2018年美国亚洲研究年会 | 数字技术与社会专题

Beyond Digitization, Cross-Specialization

3/23/2018

12:45 PM - 2:45 PM

Location: Roosevelt Room 1, Exhibit Level

Scholarship and librarianship are inextricably linked in this digital era. The volume of information available electronically may bewilder seasoned scholars. Meanwhile, shifting expectations for academic libraries may intimidate veteran librarians. Increased information access offers exciting opportunities for scholar-librarian cooperation, but complicates the traditional scholar-librarian relationship. The AAS conference provides a unique opportunity for scholars and librarians to come together, and we propose our panel as a chance for honest dialogue about scholars’ and librarians’ ambitions and concerns regarding digital scholarship. Three scholar-librarian pairs will discuss three recent collaborations across specializations. Zhaohui Xue and Yan Long discuss establishing a web archive of online content created by grassroots Chinese NGOs – a project whose politically-sensitive nature might have deemed it impossible without library support and faculty interest. Responding to the proliferation of databases for studying historical China, Feng-en Tu and Lik Hang Tsui argue that academic libraries must train scholars in digital methodologies, and assert the need for discipline-specific software applications, data collections, and standards. Cecile Sun turns a critical eye toward digital humanities, questioning quantitative research's value to the discipline. With Tianni Wang, she describes an oral history project that has convinced her of digital humanities' potential and the possibilities for librarian-faculty cooperation. Discussants Peter Bol and Jim Cheng will facilitate conversation about the intersection of scholarship, instruction, and information management.

Presentations:

• 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM Convergence or Divergence? Mapping the Landscape of Chinese Nongovernmental Organizations

• 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM Opportunities and Concerns: Collaborations between Scholars and Librarians in the Digital Era

• 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM The China Biographical Database Project: Collaboration Between Research Projects and Libraries in Addressing Digital Humanities Challenges

Reclaiming Surplus: Politics, Technology, and Culture of Dispensable Lives in Contemporary South Korea

3/23/2018

5:15 PM - 7:15 PM

Location: Jackson, Mezzanine Level

This panel looks into various social sites that reclaim the meaning and force of surplus lives in contemporary South Korea. As a “reserve army of labor” in capitalist systems and a political concern of the modern state, surplus population has appeared in varying forms over the course of Korea’s modernization. From colonial subalterns to those excluded from economic development under military dictatorship, their bodies in reserve have been deemed at once exploitable and disposable. However, as South Korea is rapidly shifting to a post-industrial, technologically advanced, neoliberal society, those who feel superfluous are not only increasing, but also taking new shapes and creating hitherto non-existent networks. By shedding light on practices that those identified as invalid, anomalous, and expendable engage in, this panel inquires into how their practices operate to tackle the conditions that reproduce dispensable lives. In addressing the struggles of Samsung semiconductor plant workers with terminal diseases, Kim attends to their strategy of shaming, particularly the use of disabled bodies. Park traces a new praxis of community in the movement to discover the truth about the Sewŏl ferry disaster, noting the movement has challenged normative definitions of “victim” and “death.” Yoon delves into the remnants of life-making in the South Korean pet-cloning industry, as she locates the production of extra animals within the transnational context of biocapitalism and bioethics. Concerned with the ingyŏ (surplus) sensibilities of the digital generation, Yi’s analysis of webtoons about war and espionage situates this new medium within the history of Korean War aesthetics.  

Presentations:

• 5:15 PM - 7:15 PM A Cold War Surplus in Digital Youth Culture: Spies and Survivors in South Korean Webtoons

• 5:15 PM - 7:15 PM Disavowal of "The Political": Life Power and the Sewŏl Ferry Disaster

• 5:15 PM - 7:15 PM The Politics of Shaming and Bodies of Evidence: Cancer and Samsung Semiconductor Plant Workers

• 5:15 PM - 7:15 PM The Remnants of Biotech Boom: Non-Human Animals as Surplus Bodies in Pet-Cloning

Digital China: Decenter and Deconstruction

3/24/2018

10:45 AM - 12:45 PM

Location: Maryland Suite C, Lobby Level

This panel examines the digitization in and of Chinese culture in the new millennium. It concerns but is not limited to the following issues: how do digital techniques transform the social reality and create new ways of representation? Particularly, how are various sectors of culture reshaped by the arrival and dissemination of digital technology? What role does digitization play in negotiating the form, content, politics, and ethics in different ramifications of culture? Song Shi’s paper investigates how digital media and communication technologies are used to empower Chinese NGOs. Andy Rodekohr considers how digital filmmaking and CGI-enhanced cinematic spectacles have transformed the imagination of the “the masses” in contemporary China. Enhua Zhang tackles the issues of digitization and dramatization, memory and anesthesia, private and public revolving around three recent films’ digital recreation of Tian’anmen Square. Based on the India-born Indrani’s The Legend of Lady White Snake, Liang Luo presents the digitization of Chinese culture in the transnational context and questions the relationship between digital-ness and plasticity, subject-making and metamorphosis. As a whole, this panel demonstrates the multifaceted use of digital technology in the spectacular construction of film, memory, performances, and social change. The four papers also each engage with the concept of marginalization: queer mentality and intermedial experimentation in Luo’s paper, marginalized grassroots NGOs in Song's paper, the anachronistic notion of the masses in Andy’s paper, and, in Zhang’s case, the the resonance of individual memory in the face of state-sanctioned mythmaking.

Presentations:

• 10:45 AM - 12:45 PM China's Digitized Masses: Crowd Spectacles and CGI in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

• 10:45 AM - 12:45 PM NGO2.0: Using Digital Technologies for Social Good

• 10:45 AM - 12:45 PM Poetry, Photography, Fashion: Things Lost and Found in Digitally Performing the White Snake

• 10:45 AM - 12:45 PM Tian’anmen in the Making: The Socialist Memory in the Age of Digitalization

Technologies of the Sublimed Self: Socio-Technical Formations and Re-subjectivization in East Asia

3/24/2018

3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Washington Room 5, Exhibit Level

Technologies have been conceptualized as a major dynamic in shaping and transforming the economic, political, and cultural status quo in East Asia. Meanwhile, many argue that the affordances of technologies have always been fulfilled within the existing social or institutional structures. The idea of socio-technical formations (e.g., Sassen 2012), however, emphasizes the ways in which interactions and collaborations between the social and technological factors engender new forms of identities, mechanism of governance, and social relations. Focusing on the booming business and financial fields in East Asia, this panel examines and contrasts how the ensemble of social and technological transformations has redefined the process of subjectivization in historically or culturally specific contexts. This innovative and interdisciplinary session will present various technological artifacts, interfaces, or interactive experiences obtained from our ethnographic works and engaged with economics or sociological concepts.

Based on the history of semiconductor industry in Taiwan since the early 1990s, Lin examines the development of communication technologies and the formation of nationalistic identities among the high-tech workers in Hsinchu Science Park. Zhang depicts the new entrepreneurial work imaginaries among IT entrepreneurs in Beijing’s High-Tech Zone, situating them in China’s post-socialist reform since the late 1970s. Wang studies the small individual investors in Shanghai using digital financial technologies to construct their new economic and social identities in and beyond the cyberspace. Finally, Kim conceptualizes financial subjectivities in South Korea after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, and studies how a specific trading technique influences individual perceptions of wealth, value and investment.

Presentations:

• 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM E-Consumers, Payers, or Investors? Digital Financial Technologies and Small Online Investors in Shanghai

• 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM Entrepreneurial Labor and Middle-Class Work Imaginaries in Beijing’s Zhongguancun

• 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM The Discontents of Global Electronic Capitalism: Individualism and Nationalism of Semiconductor Workers in Taiwan

• 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM The Moral Economy of the Networked Financial Subject in South Korea: Frugality and Value Investing in Online Financial Self-Help Communities