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

Thorben Pelzer

In this three-hours workshop, attendees will learn how to analyse large biographical datasets with a focus on uncovering spatial distributions (domestic and international mobilities) and identifying typical career patterns. As a case study, attendees will use exported data from the “Chinese Engineers Relational Database” (Pelzer et al. 2022) to untangle the prosopography of a Republican-era elite profession. Although the example relies on historical data, the methods may also be of interest to researchers of contemporary East Asia.
We will first go over the basic theory of sequence and spatial analysis. Then, we will discuss the fundamentals of structuring a relational database and how one should arrange and format data to make sure they can be used for the desired purpose. Then, we will run some example code using the “Simple Features” and “Life Trajectory Miner” packages for R. Finally, we will discuss some of the limits of quantitative data analysis to better understand the extent to which datasets can be used to augment or challenge our arguments.

Prerequisites:
Attendees are requested to bring a laptop. To allow for a swift start of the seminar, you are kindly asked to install the newest version of R and R-Studio (both available via https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/) beforehand. No prior knowledge in coding is required.