Recent Trends in Taiwan Studies : Digital Applications for Education and Research

AREA Ruhr Working Paper No. 5, edited by Yu-Yin Hsu, presents the results of the third international workshop of the "Taiwan as a Pioneer" (TAP) project held in 2024. The volume highlights how digital tools are transforming Taiwan Studies in the fields of teaching, research, and public engagement, and is divided into three main sections: Cross-Domain Digital Education, GIS and Visualization, and Database Implementation.
In the first section, Mireia Vargas-Urpí describes how digital initiatives are increasing the visibility of Taiwan Studies in Spain, where the field is often marginal within broader Sinology programs. The TXICC research group developed databases on Sinophone cinema and literature, as well as e-learning tools, to make Taiwanese cultural content more accessible. Ming-Chih Jason Wang, Wei-Chien Ma, and Yen-Hsun Su present "The Multiverse Railway Journey," a collaborative project at National Cheng Kung University. By integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) into arts education, students reconstructed Tainan's historical railway heritage. The project aims to create emotional connections to history through technological immersion and to preserve cultural heritage.
In the second part, Chun-Lin Kuo analyzes the use of ArcGIS StoryMaps using the 2025 Taroko Swallow Grotto landslide as a case study. Kuo demonstrates how StoryMaps function as "digital gazetteers" by combining technical monitoring data, timelines, and cultural contexts into a narrative structure to improve disaster management and public communication. Complementing this, An-Xi Zheng provides an overview of visualizing research results using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He explains the utility of open-source software like QGIS and introduces important digital archives and open data platforms from the Taiwanese government that are essential for Historical GIS (HGIS) analysis.
The third part is dedicated to the creation of new research databases. Thorben Pelzer introduces "CERD-Taiwan," an extension of the Chinese Engineers Relational Database. This dataset contains biographical information on over 12,600 engineers active in Taiwan between 1945 and 1974, enabling sociological analyses of technological development and migration in the post-war era. Finally, Yu-Yin Hsu describes the construction of a database for the photography collection of Takagi Tomoe, a key figure in medical education in colonial Taiwan. The paper analyzes the "forensic" process of image identification, in which historical events, landscapes, and individuals are deciphered through contextualization to visually reconstruct the history of colonial medical education.