Digital Humanities in Vietnam Studies Contexts I (in collaboration with VinUni)

An interdisciplinary field, Digital Humanities (hereafter DH) has world-widely shown its effectiveness and efficiency of the cooperation between the humanities (and social sciences) and computer science, opening new possibilities for innovate research based on big-data. In Vietnam, several intriguing projects founded on DH applications have been carried out by Vietnamese museums, cultural heritage preservation offices, and higher education institutions.
“Digital Humanities in Vietnam Studies Contexts” is specifically designed and offered in collaboration between Fulbright University and Vin University (hereafter “VinUni”). By nature, it is a connected course, in which students and instructors from the two institutions work on the same syllabus, mutually learning from each other, teaming up and teamworking together through various stages of a project of their team’s choice. The course provides its students with basic knowledge of digital humanities, computational tools and interdisciplinary methods, and shows them how to apply them in research in social sciences and humanities in general and in Vietnam’s contexts in particular.
The course introduces the fundamental concepts and interdisciplinary methods of DH contextualized in Vietnam Studies, from a theoretical and applicational viewpoints. The course comprises of three parts. The first part explains the concepts of “digital humanities” and “Vietnam Studies,” and how data is understood in humanities perceptions and processed in digital aspects. The second part presents a variety of sources as well as technical pipelines for digitizing, analyzing, and modeling written documents (printed and handwritten), photographs, map, sound, and crowdsourced data along with the principles of the most important algorithms, in particular, machine-learning approaches (e.g., document analysis and image processing). The last part of the course details how students practice the skills they learn directly by analyzing and interpreting datasets from Vietnam’s National Archives (such as provincial administrative documents written in classical Chinese and Nom script, or modern songs from pre-1975 South Vietnam, etc.) through writing their final reports.
The accomplishments of this course will lay a foundational ground for students to proceed further to a higher-leveled course titled “Applied Digital Humanities for Vietnam Studies” to be offered in the spring semester of 2023.