The Digital Society research cluster of CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) hosted an online seminar entitled “Digital Humanities and Multimodality” on 10 May 2023 to examine the intersection of digital humanities and multimodality and how this emerging field can contribute to future research in humanities.

This seminar was organised by Professor Esterina NERVINO, Assistant Professor of CityU’s Department of English (EN). About 70 people attended this seminar on Zoom across different geographies, disciplines and career stages.

Professor TSUI Lik-hang, convenor of the Digital Society research cluster and Assistant Professor of CityU’s Department of Chinese and History, welcomed the speakers and participants in his opening speech, introducing the research cluster’s mission and the importance of interdisciplinary research in understanding the relationship between technology and society. “A thorough understanding of the relationship between technology and society, informed by the humanities and social sciences, must involve vigorous interdisciplinary research,” he said.

The seminar featured two keynote speakers. Professor John BATEMAN, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Bremen University, presented “The Relevance of Multimodality Theory for the Future of Digital Humanities” in the first session. He discussed how multimodal semiotics relate to digital humanities and the humanities in general, and how relevant analytical methods can be scaled up to encourage more discussion possibilities. Despite the diverse landscape of digital humanities scholars, he also challenged traditional perspectives and emphasised the importance of discourse semantics in constructing meaning.

The second keynote speaker was Professor Christoph HAFNER, Associate Professor of EN, who spoke on “Digital Mediation in Specialised Communication”. He explored the application of digital mediation in professional communication, and how genre theory and digital genres can improve pedagogical applications for specialised language teaching contexts. He also discussed the genre and multimodality model, developed by Bateman in 2008, to analyse genres more systematically and highlighted the pedagogical applications of specialised language teaching in digital contexts.

After the talks, Nervino moderated a fireside chat and Q&A session where speakers and participants discussed the challenges of generative AI in multimodal communication, the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and new theoretical frameworks. Tsui also raised a question about the role of digital humanities in studying multimodal conversational AI. Both keynote speakers shared their takes on the thought-provoking questions and gave more examples, including AI technologies in linguistic study and digital games, to enrich participants’ understanding of digital humanities.