Humanities in the Loop: A Roundtable assessing the significance of AI

Co-sponsored by: The Taiwan Education & Research Program, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the GW Trustworthy AI Initiative (GWTAI), and the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures

This event is hybrid. If you plan to attend through zoom, here is the zoom link: https://gwu-edu.zoom.us/j/98899601393?pwd=hebMonmEQIPvbZQ7BiGXSZKtrmCl7n.1

Description: Taiwan has emerged as one of the world’s most dynamic laboratories for democratic innovation, digital governance, and human‑centered technology. Taiwan is also a key stakeholder in a growing ecosystem of AI applications in area studies, linguistics research and preservation, and pedagogy. Machine learning, consensus-seeking applications, opinion-mapping, democratic deliberation platforms, digital archives, and computational methods among many other innovations are transforming the ways in which educators, civics practitioners, and civil society leaders are engaging Taiwan’s history, politics, and society.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping key domains of Taiwan’s democratic and cultural life, generating new possibilities for governance, pedagogy, and humanistic inquiry. In the public sector, Taiwan has become a leading site for experimenting with AI‑enabled democratic governance, from the usage of tools such as pol.is that enhance participatory decisionmaking to systems that support transparency, service delivery, and civic resilience.

At the same time, AI is transforming the field of Taiwan Studies. Machine learning, digital archives, and computational text analysis are expanding the methodological toolkit available to scholars and educators, enabling new approaches to teaching Taiwan’s history, politics, and society. These tools are also prompting reflection on how digital infrastructures influence the production and circulation of knowledge about Taiwan in local, regional, and global spaces.

In the humanities and linguistics, AI is opening new avenues for analyzing Taiwan’s multilingual landscape, supporting language preservation, and deepening the study of cultural expression. From Indigenous language revitalization to corpus‑based research on Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, and Hakka, AI is accelerating both empirical discovery and interpretive insight.

How is AI transforming democratic governance and civic trust in Taiwan? What are the pedagogical gains and losses of introducing AI in Taiwan Studies? What new forms of cultural, literary, or linguistic analysis becomes possible through AI?

To address these topics, the Taiwan Education & Research Program (TERP) invites you to join us for the inaugural Taiwan Digital Frontiers conference that will bring together a panel of experts and practitioners to assess the significance of AI in transforming democracy, pedagogy, and linguistics in Taiwan!

About the Conference: The annual Taiwan Digital Frontiers Conference explores how Taiwan’s rapidly evolving digital landscape is reshaping scholarship, creativity, governance, and public life. This conference series will be an annual opportunity for scholars, practitioners, students, and the general public to investigate and discuss deeply the intersections of technology, humanities, governance, and Taiwan affairs. From AI and digital democracy to gaming, music, language, and computational humanities, the conference will highlight the many ways emerging technologies are transforming both research and lived experience with regards to Taiwan. The conference is an interdisciplinary and cross-departmental intellectual exercise that invites participants to imagine how Taiwan’s digital ecosystems can inform global conversations about technology, culture, and the human experience.

Bios:

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is Director of Graduate Studies for Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute, as well as its interim director of APSI for 2025-26. She is also a founding/core faculty member of Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies.Elsewhere, Eileen is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature. Eileen serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory. Among Eileen’s ongoing collaborative projects this year include co-editing the Routledge Introduction to Modern and Contemporary East Asian Literature; serving as dramaturg for Jingqiu Guan's multimedia dance project on rail travel and the Asian diaspora; and also, with Mae Ngai, editing the unpublished writings of pioneer Asian American author Louis Chu (U Washington).

Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Director of the Digital Humanities Institute and Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF's Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar.

Alice Siu received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy, and public opinion, and her B.A. degrees in Economics and Public Policy and M.A. degree in Political Science, also from Stanford. Siu has advised policymakers and political leaders around the world, at various levels of government, including leaders in China, Brazil, and Argentina. Her research interests in deliberative democracy include what happens inside deliberation, such as examining the effects of socio-economic class in deliberation, the quality of deliberation, and the quality of arguments in deliberation.

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies.

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