Timeline

This chronology traces the development of BDSL’s research program since 2019 and the collaborations, events, and institutional changes that have shaped it.

2026 July HKADH joins ADHO BDSL played a central role in the Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities’s (HKADH) successful application to join the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), which admitted the association as its fifteenth constituent organization.
June Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities BDSL PI Javier Cha was elected inaugural Chair of HKADH, marking a new stage in the Lab’s contribution to digital humanities community building across Hong Kong.
2025 July DH2025 BDSL PI Javier Cha delivered the opening keynote at DH2025 in Lisbon, examining how large language models are changing the possibilities and methods of digital historical research.
June Digital Humanities Teacher Training Five early-career academics from HKU and Emory completed BDSL’s summer training in digital humanities research and curriculum development, designed especially for scholars with limited access to digital humanities resources.
2023 August Digital Korean Studies The special section of Korean Studies 47 developed from BDSL’s 2022 publication workshop appeared, including Javier Cha’s “Big Data Studies: The Humanities in Uncharted Waters,” which set out the Lab’s emerging approach to humanities research in the Zettabyte era.
2022 July University of Hong Kong BDSL relocated from the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University to the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.
May–June Advanced Topics in Digital Korean Studies Held in Seoul and Copenhagen, the program combined an international symposium, project incubation, and publication workshop. Seven pilot projects in digital Korean studies were developed for presentation and publication.
2021 September 2021–February 2022 Seminar on Big Data Studies Five sessions brought together research on geospatial AI, born-digital literary heritage, distributed ledgers, recordkeeping, and data-centre ecology, extending BDSL’s inquiry across disciplinary and technical domains.
January–June Big Data and the Historian’s Craft Six sessions organized with the Department of History at Lingnan University and Columbia University’s History Lab examined how big data was changing historical sources, methods, and research infrastructure. Several questions first developed in these conversations later became part of BDSL’s research program.
2019 Founded at Seoul National University BDSL was established in the College of Liberal Studies with a nine-year institutional commitment from Seoul National University under its Innovative and Pioneering Young Researchers Scheme. Its initial research program examined how contemporary information systems were changing the sources, methods, and material conditions of humanities research; the award ended early when BDSL relocated to Hong Kong in 2022.