Possibilities of East Asian Digital Humanities : Through the Activities of Text Encoding

This paper discusses the possibility of DH in East Asia through a survey of past trends in text encoding in East Asia, particularly Japan. In Japan, the construction of text databases has been active since the 1980s, and a large number of text databases of Chinese classics have been created in China and Taiwan. However, the leading standard of text encoding, the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines were not popular at that time. In the 2010s, as several major barriers have been reduced, the TEI guidelines have become more globally oriented, and a system for dealing with East Asian texts has been established. In the future, it will be possible to produce TEI-compliant structured texts in a more appropriate form, and they will be connected with multimedia data to promote various kinds of digital research. This will lead to a truly global digital research environment in the humanities