Digital China 更新技术
Developing new digital methods for the study of China’s past and present.
Current Research
As digital research becomes increasingly prominent in academia, digital techniques provide a range of new approaches to Chinese Studies.
In 2016, the Fairbank Center launched its first for-credit graduate seminar “Digital Methods in Chinese Studies” (CHNSHIS 202) through the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, instructed by Fairbank Center post-doctoral fellow opens in a new windowDonald Sturgeon. The course covers effective use of digital resources, programming techniques with an emphasis on data preparation and extraction, textual analysis and topic modeling, and the visualization of complex datasets.
In 2016-17, the Center furthered its commitment to the digital humanities and social sciences by dedicating an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship to Chinese digital humanities and social sciences, which was awarded to Donald Sturgeon. This focus on digital China through a postdoctoral fellowship continued in 2017-2018 with An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow Ameila Ying Qin focusing on digital methods and quantitative analysis in Chinese literary works.
In addition, the Fairbank Center supports a number of digital database projects at Harvard that promote open source digital materials relating to China. These databases include the opens in a new windowChina Biographical Database Project led by Professor Peter Bol, and the opens in a new windowChina Historical Geographic Information System. These projects collaborate with partners across the United States and Greater China.
Expertise

Peter K. Bol 包弼德
Vice Provost for Advances in Learning; Charles H Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
As Vice Provost, Peter K. Bol is responsible for HarvardX, the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching, and research on the science of learning. Together with William Kirby, Bol teaches ChinaX (SW12x), a Harvard course that has a global enrollmentRead More
Research Projects
Postdoctoral Fellowships in Digital China
2014-2015: opens in a new windowPaul Vierthaler, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow
Paul Vierthaler’s research focuses on late Ming and early Qing literary representations of recent events, late Imperial print culture and history, genre analysis, and authorship studies. His research incorporates a combination of close reading and traditional critical analysis with natural language processing, corpus linguistics, machine learning and unstructured/structured data analysis.
2015-2017: Donald Sturgeon, 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, and 2016-2017 An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow
Donald Sturgeon’s research project, “Big Data and Early China: Corpus-Assisted Interpretation of Classical Chinese,” develops and evaluates fully automated methods for analyzing the contents of pre-modern Chinese documents and their relation to a large existing corpus of pre-modern Chinese writing.
2017-2018: Ameila Ying Qin, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow
Amelia Ying Qin’s research includes anecdotal narratives, biji (brush jottings), and traditional print culture. Her project at the Fairbank Center includes performing distant reading of around three thousand anecdotes through quantitative analysis, with the goal of visualizing and incorporating her results into a book manuscript.
Digital Methods for Chinese Studies Course
Building on our earlier “Digital China Lab” workshop run by Dr. Paul Vierthaler and Dr. Anthony Ruozzi, this course introduces graduate students in Chinese studies to programming skills and digital humanities techniques of practical relevance to research in their discipline. It consists of weekly lectures, each introducing a specific type of technique, followed by an interactive lab session during which students practice applying the technique to data appropriate to their own research. No background in digital methods or programming is assumed, but students are expected to have basic computing skills and are required to bring a suitable laptop to use during the lab sessions.
The techniques covered in this course all have broad applicability to topics in Chinese studies, and students are expected to apply them to their own research topics and relevant texts as arranged during the first few sessions. The course ends with student presentations in which students apply an appropriate selection of the techniques studied to their own research questions. While examples and coursework will draw upon Chinese language source materials, students primarily working with other East Asian languages are also encouraged to take this course.
For questions regarding the course, please visit the course site on Canvas, or contact Dr. Donald Sturgeon (sturgeon@fas.harvard.educreate new email).
Read more about this course on the Fairbank Center Blog: opens in a new windowHow to Teach Digital Methods for Chinese Studies, where Donald Sturgeon explains how to build a digital humanities course for Chinese Studies.
Digital China Initiative Workshop
Check back soon for information about upcoming digital methods workshops at the Fairbank Center.
Database Projects
opens in a new windowHarvard Center for Geographic Analysis
The Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (HCGA) employs GIS and other digital techniques to visualize datasets. HCGA’s China-related projects include:
- Mapping the opens in a new windowFairbank Center alumni for our 60th Anniversary
- Building the opens in a new windowTemporal Gazetteer (TGAZ) as a search engine and machine-readable API for historical place names in Greater China, Greater Tibet, and Russia
- Providing opens in a new windowgeospatial support for ChinaX’s online learning courses.
- Developing Harvard’s opens in a new windowWorldMap project to build a Chinese Academic Mapping Platform for research, teaching, and data sharing. This project is in partnership with Harvard University and opens in a new windowZhejiang University.
opens in a new windowChina Biographical Database Project (CBDB)
The opens in a new windowChina Biographical Database is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 417,000 individuals as of August 2017, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries. With both online and offline versions, the data is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference. The development of CBDB is now a joint project of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica, and the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University.
opens in a new windowChina Historical Geographic Information System Project (CHGIS)
The opens in a new windowChina Historical Geographic Information System, CHGIS, project was launched in January 2001 to establish a database of populated places and historical administrative units for the period of Chinese history between 221 BCE and 1911 CE. CHGIS provides a base opens in a new windowGIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis, temporal statistical modeling, and representation of selected historical units as digital maps.
opens in a new windowChinese Text Project
The Fairbank Center’s 2016-2017 An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Donald Sturgeon, created and maintains the opens in a new windowChinese Text Project, a highly respected academic resource for scholars. Dr. Sturgeon began his project in 2005, developing the site as a resource for the study of early Chinese literature. He has since created fully automated procedures for accurately identifying and visualizing parallel passages in early Chinese text as well as designing a fully automated OCR system for Chinese transmitted texts. Thus far, the system has been applied to over 10 million pages of pre-modern Chinese texts.
Latest News
2018-2019: A Year in Review of China Studies at Harvard
Read and download our 2018-2019 Annual Report here. The 2018–19 academic year was a challenging time for all of us at the Fairbank Center who devote ourselves to the study of China. The U.S.-China bilateral relationship continues to deteriorate and there are few...
2019-20 Fairbank Center Fellowships
The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies is pleased to announce the 2019-2020 competitions for the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowships in Chinese Studies, the Digital China Fellow, and the Hou Family Fellowships in Taiwan Studies. An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowships...
Resources at Harvard
- opens in a new windowDigital Research Guides for Chinese Studies, Harvard Library
- opens in a new windowHarvard-Yenching Library Digitization Projects for East Asian Studies
- opens in a new windowEast Asian Digital Humanities Lab At the Harvard-Yenching Library
- opens in a new windowDigital Experimentation with Chinese Prehistoric Pottery, Harvard Art Museums
- opens in a new windowDigital History at Harvard
- opens in a new windowHarvard Center for Geographic Analysis