Shih-Pei Chen: Treating a genre as a knowledge system: Analysing Chinese local gazetteers and daily-use encyclopedias with quantitative approaches

Many digital humanities research projects rely on large amounts of digitized primary sources to elevate research from manual, close reading to large-scaled, computer-assisted quantitative analyses –– sometimes called distant reading or birds-eye views. This presentation reports on the case of Chinese local gazetteers (difangzhi), in particular the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), designed and developed at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) to bring a collect...