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

Hongsu Wang, Peter Bol

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a freely accessible relational database with biographical information about approximately 535,181 individuals as of February 2024, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries. With both online and offline versions, the data is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis as well as serving as a kind of biographical reference.

This workshop will cover the foundational methodologies of the CBDB, demonstrate how to utilize it for prosopographical research, and highlight the latest advancements in our project. In recent years, CBDB has collaborated with numerous scholars to expand its data sources, ranging from early China to the Qing dynasty. Furthermore, CBDB has explored innovative data mining methodologies employing traditional machine learning models, large language models, and digital humanities tools like LoGaRT and Markus. These developments and their applications will be introduced during the workshop.
We will introduce examples of research utilizing the China Biographical Database based on several studies conducted in recent years. These cases will illustrate the diverse ways in which CBDB has been employed to advance research in Chinese studies.”
These years, CBDB has fostered a vibrant open-source development community on GitHub. The array of tools and manuals available in the CBDB GitHub community might benefit various other projects. These include disambiguation tools, a practical tool for applying transformers to identify personal names, addresses, and official titles, the transformer model to separate author and book titles for unpunctuated Chinese, the tool to submit prompts to free large language model API by batch, etc.

Installation and download before the workshop:
– QGIS: https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
– Gephi: https://gephi.org/users/download/
– Microsoft Access
– CBDB Access Database: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/itcaauz35orn48qtsegp5/CBDB_bg_20240208_build20240411.7z?rlkey=us92t0xbjnwdp2qycccrgfilq&dl=0
– CHGIS V6 Layers: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fviyyklh9s7uf1qt6i1a9/GIS-materials.rar?rlkey=041ga2ngdfxqqpplixfir088b&dl=0
– Installation tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGgLzyv7BMgY0fs-Un-UAieCrZPKG-Fp7