The digital humanities (DH) encompass a variety
of methodological innovations that have become increasingly popular among
humanists. Although DH is proving quite effective as a means of studying human
culture, scholars of imperial Chinese studies in the western academy are still
coming to grips with what mass digitization and the prospect of quantitative
analysis means for the field at large.
Historians of China were the first in the field
to realize the potential of computer-aided research. They began creating large
databases of historical information amenable to quantitative analysis very
early. In the 1970s, Charles
Hartwell was among the first to realize computers’ potential, when he first
began storing prosopographical data in a database. Among literary scholars, the
first digital efforts focused on digitizing texts, but the transformed
documents were often not as clearly amenable to digitally aided analysis.
In recent years, historians of imperial China
have readily engaged with both social network analysis and GIS (geographic
information systems). The value of conceptually and geographically mapping
historical information was clear at an early stage, and sophisticated software
has made this analysis easy to perform. In combination with accessible
geographical and social data, available through places such as the University of Michigan’s China Data Center, Harvard
University’s Center for geographic analysis, or data derived from databases
like the China
Biographical Database Project, there has been a flowering of projects that
effectively leverage these methods.
