Treating a genre as a database: a digital research methodology for studying Chinese local gazetteers

Abstract

As digital humanities research relies on the digitization of sources, many of its applications are based on access to data on a huge scale that makes quantitative analyses and distant reading (or a birds-eye view) possible. Based on this assumption, we show how the genre of Chinese local gazetteers, with its volume, consistent structures, and broad geographic and temporal range, provides an ideal case to benefit from the digital approach. This paper introduces the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), a suite of research tools designed for studying Chinese local gazetteers based on the philosophy that any comprehensive genre, such as Chinese local gazetteers, when accompanied with tools that aim to bring a collective lens to the genre, can greatly enrich the ways that scholars approach it and can transform the genre into a research infrastructure that enables new types of research. We report on how LoGaRT opens up new perspectives for researching Chinese history by showing case studies and the scholarly breakthroughs made by our research group. With this paper we hope to provide one possible answer to the question of how digital methods can contribute to humanities research. Even though LoGaRT is developed for a specific Chinese genre, we argue that the proposed research methodology and the corresponding user workflow and tools developed in our software can be applied to other genres or collections of sources when certain criteria are met.