Treating a Genre as a Database: the Chinese Local Gazetteers, the LG tools, and Research Based on This New Digital Methodology

This panel discusses how digitization and digital tools help to bring new insights to a well studied genre, in this case the Chinese Local Gazetteers, by supporting research inquiries that treat the whole genre as a conceptual "database" to answer especially large scale questions that take into account gazetteers from multiple geographic regions and within long time spans. The Chinese Local Gazetteers is a long established genre of writing in China since the twelve century for recording local knowledge about a region. Local gentry and officials compiled information about a region, ranging from landscape, flora and fauna, officials and celebrities to temples and schools, local culture and customs, and taxes and census, and kept them in this genre. Despite that Local Gazetteers have been major sources for scholars to find specific information about a place, it turns out to be very difficult if a scholar wishes to study the gazetteers on larger scales due to the vast amount of information contained within. Thanks to the increasing recognition of digitizing historical sources, as of 2016 nearly half of the extant 8,000 titles of local gazetteers (one title can mean one to dozens of physical volumes) has been digitized as searchable full texts and provided access through various databases from public and private sectors. However, despite of the large amount of local gazetteers available electronically, these databases mainly provide features that replicate how physical books are used: users are able to flip a gazetteer page by page; even when reading the returns from a full text search, a scholar still needs to click the returns one by one in order to read the texts. Such principle of treating the gazetteers individually highly restricts the possibility of researching large sets of digital gazetteers. Historians need better tools to work with the large amount of digitized gazetteers to employ new forms of digital research methodologies and to fully benefit from the digital formats. One important methodology that we address here is the possibility to treat the whole genre as the body of inquiry in order to research global and large scale phenomena that are across individual gazetteers, geographical regions, and time spans. Under this context, Department III “Artefacts, Actions, and Knowledge” of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) embarks on a digital project to build digital tools specifically for this genre that allow scholars to adopt this methodology of treating the available set of digitized gazetteers as a conceptual “database” to post inquiries. The digital tools, which we call the LG Tools, include a full text search facility, an Extraction Interface to collect data in the form of lists, a research repository to store and publish collected data, and an interactive mapping and analysis platform that are linked to data collected via full text search or the Extraction Interface in order to visualize the data geographically. We have presented the LG Tools last year in this conference. The abstract, which contains detailed description for the tools, can be found online. In this panel, we would like to shift the focus from the tools themselves to the types of research that can be derived from the LG Tools and from the methodology of treating the whole genre as a database. We invite four scholars in Chinese history to demonstrate their research projects and to discuss what advancement the LG Tools have brought to their research. The topics of their research range from history of science and technology, environmental history, to social and intellectual histories. The four historians and their research projects are described below.