About the Workshop
The Digital China Initiative of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University hosted a two-week in-person workshop on methods of digital scholarship from June 6 to June 17 2022. This intensive workshop was designed for novices as well as those with some digital research skills. It included individual tutoring, group lessons, constant practice, and collaboration. By the end of the workshop participants learned methods of natural language processing for Chinese using regular expressions, database construction and query building, geographic analysis, social network analysis, gathering information from websites and social media, and visualizations.
The workshop involved a collaborative investigation into Shaoxing prefecture 紹興府 using digital sources in Chinese, both historical and contemporary. Sources included, for example, historical and contemporary local gazetteers, public websites, the writings of local authors and blog posts, and local economic, environmental, and legal data embedded in local and national sources and databases depending on the interests of participants. Participants learned how to turn text into data and build relational databases from the content of historical local gazetteers. They learned the basics of all the technologies taught and how to apply these to topics and methods of particular interest to their research.
Organizers
With thanks for the support of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies
People
Faculty Sponsors
Peter K. Bol
Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
Lead Instructors
Instructors
Guest Speakers
Staff
Teaching Fellows
Keyao (Kyle) Pan
Assistant Professor of Digital History
Florida International University
2021-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University
Wanchun Chiu
PhD Candidate, Department of Chinese Literature
National Taiwan University
Resources
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the digital tools, software, and resources covered in the Summer Workshop:
- China Biographical Database Project (CBDB), a relational database of historical figures and texts
- Chinese Text Project, an open-access digital library
- DocuSky, a digital humanities academic research platform
- LoGaRT for analyzing Chinese local gazetteers
- MARKUS for tagging text
- QGIS for spatial analysis
- BabelPad for text editing
- Gephi for social network analysis
- Omeka for making digital exhibits
- Scalar for presenting scholarship online