China Biographical Database Research Articles

Normalization of kinship relations to enrich family network analysis: case study on China biographical database

Abstract Kinship is an important issue in history studies. The kinship database is the key resource to analyze the structure, succession, and evolution of families. However, one kinship could be expressed by different words, and one kinship word may be vague and ambiguous in natural languages, especially in pre-modern Chinese. As in the well-known China Biographical Database, which contains 484,066 kinship instances, there are more than 400 kinship words. Thus, the relations extracted from history texts cannot be directly used to build family networks. In this article, we put forward a novel method to normalize kinship relations by three basic relations: father–descendant, mother–descendant, and husband–wife, as well as the gender of each person. All types of kinships are normalized to these three basic relations. In this way, we identified 178,390 basic kinship relations to fully describe the original 462,147 unambiguous kinship instances, while finding 3,989 inconsistencies and inferring 5,805 missing persons. Then, we generate 29,423 families by basic kinship relations and analyze the properties of families, such as their sizes, depths, and intermarriages across families. This type of family analysis had been almost impossible prior to normalizing kinship relations. Therefore, this technique enables improved family database construction and deeper quantitative analysis.

Visual Reasoning for Uncertainty in Spatio-Temporal Events of Historical Figures.

The development of digitized humanity information provides a new perspective on data-oriented studies of history. Many previous studies have ignored uncertainty in the exploration of historical figures and events, which has limited the capability of researchers to capture complex processes associated with historical phenomena. We propose a visual reasoning system to support visual reasoning of uncertainty associated with spatio-temporal events of historical figures based on data from the China Biographical Database Project. We build a knowledge graph of entities extracted from a historical database to capture uncertainty generated by missing data and error. The proposed system uses an overview of chronology, a map view, and an interpersonal relation matrix to describe and analyse heterogeneous information of events. The system also includes uncertainty visualization to identify uncertain events with missing or imprecise spatio-temporal information. Results from case studies and expert evaluations suggest that the visual reasoning system is able to quantify and reduce uncertainty generated by the data.

Structuring, Recording, and Analyzing Historical Networks in the China Biographical Database

Structuring, Recording, and Analyzing Historical Networks in the China Biographical Database

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

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.

Construction over operation? A study of the usage of digital humanities databases in China

PurposeDigital humanities database is one of the essential tools in digital humanities research area. Therefore, examining the usage of digital humanities database in academic papers is conducive to assessing the value of digital humanities database for scientific research activities and improving the construction of digital humanities infrastructure.Design/methodology/approachThis paper constructs an evaluation system of digital humanities database from the perspective of academic influence and social influence, with mention frequency, usage motivation, platform access data, usage region and usage discipline as indicators and takes China Biographical Database Project as the empirical object to explore the usage of digital humanities database in China.FindingsThe data analysis result demonstrates that digital humanities databases are widely used and recognized in China. However, the problem of low actual usage remains.Originality/valueThis paper constructs the digital humanistic database's evaluation system and discusses applying the digital humanistic database in China, which provides a new perspective and method for the influence evaluation study of the digital humanistic database.

SIGNLENS: A Tool for Analyzing People's Polarization Social Relationship Based on Signed Graph Modeling

SIGNLENS is a tool that helps to analyze polarized social relationships based on signed graph modeling. It could be used by political analysts, historical researchers, and social media community organizations to analyze the social network with negative links (i.e., conflicts or disagreement). SIGNLENS can handle signed temporal graph by doing individual analysis and group analysis. Individual analysis gives a Web dashboard to users to explore the nodes who users focus on. Group analysis provides another perspective of analyzing the whole graph, which mainly analyzes the changes in the unbalance of the signed graph over time. We give two examples to demonstrate how our tool works, which consist of The China Biographical Database and the United States Congress Vote. More details about these two examples can be found in https://github.com/huangjunjie-cs/SIGNLENS.

Harvesting Big Biographical Data for Chinese History: The China Biographical Database (CBDB)

AbstractBiographies constitute the main historical record of China. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is an important project that tackles this vast biographical material with digital technologies. With both online and offline versions, CBDB is meant to be useful for statistical, social network, and spatial analysis, as well as serving as biographical reference. Through the wide range of data it collects through mining historical texts and reference sources, CBDB offers multiple ways to examine the lives of past groups and individuals in Chinese history. The use of CBDB data for prosopographical and other types of analysis has generated important work that interprets Chinese history in new ways, and has also fostered new forms of digital humanities collaborations. This article introduces the history of the CBDB project and its methods for populating its biographical data. It also presents the ways that historians and other scholars could utilize its data for research and teaching.

The Multilingual Full-Text Database of Overseas Life-Writing on Modern Chinese People and the China Biographical Database

http://sclw.lib.sjtu.edu.cn/index The Multilingual Full-Text Database of overseas life writing on Modern Chinese People (the Database) was launched by the Centre for life writing at shanghai Jiao Tong University (sJTU) in november 2011. all subjects in the Database are influential, representative, or exemplary Chinese people whose life materials are either published or preserved outside mainland China after 1898, the year generally considered to be the beginning of China’s Modern age. The Database aims to bring a prosopographical perspective to the transnational and transcultural experience shared by a rather large number of Chinese people in the previous century. by april 2018, the Database has listed more than 3,000 subjects and over 15,000 relevant resources. 
 https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdbThe China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a large data aggregator and powerful content harbour co-developed by Harvard University, Academia Sinica, and Peking University. It is one of the oldest and biggest digital humanities projects focusing on China. In its latest data release in August 2017, CBDB contains biographical information about 417,000 Chinese individuals, mostly from the 7th century to the 19th century. Unlike many text-based databases, CBDB does not preserve primary life materials in the original textual sources. Rather, it mines texts from digital sources of reliable historical records and stores them in a relational database.

A Chinese ancient book digital humanities research platform to support digital humanities research

PurposeWith the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However, most of them have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment and practicable social network analysis tool to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters’ social network relationships. Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. For these reasons, this paper aims to present a Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical China studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search and advanced search functions for Chinese ancient books, this platform still provides two novel functions that can more effectively support digital humanities research, including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) for interpreting texts and a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) for exploring characters’ social network relationships.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository system, to serve as a digital archives system for archiving scanned images, metadata, and full texts to develop the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities (DH) research. Moreover, the ATAS developed in the CABDHRP used the Node.js framework to implement the system’s front- and back-end services, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by different databases, such as China Biographical Database (CBDB) and TGAZ, used to retrieve the useful linked data (LD) sources for interpreting ancient texts. Also, Neo4j which is an open-source graph database management system was used to implement the CSNRMT of the CABDHRP. Finally, JavaScript and jQuery were applied to develop a monitoring program embedded in the CABDHRP to record the use processes from humanists based on xAPI (experience API). To understand the research participants’ perception when interpreting the historical texts and characters’ social network relationships with the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, semi-structured interviews with 21 research participants were conducted.FindingsAn ATAS embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different databases through LD for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows the humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts, as well as provides a friendly text annotation reader for humanists to interpret ancient text through reading. Additionally, the CSNRMT provided by the CABDHRP can semi-automatically identify characters’ names based on Chinese word segmentation technology and humanists’ support to confirm and analyze characters’ social network relationships from Chinese ancient books based on visualizing characters’ social networks as a knowledge graph. The CABDHRP not only can stimulate humanists to explore new viewpoints in a humanistic research, but also can promote the public to emerge the learning interest and awareness of Chinese ancient books.Originality/valueThis study proposed a novel CABDHRP that provides the advanced features, including the automatic word segmentation of Chinese text, automatic Chinese text annotation, semi-automatic character social network analysis and user behavior analysis, that are different from other existed digital humanities platforms. Currently, there is no this kind of digital humanities platform developed for humanists to support digital humanities research.

What Helped Officials of Song Dynasty in Climbing the Greasy Pole: An Empirical Study

The promotion mechanism of human resource is the key factor for the performance of the organization, and, was more influencing when the organization was dominating an empire, such as the Song dynasty. However, there was little literature discussed the promotion mechanism beyond the written rules and isolated cases. Thus, we used modern social science research methods and machine learning models to generate empirical findings on the promotion mechanism by predicting the highest rank of the officials with their biographical information from the China Biographical Database. Our findings included two elements: the factors that influence the highest rank of an official by linear regression, and, the comparative importance of influence of the factors by Random Forest regression. The findings were mostly consistent with previous historical research, with few exceptions. We found that the elite route via examinations were favored by the promotion mechanism, the bloodline route was unfavored by the promotion mechanism, and the social network around an official was associated with his highest rank. This finding is also consistent with modern business research on large enterprises.

Exploring Lives of China Ming-Qing Female Poets: Collaboration of the “Ming-Qing Women’s Writings Digital Archive and Database” and the “China Biographical Database”

Exploring Lives of China Ming-Qing Female Poets: Collaboration of the “Ming-Qing Women’s Writings Digital Archive and Database” and the “China Biographical Database”

THE INTELLECTUAL PERSUASION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A CONVERSATION WITH PETER K. BOL

Interviewer’s Note: Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. A leading scholar in the field of Chinese intellectual history, the much-published Professor Bol has long been an active figure in academic conferences and research collaborations. Professor Bol’s influential works on Neo-Confucianism, especially the monograph, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China and his recent book, Neo-Confucianism in History, present a compelling delineation of the transformation and magnification of intellectuals’ roles from the seventh century to the seventeenth century. Professor Bol is also a distinguished Harvard faculty member, being its first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis, first director of the China Biographical Database project, and department chair from 1997 to 2002. He won the prestigious honor of College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.I first met Professor Bol in the spring of 1997 when I participated in a symposium he organized for graduate students in the field of premodern China. During the 2008–09 academic year, I was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and had the opportunity to tour his Center for Geographic Analysis and meet with him from time to time to discuss the CBDB project. I also visited his class and interacted with his students. I sensed that Professor Bol’s vision and passion as a humanist and his dedication to education are very similar to those of Neo-Confucians of the Song-Yuan-Ming eras, save for his acute interest in global politics and, especially, the state of affairs in the US and China. Inspired by this encounter, I made a request for interviewing him for CHR readers. Professor Bol graciously accepted my request. Here is the interview.

웹 기반 중국인물정보원의 현황 조사와 분석 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the status and characteristics of Web-based biographical information sources. Hence, this study examined the current status of Web-based biographical sources in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. It also conducted a comparative analysis of family names from the subject dictionary and Biography of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), reference books of China and the Chinese Historical Biographical Database and the China Biographical Database Project (CBDP) of the U.S. Furthermore, the problems related to status investigation and analyses of the Chinese biographical sources were studied. In this study, some suggestions were made to improve the management and usability of those biographical information sources in China and Korea.

GIS, prosopography and history

This study of the early spread of Neo-Confucianism as an intellectual–social movement in southern China in the twelfth century applies geospatial analysis to a prosopographical study of the social networks of leading figures. By analyzing the spatial distribution of intellectual networks, we see that Neo-Confucianism was most successful in areas that had strong traditions of investment in education but that were generally marginal to the commercial economy of the times. The research draws on data from the China Biographical Database, which include data on the social associations, kinship, careers and addresses of over 40,000 Song dynasty figures and the China Historical GIS, a times-series database of administrative units from 221 BCE to 1911 CE. Intellectual history traditionally has focused on the transmission of ideas; network and spatial analysis helps explain why some areas were more receptive to certain ideas than others.

Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Women's Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women's writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper focuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastructure, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyberinfrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.