China Biographical Database (CBDB): A Relational Database for Prosopographical Research of Pre-Modern China

Song Chen,Hongsu Wang

doi:10.5334/johd.68

Abstract

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is the largest prosopographical database for the study of Chinese history. We use regular expressions and neural network models to systematically harvest data from primary and secondary sources and employ an entity-relationship model to organize our data. As a relational database with both online and offline versions, CBDB provides freely accessible, structured data for macroscopic, quantitative studies of premodern China. The data in CBDB is continuously disambiguated and readily formatted for statistical, social network, and spatial analyses, and also has value for tagging named entities in historical texts and contextualizing other data collections.

Highlights

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) amasses biographical information from disparate historical sources to facilitate quantitative, prosopographical research of premodern China
It has since been transferred to the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, which, together with the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University and the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, continued to add new contents under the direction of an international committee chaired by Peter K
Over the past sixteen years, CBDB has grown from a database of about 25,000 individuals to include approximately 491,000 individuals whose lives spanned from the seventh through nineteenth centuries and is available for scholarly use in several online and offline (Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and SQLite) versions

Summary

Introduction

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) amasses biographical information from disparate historical sources to facilitate quantitative, prosopographical research of premodern China. CBDB is a relational database that uses the entity-relationship model to organize biographical information. To download the most recent version of CBDB in the Microsoft Access format, see https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/download-cbdbstandalone-database.

Results

Conclusion