Workshops

Call for Papers:

The fifth workshop in the Trilateral Workshop Program „Transcontinental Perspectives on Knowledge Production“ organized by the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Tokyo and Yonsei University (Korea) will be hosted at Yonsei University, Korea on September 6-7, 2018. This time the workshop is titled „Seeing like a State: Popularizing Correct Knowledge“.
The workshop will be held in English and is once more aimed at M.A. and Ph.D. students of FAU who are interested in intensive international academic experiences and exchange in the areas of history, cultural studies and area studies. Presentations should be about 20 minutes, followed up by discussions.
Depending on the quality of the application and the availability of funding it is possible to combine the workshop participation with a short-term research stay for field work, archival research or visits of the Kim Dae-Jung Presidential Library. Maximum length of research stay for M.A. students is 2 weeks, and for Ph.D. candidates 2 months.

Applications with a presentation abstract of max. 300 words—supplemented by a short description of the research stay purpose—should be submitted to the email addresses mentioned below until April 20, 2018:

Professor Dr. Marc Andre Matten / Professor Dr. Fabian Schäfer
marc.matten@fau.de / fabian.schaefer@fau.de
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Institute for Near Eastern and East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Artilleriestraße 70
91052 Erlangen, Germany

Workshop: Digital Networks of Knowledge in the Cold War Era

Organized by Marc A. Matten, Renée Gringmuth and Henrike Rudolph

22-23 February 2018

In the past decade, science and knowledge as historical objects have been re-examined from different perspectives, with a lively exchange between the disciplines of history, area studies and cultural studies. Within the history of science there has been a shift towards a discursive and network-like consideration of knowledge production and its conditions, that—instead of asking for success and/or failure of knowledge reception in modernization processes—takes their mobility into focus. Going beyond the currently productive, but primarily hagiographical, research on 20^th century famous scientists and experts in historical sciences, the aim of this workshop is to discuss methods and techniques from the field of digital humanities that could help to describe and visualize transnational scientific communities and their contribution to the production of knowledge in networks. By doing so we hope to question the long-held assumption that such production was neither limited by national boundaries nor only occurred within the geopolitical blocs of the Cold War era.

The primary task of this workshop is to identify central problems in processing multilingual sources (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Western languages) and to discuss different OCR and mark-up techniques as a first step for creating a multi-media database that is able to describe historical processes of transnational knowledge production.

Workshop Program

22nd February

13:30     Welcome

Introduction of sources/texts

Processing sources

15:00     Coffee break

15:15     Software discussions (Stanford NER, Access, Yoshikoder etc.)

16:45     Coffee break

17:00     Discussion of Data Architecture (text markup and generating databases)

18:00     End of workshop

19:00     Dinner

23rd February

9:00-ca. 13h Visit of the SASS-collection in Tennenlohe

This Workshop is supported by the Zentrum für Regionenforschung and the IZ Digital.

Tri-national Workshop Program “Knowledge Production in Transcontinental Perspective” with Japan und Korea (PAJAKO; GAES-funded)

Since 2014 the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Institute for Languages and Cultures of the Middle East and East Asia) together with the Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (Tokyo University) and the Institute of Korean Studies (Yonsei University) have been offering a workshop program addressing the production, transfer, and circulation of knowledge in transcontinental perspective. The German Academic Exchange Service (GAES) is funding this program for a two-year period from 2017-2019. Grants are available for projects on the history and sociology of knowledge that focus on the cultural, social, political, and intellectual dimensions of knowledge production. Research questions pertaining to this field are to be newly examined from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. The following workshops will be organized within the next two years together with our partners in Japan and Korea:

• Workshop 2/2017 at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg: Sharing Knowledge in a Globalized Civil Society
• Workshop 9/2017 at the University of Tokyo: The Fate of the Fact in the Post-Secular Era
• Workshop 3/2018 at Yonsei University: Seeing like a State: Popularizing Correct Knowledge

The workshops are combined with research stays and target especially qualified and interdisciplinary working MA and PhD students. These short to medium term research stays offer both groups the opportunity to do archival research or fieldwork in Korea and Japan (MA students: 14 days, PhD students: 2 months).

The fourth workshop in the trilateral series “Transcontinental Perspectives on Knowledge Production” titled “The Fate of the Fact in the Post-Secular Era” took place in Tokyo from September 15 to 16. MA and PhD students from the departments of Japanese and Chinese studies together with Professor Matten traveled to Japan for the purpose of discussing the fate of facts in the post-secular era. Professor Nakajima Takahiro (University of Tokyo) warmly welcomed his guests from Germany and Korea. Prof. Kim Hang (Yonsei University, Seoul) also participated in this workshop together with several students.

Apart from the academic program and the fruitful discussions that took place during the two-day workshop our host also organized an event program that included a visit to Kanda Shrine (神田明神; http://www.kandamyoujin.or.jp), Jinbōchō (神保町; http://jimbou.info), and a guided tour of the Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures (https://www.meiji.ac.jp/cip/english/institute/yonezawa.html).

On account of PAJAKO grant money from the GAES students had the opportunity to combine their participation in the workshop with a research stay of up to two months to do fieldwork and archival research for their MA or PhD theses in the numerous and excellent libraries at the University of Tokyo.

The next workshop in this series is planned for September 2018 and will take place in Seoul. The central aim of this series is to support young scholars by offering MA and PhD students the opportunity to get feedback on their research and to network in an international setting.

We cordially thank all participants for their contributions and especially our hosts for organizing this international workshop.

From February 17-18 2017 the PAJAKO workshop “Transcontinental Perspectives on Knowledge Production: Sharing Knowledge in a Globalized Civil Society” took place at the FAU. Numerous participants from the FU Berlin, Tokyo University, Yonsei University and of course the FAU attended the workshop. Fourteen presentations in all covering a large variety of topics related to the workshop’s theme were held during the two-day workshop. The workshop was funded by the Centre for Area Studies and the GAES. Participants also spent a day in Nuremberg, where they visited the Germanisches Nationalmuseum as well as the Nazi party rally grounds.