Master of Arts in Digital History in Global Asia

This course introduces students to digital history, providing them with foundational knowledge on its emergence, developments, benefits, and challenges, and its methods, theories, and practices. It will begin with an exploration of digital history's relationship to history, digital humanities, and Asian studies, and an overview of how historians of global Asian history have used and created digital history. Throughout the course, students will study and explore existing digital history projects and probe into the different kinds of digital expressions that historians have deployed. By the end of this course, students will be introduced to Digital History and the basics to create a digital history project.

This course familiarises students with the approaches, theories, and tools of digital historical scholarship. It is aimed at developing their skills as thinkers, writers, and creators of Asian historical narratives with the use of digital approaches. Throughout the course, students will be exposed to several digital tools, such as QGIS (Mapping) and Gephi (Networks and Data Visualisation) and will utilise these platforms to enhance their digital skills in historical research and presentation. Drawing on specific case studies, students will be acquainted with how digital technology has revolutionised research on global Asia from the perspective of urban studies, heritage, mobilities, networks, race, class and gender, etc.

This course offers students the chance to critically assess the digital methods used in historical studies and the digital ways through which history is presented to the public. Students will engage with scholarly criticisms of digital history practices. Questions that will be explored include the inclusivity/exclusivity of digital history, the limitations of relying on selected data, how historical narratives are controlled and communicated to the public, and whether AI can be used responsibly to reshape the field.

Digital Data Management refers to the organisation, cleaning, analysis, and interpretation of data to support historical research. This course will walk students through the process of digital data management for historians, librarians, archivists, and museums curators. It will draw on the experiences of Asian libraries, archives, and museums to give students an in-depth understanding of the essential components of data management (e.g., collection selection, organisation, documentation, storage, analysis, preservation, presentation, and dissemination) with a focus on Asian history, culture, and society. Students will be expected to work with Excel and SQL to build a database and Gephi for data visualisation.

This course focuses on the 'spatial turn' in historical studies and introduces a range of geospatial technologies available to historians including spatial theory and thinking, geographical text analysis, and GIS. This unit will take place over two complementary halves, the first considering the driving motives and potential uses of geospatial research, and the second turning to how such research has been applied to Asian case studies. Students will not only have the opportunity to acquire transferable digital skills in visualising data in two and three dimensions, creating timelines, producing maps, and performing spatial statistical analyses, but also develop an all-rounded understanding of the limitations and practical implications of geospatial technologies.

This course exposes students to the theory, practices, and issues surrounding digital public history in adjacent fields at museums, libraries, governments, and historical and communal institutions. Students will explore methods of presenting, communicating, researching, and creating history with digital technology that is accessible to and engages the public, and will have the opportunity to create their own work of digital public history in relation to contemporary concerns in Asian societies.

This course will introduce students to applications in 3D modelling and basic skills in 3D modelling and animation. Students will focus on the challenges of digitally reconstructing Asia's past, problematise digital exhibition, and museums through critical heritage management, and public archaeology, etc., and take part in the reconstruction of a significant Asian cultural heritage. The course will also cover the ethical considerations on digital preservations and how digital approaches can contribute to the preservation of Asian cultural heritage sites and artifacts.

This course introduces students to the shifting landscape of historical archiving and preservation that has accompanied the 'digital turn.' The course will focus on how digital access to resources is reframing academic research, the potential benefits and innovations increased access has for the discipline, and also the pitfalls that commonly accompany the digital curation of source materials. Students will further encounter the ways programming, Optical Character Recognition, and the free version of Natural Language Processing can provide new access to - and new ways of working with - digitised archives. This course looks at both scholarly debates and a variety of archival digitisation and databasing projects to explore the research questions, methods, and logic behind their creation, and to critically frame the potential and limitations of digital archival research.

This course introduces major themes in the history of modern East Asia, including China, Japan, and Korea, as well as Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong. With an emphasis on relevant digital sources, databases, and tools, it introduces students to themes ranging from the shaping of East Asia as a political and cultural entity to the evolution of East Asia's relationship with the Western world, to overlapping narratives and episodes of cooperation and tension linked to colonialism, nationalism, and independence. The themes will be studied from varying perspectives, in particular the dynamics of continuity and change within individual East Asian societies and across East Asia and the transformative roles of East Asia in the modern world.

This course examines the history from British Hong Kong to the present by engaging with emerging themes that range from governance issues, social stratification, cultural developments, urbanization, etc. Students will study the economic, political, and social developments of Hong Kong, focusing in particular on the complex interplay between the British and Chinese cultures at policy and grassroots levels. The course also encourages students to analyse a century of Hong Kong history through the deployment of digitised primary sources and visualise Hong Kong society from the lenses of relevant digital history platforms. Special attention will be paid to local digitisation projects, museum narratives, and the use of digital platforms in tracing and examining Hong Kong's formation from a war-torn city to a world-renowned metropolis of international standing. Some of the themes featured will touch on the city's postwar recuperation, the development of civil society, the rise of a nascent middle class, Hong Kong's relations to the Cold War, the path to the handover, and Hong Kong's post-1997 national integration and subsequent shaping as a part of the Greater Bay Area.

This course introduces the history of Southeast Asia, covering a broad temporal framework that runs from antiquity to the post-war period. It permits students to engage with the historical making of Southeast Asia through significant themes such as ancient trading systems, colonialism, the rise of print culture, modernisation, anti-colonialism, and independence. Students will be introduced to relevant digital sources, tools, and platforms to enrich their study and research of Southeast Asian history.

This course provides an opportunity for students to study and discuss selected topics in history.