Abstract
How to study Southeast Asia (SEA)? The need to explore and identify methodologies for studying SEA are inherent in its multifaceted subject matter. At a minimum, the region's rich cultural diversity inhibits both the articulation of decisive defining characteristics and the training of scholars who can write with confidence beyond their specialisms. Consequently, the challenges of understanding the region remain and a consensus regarding the most effective approaches to studying its history, identity and future seem quite unlikely. Furthermore, "Area Studies" more generally, has proved to be a less attractive frame of reference for burgeoning scholarly trends. This paper will propose a new tool to help address these challenges. Even though the science of artificial intelligence (AI) is in its infancy, it has already yielded new approaches to many commercial, scientific and humanistic questions. At this point, AI has been used to produce news, generate better smart phones, deliver more entertainment choices, analyze earthquakes and write fiction. The time has come to explore the possibility that AI can be put at the service of the study of SEA. The paper intends to lay out what would be required to develop SEABOT. This instrument might exist as a robot on the web which might be called upon to make the study of SEA both broader and more comprehensive. The discussion will explore the financial resources, ownership and timeline needed to make SEABOT go from an idea to a reality. SEABOT would draw upon artificial neural networks (ANNs) to mine the region's "Big Data", while synthesizing the information to form new and useful perspectives on SEA. Overcoming significant language issues, applying multidisciplinary methods and drawing upon new yields of information should produce new questions and ways to conceptualize SEA. SEABOT could lead to findings which might not otherwise be achieved. SEABOT's work might well produce outcomes which could open up solutions to immediate regional problems, provide ASEAN planners with new resources and make it possible to eventually define and capitalize on SEA's "soft power". That is, new findings should provide the basis for ASEAN diplomats and policy-makers to develop new modalities of cultural diplomacy and improved governance. Last, SEABOT might also open up avenues to tell the SEA story in new distinctive ways. SEABOT is seen as a heuristic device to explore the results which this instrument might yield. More important the discussion will also raise the possibility that an AI-driven perspective on SEA may prove to be even more problematic than it is beneficial.