Shih-Pei Chen: Treating a genre as a knowledge system: Analysing Chinese local gazetteers and daily-use encyclopedias with quantitative approaches

Many digital humanities research projects rely on large amounts of digitized primary sources to elevate research from manual, close reading to large-scaled, computer-assisted quantitative analyses –– sometimes called distant reading or birds-eye views. This presentation reports on the case of Chinese local gazetteers (difangzhi), in particular the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), designed and developed at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) to bring a collective, quantitative lens to research the genre.

The local gazetteers document data in local regions in consistent categories throughout 800 years and across populated territories of historical China. With the successful case studies conducted by scholars in our working group in the past 10 years, I will show how LoGaRT transforms the genre into a research infrastructure and supports historical research that takes on new perspectives and yield new findings by being able to utilize the massive amount of information documented in thousands of digitized local gazetteers.

I will then move on to another historical genre, the daily-use encyclopedias (riyong leishu), that were published by commercial printing houses since the late 16th century, which repackaged elite knowledge and claimed to offer comprehensive knowledge for daily uses to tailor for the rising literate readers beyond literati. I will report on the computational methods that our team has identified for tracing similar contents, both textual and visual ones, across these encyclopedias and with their possible sources. These two projects should show case how digital methods can help to answer historical questions that existed before the digital age.

Lecture within the Open Research Colloquium Digital History
Time: Wednesday, 20 November 2024, 4:15-5:45pm CET
Place: via Zoom – Request access via email (digitalhistory@hu-berlin.de) or Mailinglist

Additional materials:

Chen, Shih-Pei, Calvin Yeh, Sean Wang, and Qun Che (2023). “Treating a Genre as a Database: A Digital Research Methodology for Studying Chinese Local Gazetteers.” International Journal of Digital Humanities 4 (1–3): 171–193. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-022-00048-5.

Chen, Shih-Pei (2024). “Fenye by the Numbers: A Quantitative Analysis of Astrological Contents in Chinese Local Gazetteers.” HoST — Journal of History of Science and Technology 18 (1): 6–30. https://doi.org/10.2478/host-2024-0002 .

Image

Selected pages from Dantu County Gazetteer, 1803 (Image credit: Harvard-Yenching Library).

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