I have put up my conference report on the Culture and Computing 2011 conference held here in Kyoto.
The conference brought together three communities of research and practice, media arts, language technologies, and the digital humanities. They also had a full complement of traditional arts demonstrations and an exhibit space with companies and artists side by side. I like this combination as it avoids the purely academic. Language technologies are an important business and media artists engage their public differently than academics do. We can learn from both.
I went mostly to the digital humanities papers. As Seth Denbo pointed out in his paper (the last of the digital humanities stream), very few of the digital humanities papers dealt with text. In the West we privilege text, especially in the humanities where we not only study texts, but we share our research through texts. In Japan text is less important as a form of cultural transmission and therefore digital humanists are working with other forms of culture from calligraphy to Kabuki.