Panel 39: Locating Digital Spaces

Chair: Amanda Kennell, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Liang Cai, University of Notre Dame, “Geomobility of Elites and Identity Construction Before Qin’s Unification of China (ca. 390–221 BCE)”

Jesse Drian, University of California, Los Angeles, “Digital Spaces for Exploring the Archives”

Amanda Kennell, University of Notre Dame, “Drinking with Dazai at Bungo Stray Dogs’ Bar Lupin”

Digital technologies have now proliferated to the point that they suffuse everyday life. Much work has been done on the digital-human interface, but outside the buzzy field of virtual reality, comparatively little research has been done on how digital technologies affect physical spaces or human perceptions thereof. This panel draws together three scholars whose work interrogates digital-spatial connections in three different nations through diverse analytical lenses. Dr. Liang Cai uses digital network analysis tools to cast new light on individual movements during a turbulent period of Chinese history. Dr. Jesse Drian applies digital mapping tools to re-work our understanding of both the contents of a UCLA archive of Japanese-American Buddhist materials and how we navigate archives more broadly. Where Drs. Cai and Drian apply digital tools to physical places, Dr. Amanda Kennell traces the effects of digital media on physical sites in the greater Yokohama and Tokyo region of Japan. Collectively, the panel explores how digital technologies affect our understanding of physical spaces and places with an eye toward changes that apply across national borders and time periods.

Dr. Liang Cai presents on her work using ArcGIS to conduct social network analyses of early Chinese empires. Specifically, she examines geomobility and its role in the identity formation of ruling elites in the period prior to the Qin dynasty’s unification of China (221BC). Before unification, regional powers, alleged vassals of a weak Zhou court, had developed strong and unique political and cultural identities. Due to its brutal military conquests and political reforms that distinguished its system from Zhou politics, the Qin state became these powers’ cultural other. Anti-Qin pronouncements depicted Qin as a state of tigers and wolves, the enemy of all under Heaven. Furthermore, Qin law itself clearly differentiated Qin natives from barbarians and from the inhabitants of other Zhou states. However, elites from Qin’s rival states, particularly the most innovative and ambitious ones, went to Qin seeking employment. Guest statesmen, in fact, served as a significant force in helping Qin conquer China proper, including their own home states. Through ArcGIS, Dr. Cai analyzes the geographic mobility and career trajectories of these guest statesmen to test the theory of identity politics and examine the identity construction on the eve of Qin’s unification of China.

Where Dr. Cai demonstrates digital tools’ potential to offer new insights into a well-studied period of Chinese political and intellectual history by reorienting our understanding of elite movement, Dr. Jesse Drian applies digital tools to connect physical locations and place-bound objects. Specifically, he introduces a project mapping UCLA’s archival collections on Buddhism in North America – in particular, Japanese-American Buddhism – in order to examine how digital approaches can provide new avenues for considering places and spatial perspectives that tend to be overlooked due to disciplinary biases and current archival organization schema. Simply shifting an organizational scheme from textual descriptions of the material to a map can encourage users to explore beyond sites that are already well-known from previous research. On the other hand, he highlights a gap – the invisibility of movement and connections between sites in North America and Japan, which can become problematic if users were to use the map as their primary mode of navigating the archive. In this manner, he limns an alternative approach to organizing and navigating sources while also recognizing the selective choices made whenever sources are organized (e.g., archival finding aid) or navigated (e.g., within a research methodology).

Where the initial presentations examine how scholars’ application of digital technology to physical spaces, Dr. Amanda Kennell examines how digital culture directly affects locations. Research examining the relationship between places and Japanese media has tended to take two paths. On one hand, literature scholars have focused on place-making within literary narratives, especially as regards Japan’s colonization of Asia and the creation of the modern Japanese nation-state. In contrast, media scholars have attended to the physicality of mass media by drawing attention to the ubiquitous (i.e. merchandise, ambient media). Dr. Kennell merges these two approaches to illuminate how media affect the environment beyond the existence of the physical media themselves. Specifically, she examines how digital materials related to the sprawling multimedia franchise Bungo Stray Dogs affected sites associated with the franchise. Bungo Stray Dogs cultivated global popularity with an ornately fictional world that is nonetheless solidly founded in real locations, people, and events related to modern Japanese literature. Dr. Kennell thus explores how physical spaces are reshaped by digital activity.