Comparative Global—Digital—Humanities

This article investigates a technical and intellectual foundation of digital scholarship—digital copying—for how it might help us to think about frameworks for exploring the humanities, digital or otherwise, in comparative contexts. Two research projects are compared and contrasted to suggest how the investigation of copies and digital copying might formulate useful critical frames for global comparative humanities projects. Both projects employed the same artificial intelligence technologies, specifically deep learning tools, to copy documents from previous centuries, the Qisha canon (Qishazang 磧砂藏), a thirteen-/fourteenth-century Tripitaka produced in Southeast China, and the Capital Gazette (Hwangsŏng sinmun 皇城新聞), a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century newspaper produced on the Korean peninsula. One project was conducted with monastics at Fo Guang Shan (佛光山) Monastery in Taiwan between 2017 and 2021, and the other with the National Library of (South) Korea in 2021.