Digital China 更新技术

Since 2014, the Fairbank Center has supported digital humanities and social sciences through postdoctoral fellowships, including our An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship. Past postdoctoral fellows focusing on digital methods in Chinese Studies include:

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.

The Fairbank Center supports the for-credit course offering, CHNSHIS 202: Digital Methods for Chinese Studies. This course is offered through Harvard’s East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and History Department, and is instructed by Dr. Donald Sturgeon, a former An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow (2015 to 2017) at the Fairbank Center.

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.edu).

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. 

The Fairbank Center supports a regular workshop series that examines digital methods in Chinese Studies. Last year, Amelia Ying Qin, a 2017-2018 An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, hosted a workshop to address different digital techniques and their application to scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences.

Check back soon for information about upcoming digital methods workshops at the Fairbank Center.

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.