Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies

Christian Henriot, Cécile Armand (ENP-China)

This workshop introduces HistText, an application designed to leverage large-scale, multilingual, digitized corpora, with a particular emphasis on Chinese and English sources for studying modern China. Developed by the ENP-China team (“Elites, Networks, and Power in modern China”) through a longstanding interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and computer scientists, HistText employs natural language processing and other computational techniques.
The application offers a range of functions enabling researchers to:
1. Build a corpus tailored to their research questions using advanced keyword search, multifaceted filters and queries, concordance, and word embedding.
2. Explore their corpus through diverse statistics and visualizations, such as word clouds and document frequency over time.
3. Extract, analyze, and visualize information such as names of persons, organizations, locations, and other named entities.

The workshop will be divided into two main parts:
1. In the first part, we will provide a brief overview of the genesis of HistText and demonstrate its functionality.
2. In the second phase, participants will have the opportunity to test the application with their own research cases.
A final wrap-up session will be dedicated to discussion and feedback.

Participants will have access to explore the corpora included in the Modern China Textbase, which currently comprises dozens of reference texts in Chinese and English, including the Chinese newspapers Shenbao and Dongfang zazhi, the ProQuest Chinese newspaper collection, student and economic journals, diaries, directories, who’s who publications, archives, and Wikipedia.
HistText offers two main modes: (1) A beginner mode with a user-friendly R Shiny interface. (2) An expert mode in the form of an R package, utilizing R Studio. The workshop will focus on the interface and requires no programming skills from the participants. A demo of the expert mode can be provided upon request.