THATCamp AHA 2013
Talk proposal

As I prepare to head to East Asia for several months of dissertation research, I’ve been considering the challenges of adapting my citation management tools for use in the Chinese-language archives in which I’ll be working. Along these lines, I’d like to propose a discussion of the particular digital needs of historians working in non-Western languages. Such a discussion might include some of the following topics:

-What are the relative strengths of extant citation management applications in their handling of non-Western scripts?
-What solutions have been created for the integration, manipulation, and searching of scripts and transliterations within database records?
-What possibilities exist for incorporating OCR and other digitization techniques into a paperless research workflow for non-Western languages?
-How might historians working in non-Western scripts more effectively use the digital humanities tools that already exist, and how might future versions of these tools be of greater use to us?

We might also consider composing a critical summary of this session for circulation among a wider community of historians and open source developers.