Prof. Jieh Hsiang
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Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering / Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University (NTU)
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Director, Digital Humanities Research Center, NTU
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Research Fellow, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
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Affiliate Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU
About Prof. Jieh Hsiang
Professor Hsiang's recent research focuses on digital humanities, with a core aim of exploring how information technology can be leveraged to handle big data in the humanities for research purposes, particularly to uncover phenomena and research topics that traditional methods cannot reveal. This is an innovative field that integrates humanities and technology. The work includes digitizing historical materials and classics needed for historical and humanities research (including images, metadata, full text, annotations, etc.), developing methodologies for digital humanities, building large-scale historical databases (contextual analysis systems), and creating digital humanities tools and platforms.
Achievements include establishing theories for contextual analysis and interactive visualization, building nearly 40 context analysis systems focused on Taiwanese archives (such as those from the National Palace Museum, the National Archives Administration, the Taiwan Historica, the Taiwan Provincial Assembly, and local council records) or Chinese classics, and developing over 40 digital humanities tools for data download, processing, annotation, format conversion, analysis, and visualization. Additionally, the personalized digital humanities platform DocuSky allows scholars to manage data, analyze contexts, and create searchable databases for their own research. These systems have been used over 43 million times across 250 countries, with more than 13,000 daily accesses. DocuSky currently offers interfaces in Chinese, English, and Korean, with a Japanese version in progress led by Japanese scholars. DocuSky has over 4,000 registered users, primarily sinologists, who have established more than 8,000 personal context analysis systems.
Furthermore, Professor Hsiang has authored six academic books on digital humanities in Chinese, some of the earliest on the topic in the Chinese-speaking world, and in 2018 founded the first Chinese journal on the subject, Digital Archives and Digital Humanities, which was selected last year by the National Library as the most cited journal in Taiwan’s information science field. In 2022, Professor Hsiang was invited as a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), the world’s largest DH conference, marking the first time in its 23-year history that an Asian scholar was invited as a keynote speaker.