Song Chen

Historians have long aspired to see beyond the rise and fall of dynasties to the longue durée and the major changes over time in Chinese society. The five empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated books discussed in this essay all share this goal. While they make distinct contributions, they have in common close attention to the relationships between the state, the elite, and local institutions between the late Tang and Qing periods. Reading them together encourages rethinking the state-and-society issues that historians have been debating for a generation. In this essay, after a brief summary of each book's major contributions, I suggest ways they help us conceptualize the long-term processes of continuity and change from the late Tang to the Qing.

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.

Chinese translation, with updates, of “Writing for Local Government Schools: Authors and Themes in Song-dynasty School Inscriptions.” Journal of Chinese History 4.2 (2020): 305–46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.11

地方官學在全國範圍內的普遍設立乃是有宋一代的標誌性成就。在地方官學興建、重修和改建的過程中，大量紀念性的碑記文字隨之產生。這些碑記成為許多作者闡揚其政治思想與教育理念的重要媒介。運用網絡分析和文檔聚類等方法對現存所有宋代地方官學碑記進行分析，可以揭示在思想觀念交流上宋代四川與其他地區之間存在著的結構性鴻溝，以及理學思想在南宋地方官學碑記寫作中與日俱增的影響。通過綜合利用多種數字分析方法對大量史學文獻進行多角度、整體性分析，探索數字人文技術在拓寬史學研究領域方面的學術價值。

In eleventh-century China, a growing number of local men received a classical
education and played a visible role in the government. Some passed
the civil service examinations and held office, but those who did not also
actively engaged themselves in local administration. These local men of
culture, or local literati, had a dual identity: they were influential members
of local society in their hometowns, but they were also participants in an
empire-wide literati community that defined itself by a shared culture and
supralocal networks. This chapter provides a case study of how local literati
on the fringes of officialdom negotiated between these two identities
and how they both cooperated with the state in local administration and
protested against it in defence of local interests. The protagonist in this
chapter is Zhang Yu, a Sichuanese literatus of the early Northern Song
Dynasty who never held office but commanded great respect from local
officials. Using his letters, parting valedictions, and commemorative
inscriptions, this chapter explores how local literati provided political
counsel and communicated their demands to the government. It argues
that Zhang pursued, in different genres of his writings, several agendas
that complemented one another. He eagerly fashioned himself as a true
literatus in the metropolitan circles, which in turn strengthened his
social standing and enabled him to weigh in on local policy and speak
for local interests.

A hallmark of the Song dynasty's achievements was the creation of a national network of state-sponsored local schools. This engendered an exponential growth of commemorative inscriptions dedicated to local government schools. Many authors used these inscriptions as an avenue to expound and disseminate their visions of schools and education. Using the methods of network analysis and document clustering, this article analyzes all the inscriptions extant from Song times for local government schools. It reveals a structural schism in the diffusion of ideas between the Upper Yangzi and other regions of the Song. It also demonstrates the growing intellectual influence of Neo-Confucian ideologues that gradually overtook that of renowned prose-writers. Methodologically, this article provides an example of how diverse digital methods enable us to handle a large body of texts from multiple perspectives and invite us to explore connections we might not have otherwise thought of.

The widespread interest in digital humanities (DH) has given rise to a lively discussion about the role of technology in undergraduate classrooms. This article discusses the author's own experience designing and teaching two DH courses in a liberal arts college in North America and offers advice to others who wish to attempt similar courses. The different designs of these two courses serve to demonstrate different ways of tailoring pedagogical objectives and strategies according to the needs and readiness of different student audiences. Both courses illustrate how the infusion of technology into liberal arts programs advances student-centered learning and promotes the teaching of discipline-specific knowledge and critical thinking skills. They underscore the importance of blending technical instruction with methodological reflections and carefully scaffolding course content and activities.

The Journal of Digital Humanities is a quarterly, bilingual journal jointly sponsored by Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Zhonghua Book Company (中華書局). The goal of the journal to provide a publishing venue for theoretical discussion and original research in the burgeoning and highly interdisciplinary field of digital humanities. Network research is a flourishing area in digital humanities. In recent years, the digitization of source materials, the proliferation of databases, as well as the development of digital tools, have greatly facilitated network research in Chinese studies across a wide range of disciplines that include literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, art, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. With this special issue on network analysis, the Journal of Digital Humanities aims to provide a venue for sharing cutting-edge research on networks in Chinese humanities and social sciences, encourage further explorations in this area, and promote interdisciplinary dialogue about technology and methodology pertaining to network research in different subject areas. This special issue publishes contributions in both Chinese and English. We welcome contributions from scholars in all humanities and social sciences disciplines who employ network analysis in teaching and research. We also welcome contributions from developers of databases and tools that facilitate the teaching and research of networks in these disciplines. Types of contributions accepted for review include original research articles, pedagogical discussions, state-of-the-field essays, comprehensive review essays, short book reviews, discussions of databases and tools, and reports and newsletters on recent publications, conferences, and projects in China and abroad.

With the expansion of the civil service examinations and the increasing availability of educational and political resources from the 11th century onwards, the political elite in Song dynasty China was transformed from a capital-centered group into one more embedded in their native communities in different parts of the empire. Social networks of the elite also underwent profound changes. Marriage became more localized, whereas a shared literati culture also fostered national connections. Using network data on marriage and correspondences, this paper harnesses the power of digital tools to study the structure of elite networks in the early thirteenth century in comparison with those in the eleventh century. It explores spatial clusters in elite networks and the nature of brokerage between different regional groups.

Review of five recent books:
村社傳統與明清士紳：山西澤州鄉土社會的制度變遷, by 杜正貞;
The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy, by Nicolas Tackett;
金元時代の華北社会と科挙制度―もう一つの「士人層」, by 飯山知保;
The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: I. Village, Land, and Lineage in Huizhou, 900–1600, by Joseph P. McDermott; and
Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in Twelfth- to Fourteenth-Century China, by Sukhee Lee.

Full text available for viewing and downloading here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-history/article/div-classtitlethe-state-the-gentry-and-local-institutions-the-song-dynasty-and-long-term-trends-from-tang-to-qinga-hreffns01-ref-typefnadiv/98FF05D23838EA992380D13B122A4598/core-reader

Course description: research seminar for graduate students using primary sources. Reexamines Tang-Song transition from the perspectives of local society and its relationship to the imperial state. Topics include transformation of local elites, local space, administrative practices, elite culture, and religion.

Course description: undergraduate seminar on the history of the People’s Republic of China, with a particular focus on post-Mao era. Topics covered include government structure, economic reforms, social changes, and intellectual debates. Combines lecture and in-class discussion.

Course description: introductory course to digital humanities. Explores existing visualization projects in the humanities field, evaluates the role of visualization in humanities scholarship, introduces a variety of visualization tools, such as Map Tour, Timeline JS, StoryMap JS, Voyant tools, Palladio, Gephi, and CartoDB.

Course description: introductory course to digital humanities. Explores existing visualization projects in the humanities field, evaluates the role of visualization in humanities scholarship, introduces a variety of visualization tools, such as Map Tour, Timeline JS, StoryMap JS, Voyant tools, Palladio, Gephi, and CartoDB.

Course description: introductory course on using computational methods to study history, with particular focus on basic computational skills related to prosopography, data mining, database management, spatial and network analysis. For graduate students and undergraduates of East Asian concentration.

Course description: introductory course on using computational methods to study history, with particular focus on basic computational skills related to prosopography, data mining, database management, spatial and network analysis. For graduate students and undergraduates of East Asian concentration.