An important cultural and technological event, the “Pacific Neighborhood Consortium Annual Conference,” attended by a large number of humanities, social studies and IT scholars from Taiwan and overseas, came to a successful conclusion on October 8. During the three day conference, scholars from different disciplines put forward numerous observations relating to digital archives, e-learning, GIS, Social Computing, e-Culture etc. Liu Chao-han President of Academia Sinica presented a speech during the opening and closing ceremonies and, during the conference, Academia Sinica President Liu Ts’ui-jung shared his views on the influence of digital archives and e-learning on humanities and social studies research and on society, receiving a very positive response from the attending scholars.

After three days of discussion the participants came to the conclusion that the Internet and the concept of communities is having an unprecedented impact on society. Real cultural heritage can, after digitization, cross the barriers of time and space and be used as research material by scholars; through the Internet and IT, virtual museums  and art lovers can be linked and a community exchange platform provided;PC and on-line games are not the disasters that teachers used to think them as and have become goods assistants for teaching primary and junior high school students; through on-line community platforms like Facebook,Plurk,Twitter, Taipei netizens can form a  group to go south to help the victims of Typhoon Morakot and Iranian netizens can send information about their country’s political situation out to the world. Because of the Internet and on-line communities network many interesting things are happening around us!

Conference participants were of the view that to understand current and future society and use group power to make the world a better place humanities, social sciences and IT scholars should continue to strengthen dialogue and cooperation and observe and discuss the influence of the Internet on social behavior. Scholars from various disciplines rarely have the chance to meet together and share their research results, therefore this meeting was a valuable opportunity to stimulate more academic research that will benefit society.

During the closing ceremony one of the senior participants in the PNC annual conference John Lehman shared his feelings with the scholars attending this year’s conference, saying: “We Are the Future.” This was a resounding annotation to the various kinds of cultural and information cross-field cooperation that are rapidly gathering pace. 

Related news
Pacific Neighborhood Consortium
http://www.pnclink.org/ch/about-c.htm
2009 Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) Annual Conference official website
http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2009/english/index.html