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A Taste of Digital Scholarship: Akha voices in one script & Visualising the Huainanzi’s Intertextuality
Come and enjoy a taste of Digital Scholarship as two HKUST professors share on their recent projects! Each professor will share for 20 minutes, followed by a 20 min Q&A session.
Prof Giulio Ongaro - Akha voices in one script: a project of digitalization and standardization of oral texts
In this talk, Prof. Ongaro will share on the challenges of making an oral tradition, recorded by researchers using many different writing systems digitized and standardized for greater accessibility and to help preserve the Akha people's unique cultural and spiritual heritage.
Tobias Benedikt Zürn (陶全恩) - Visualising the Huainanzi’s Intertextuality: A Hyperlinked Approach
In this talk, Prof. Zürn will share on the challenges of his project: to generate a digital edition of The Huainanzi 淮南子 that visualizes its intertextual design with the help of a color-coded, hyperlinked interface. This will enables scholars to explore the peculiar features of the Huainanzi more efficiently.
About the speakers:
Prof Giulio Ongaro received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2020. His research lies in the areas of medical anthropology and ethnopsychiatry. As part of his PhD, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Akha people of highland Laos, studying their shamanic tradition, etiological knowledge, and system of ritual healing. At HKUST, he teaches courses on cultural psychiatry, social anthropology, and human history.
Prof Tobias Benedikt Zürn (陶全恩), born in Esslingen, Germany, is an assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. As a historian of Chinese religions and literature, he explores how academic disciplines project and perpetuate modern and Eurocentric concepts onto the past and non-Western societies, a process he calls “theoretical imperialism”. He maintains two websites: tobias-zuern.org and zhuangzi-reception.org.
A Taste of Digital Scholarship: Akha voices in one script & Visualising the Huainanzi’s Intertextuality
2026-03-17
12:00 noon - 1:00pm
LG4 Multifunction Room
