Youngmin Kim: Digital Humanities in Asia

In his influential world-wide known book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), Klaus Schwab initiates the transdiscursive provocation on the new technology revolution by introducing “The Fourth Wave of the Industrial Revolution,” and argues that the size, speed and scope of these historic changes were brought up by the “unlimited possibilities” of connectivity by mobile devices and the convergent “emerging technology breakthroughs.” On the wave of The 4th Industrial Revolution, our field of the Digital Humanities transforms itself into complex system of the “expanded field” of “big tent” DH, reminding us of the three V’s in the Fourth Wave of the Industrial Revolution: Volume, Velocity, and Variety (one can add more: Variability and Complexity now).

Rapid change after 4th Industrial Revolution has led to the drastic change of platforms which combine technical, academic, cultural, political, economic, and ethical issues at a scale that is unprecedented, including the issues of big data and AI. When one clicks these platforms, one can get the sense of the scales of these different projects, retrieving the vortex of inbound authenticity and outbound hybridization in the structured data of the DH. Richard Howitt’s application of the concept of the “scale” to representation of “glocalization” invokes a double movement of the local and the global which contextualizes “the simultaneous and contested shift up-scale towards the global and down-scale to the local as a response to changing economic, political and cultural pressures,” thereby letting us “zoom-in and zoom-out” (or “turn closely and go away distantly”) of the object of “DH in Asia,” which, I look forward to, will be embedded in the next 2019 JADH-Osaka conference theme of “Localization in Global DH” in “wider East Asia region.”

Youngmin Kim has been teaching literatures in English and critical theory at the Department of English, Dongguk University since 1991 after he got his Ph. D. at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is currently Professor of English, Distinguished Research Professor at Dongguk University, and Jack Ma Chair Professor of Ma Yun Education Fund at Hangzhou Normal University (2019-2020). He has been serving as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of English Language and Literature (2013-2020). He was Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1998-1999) and Sapporo Gakuin University (2009) in Japan, and the Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (2007-8, 2015-6). He had served domestically in Korea as President of William Butler Yeats Society of Korea (2000-2), of Jacques Lacan & Contemporary Psychoanalysis Society(2008-10), and of English Language and Literature Association of Korea(2012-13); internationally as Vice President of IASIL(International Association of the Study of Irish Literatures, Headquarter in Ireland, 2009-2020) and IAELC(International Association of Ethical Literary Criticism, Headquarter in China, 2012-2020), and council members and editorial board members of many other international associations and society. His current interest is Yeats, Hopkins, Pound, and modern and contemporary British and American poetry, transnationalism, world literature, and digital humanities. He wrote articles and books on modern and contemporary poetries in English, critical theory, psychoanalysis, comparative literature and world literature, and Digital Humanities.

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