresented narratives —in order to empower individuals to gain a voice and perspective in the transnational metropolis of Singapore. Digital Arts Digital Arts also constitute a significant part of DH in Singapore. For example, the work of new media artist Ina Conradi Chavez spans several disciplines: digital painting, experimental S3D animation, installation and media architecture. Ina’s explorations redefine the wide spectrum of what painting can be. Her ‘paintings’ are often “unframed” and animated as cine-installation in a 38 http://myycai.wix.com/test, accessed June 28, 2018. 15 gallery, infinitely expanding within variable display immersive platforms such as for example Deep Space 8K, 360 screens, urban screens, or those that are “re-framed” back into cinema projection.39 She has completed five experimental animated films since 2007: Dreams (2005), Emotion Study (2010), Le Phénomène Atmosphérique (2011), Elysian Fields (2013) and Chrysalis (2016).40 Jesvin Yeo’s Designing Cultures project aspires to a holistic preservation of Singaporean intangible cultural heritage. Rather than introducing new methods, it seeks to facilitate better coordination of existing approaches.41 “Designing Cultures” involves examining different perceived notions and levels of aesthetics, manifested in traditional historical Asian arts and crafts of the region. Using a variety of digital tools from VR, 3D printing and tracking Instagram, her tools and approaches are grounded on conceptual experimentations with the rich disciplines of visual communication and technology. Tangible/Intangible, by Elke Reinhuber, Benjamin Seide and Ross Williams, investigates how current and emerging visual technologies such as VR may be utilized to capture cultural heritage sites such as the Yunnan Gardens at NTU, and to create immersive virtual environments for audience exploration and engagement. Preliminary outputs, such as the Secret Detours immersive video, give an indication of the directions the project will take.42 This movie short is set within a lush Chinese garden, adapted from the great traditions of imperial landscaping —the Yunnan Gardens in the West of Singapore. Four dancers, dressed in the colors of the cardinal directions, examine the spaces, the paths and the detours of the green scenery. The spherical video relates to the experience of being surrounded by mythological creatures and their traces inside the garden. As the beautiful layout of the grounds is composed from a range of intersections with multiple meandering paths to choose from, the omnidirectional video invites similarly to explore the atmosphere between an exquisite selection of trees, shrubs, bushes and pieces of architecture. Venomenon by Elke Reinhuber also uses stereoscopic 3D video to explore counterfactual thinking and anti-linear or multi-linear narrative, within stunning locations in Singapore, which unfold their impressive sculpturality fully in stereoscopic 3D.43 According to the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus, the famous poet turned his head despite the injunction not to do so —and lost his wife. In the installation of the movie short, the audience is invited to become protagonist in the immersive environment of two opposing screens and to question the different outcomes of the decisive situation with contradicting content in the two corners of the room. The display 39 40 41 42 43 https://www.aec.at/radicalatoms/en/deep-space-8k-media-wall-nexus/, and http://mediaartnexus.com/ accessed June 28, 2018. https://vimeo.com/113188320, https://vimeo.com/46398056, https://vimeo.com/163234557, http://www.elysianfieldsfilm.com/, https://vimeo.com/163234557, accessed June 28, 2018. https://www.designingculturesstudio.com/ accessed June 28, 2018. https://vimeo.com/231271809, accessed June 28, 2018. http://www.venomenon.com/, accessed June 28, 2018. 16 modes force the spectators to turn their heads around, just as the protagonist of the ancient Greek myth. ACTIVITIES AND CONFERENCES Several visiting researchers from Australia, the US, Germany and England have given talks on DH in Singapore’s universities, libraries and museums since at least 2007. Although many projects started in the 2000s or earlier (before the name Digital Humanities even replaced older articulations such as Humanities Computing), the first public workshop to actively align itself to DH in Singapore was Cultural Specificity in Digital Collections at NUS in 2016, convened by John Phillips and Miguel Escobar Varela.44 This workshop aimed to produce a reflexive overview of the key mechanisms through which the makers of digital collections introduce general audiences to the cultural specificity of their collections. A possible concept that can encompass these mechanisms was proposed in the workshop: “hermeneutic algorithms,” which encompasses things as diverse as audiovisual introductions, critical commentaries, interactive visualizations, navigational frameworks and tooltip displays. The questions considered in the workshop were: l What strategies are used in order to communicate cultural specificity through digital collections? How do these strategies continue or displace traditional practices of cultural hermeneutics? l What are the implications of the specific design choices actualized in the interfaces of the digital collections? l How are these strategies developed, tested, and changed within the life-cycle of a digital collection? l How can quantitative digital humanities tools be used to learn more about the items in the collection and the ways users are interacting with them? l What conceptual frameworks are the most appropriate to describe the technical/conceptual hybrids represented by these hermeneutic algorithms? At the time of the workshop there was no centralized database or authoritative list of these kinds of digital resources, so the first objective of this workshop was to assemble a list of digital projects concerned with lesser known traditions in humanities research. Most of the famous digital platforms at that time dealt with text (for example the Perseus Digital Library, a collection of Greek and Latin texts). In contrast, the projects presented at this workshop focused on art forms such as dance, theatre, music, architecture, oral poetry and video games. Likewise, while most academic discussions deal almost exclusively with art forms from Europe and North America, the invited speakers presented projects focused on art forms from Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia, South Africa and Latin America. The projects in this survey were very diverse, but they all shared one characteristic. The makers of these archives were constantly thinking about the implications of design choices. Decisions about the visual organization of the material can change how people perceive the content of online collections. Therefore, one of the best practices proposed by the workshop is that "makers of digital platforms should always allow for different kinds of usage of a platform." Any 44 http://digitalhumanities.sg/cultural-specificity-in-digital-collections/, accessed June 28, 2018. 17 platforms should allow different interaction paths, that is, different journeys across a digital collection that correspond to the interests and level of expertise of different user groups. Through the discussions, participants from Singapore and abroad also stressed two key areas: the creation of databases and the institutional contexts in which platforms are developed. Many of the participants were experts in information science and software engineering, and one of their recommendations was for the usage of semantic databases to structure cultural information in digital platforms. Institutional contexts were considered very important for the future of digital collections. The workshop's recommendation for developing sustainable digital collections was to engage librarians and academics from across the universities in Singapore in the creation of common tools and repository systems that could guarantee continued access to digital resources for generations to come. As a result of this workshop, the informal Digital Humanities Singapore group was established. Since 2016, other workshops have been organized by the group. These included an initial meeting of researchers and librarians at the National Library Board convened by Wai Yin Pryke (NLB director), Miguel Escobar Varela and Peter Schoppert (director of NUS Press and president of the Singapore Book Publishers Association). Subsequent events include Who's Doing What (2016), a workshop hosted at NUS aimed at fostering communication across DH research in Singapore and two thematic DH symposiums: Metadata (2017) and an upcoming event on Copyright (2018), as well as an intensive workshop on biographical databases and social networking software.45 Explicitly-labelled DH work has also been presented by Singaporebased researchers at Histoinformatics (2017) and at the CrossRef annual conference (2017). In 2019, the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium will be hosted at NTU. TEACHING Blog posts detailing the importance of DH are found in several institutional platforms.46 Until recently, there were only two courses offered at the tertiary level, both of them at an introductory undergraduate level, one within a communications and new media specialization and the other as a general education module. It is only in 2018 that SUTD (Singapore University of Technology and Design) has begun to offer a minor in DH. 47 DH-themed workshops outside formal classes have focused on TEI encoding, and a new one offered at NUS at the time of writing, by Marcus Bingenheimer with the support of Kenneth Dean, focuses on social networking software and the use of biographical databases. Forthcoming workshops on Python for DH are scheduled at NUS for late 2018. 45 Metadata in the Digital Humanities: Who’s Using What? http://digitalhumanities.sg/metadata-in-the-digital-humanities-whos-using-what/, accessed June 28, 2018. 46 for example: Ancient Philosophies with a Digital Twist https://hass.sutd.edu.sg/education/teaching-highlights/ancient-philosophies-digital-twist; and National Day Songs and Digital Humanities https://lkycic.sutd.edu.sg/blog/33-years-nationalday-songs-digital-humanities/, accessed June 28, 2018. 47 https://hass.sutd.edu.sg/education/minors/digital-humanities-minor/ 18 PLACE IN THE WORLD AND THE REGION Singapore-based researchers and practitioners often have joined the field from a variety of other disciplinary backgrounds: history, linguistics, literature, art, theatre, geography and computer science. Although many academics carry out cutting-edge digital research in their fields, very few researchers actually engage with the international institutions of DH or with DH as a site of intellectual debate. There are only a handful of articles by Singapore-based researchers published in the two leading DH journals, Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing). There are very few presentations from Singapore-based scholars in international DH conferences. There has been some participation in the Australian (aaDH), Japanese (JADH) and Taiwanese (DADH) conferences but very little participation in the international (ADHO) conference. This could be partially explained by the fact that this conference has been, until recently, mostly held in Europe and North America. However, the 2021 conference will take place in Tokyo. This will be the first time the conference will be held in Asia and its theme, "Responding to Asian Diversity", promises to invite more participation from Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In spite of the lack of direct engagement with the global DH community, Singapore-based researchers have used digital methods for publishing high impact papers and presented in leading conferences in their fields, mostly in history, religious studies and GIS. OBSERVATIONS Researchers based in Singapore are interested in strategically labeling themselves - or their projects – as DH, but this act is mostly aimed towards their institutional peers or disciplinary colleagues. This means that there is more engagement with DH as a tool, or as the best possible tool within a shifting methodological pallet, rather than coming "from" DH or being aimed at making interventions in the global DH discourse. The first part of Singaporean DH history, as reported here, has been organic. However, better institutional support, spaces for epistemological dialogue and policies are needed to push the field forward. The next phase in this history might be more directed by specific funding guidelines and inter-institutional collaborations. It is important that more critical discourse around the specific intellectual histories of the humanities is integrated into the endless tinkering and innovation of digital methods. For the field to thrive, more participation within the regional and global communities needs fostering, as well as more interdisciplinary dialogue with digital humanities as a site of discourse rather than merely a source of methods and practices. From this brief survey of projects in Singapore, it should also be clear that Digital Humanities has enabled scholars in the region to produce new, collaborative, multi-disciplinary research that reflects the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, traditional/modern, Asian/Western and communityoriented cultural dynamics of Singapore and Southeast Asia more widely. Digital Humanities offers a new space for scholars of multiple disciplines, from visual arts and literature, to history, linguistics, computing and health sciences to work together to address themes of common concern. As a nascent field or method for collaboration and dissemination, it shows great promise for cutting edge research to address complex questions, and we look forward to seeing the new directions in which DH will develop in the region. 19 REFERENCES Aricat, R., & Ling, R. (2016). Civic engagement in Myanmar: The promise and threat of mobile communication and the internet. In R. 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