The International Joint Summer Workshop on Digital Humanities, co-organized by Peking University, Harvard University, and Princeton University, will be held at Yan Yuan (燕园), Peking University's main campus from late July to early August 2023, marking an important milestone in fostering international cooperation in the field of digital humanities. Since the workshop opened for registration in May 2023, our program has received great attention from academic communities both in China and abroad. We believe that this annual workshop will significantly promote the application of digital humanities tools in Chinese studies, nurturing a group of young scholars who can not only effectively utilize digital methods for humanities research, but also facilitate cross-cultural collaboration.

The idea of jointly organizing a summer workshop on digital humanities between Chinese and American universities was proposed during the winter of 2019. It was initiated by Professor Peter Bol, a distinguished international Sinologist and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, during his visit to Research Center for Digital Humanities at Peking University. The initiative was further developed and supported by Professor Wang Jun, the director of the Digital Humanities Research Center at Peking University, and Professor Michael Szonyi, the then-director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

Due to the disruptions caused by the pandemic, this collaboration was put on hold for three years. However, it has received consistent, strong support from Professor Deng Xiaonan from the Department of History at Peking University and Professor Peter Bol. In March 2023, Professor Wang Jun went to Harvard University for a short-term academic visit and participated in "Trade of Tools," the largest East Asian Digital Humanities conference in the past three years. During his visit, Professor Bol proposed that Professor Wang Jun should also visit Princeton University and discuss plans for jointly organizing an international digital humanities summer workshop, with each of the three universities taking turns hosting the event.

The inaugural session of the summer workshop is scheduled to take place at Peking University's Yan Yuan campus from late July and early August 2023. The core faculty consists of eight scholars from China and the United States, representing Peking University, Nanjing University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bucknell University, Durham University, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Their academic backgrounds cover various fields, including Chinese history, historical geography, intellectual history, natural language processing, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and information resource management, fully reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the field of digital humanities.