CHC講座-跨越模型與史料的鴻溝：數位革命與史學研究範式的拓展
CHC
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Date
14 Oct 2024
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Organiser
CHC
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Time
16:30 - 18:00
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Venue
R902&ZOOM Map
Speaker
Dr Chen Song
Summary
All historical research begins with sources, and no historical research is possible without “models.” Models are intellectual constructs that simply reality in order to emphasize the general and the typical and thereby enable historical explanation. In essence, all historical research is an attempt to bridge the gap between sources and models. By discussing the speaker’s several research projects in the aggregate, this talk explores how digital technology offers new possibilities for bridging this gap. In contrast with the traditional approach of close reading, historical research empowered by digital technology take sources as “unborn” databases and employ digital tools for annotation, disambiguation, data-linking, and analysis, thereby blazing new trails for understanding models, discovering them in the sources, and linking them with empirical evidence.
Keynote Speaker
Dr Chen Song
Associate Professor of Chinese History at Bucknell University
Chen Song (陳松) is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at Bucknell University, with a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2011. He specializes in social and cultural history during the Tang and Song dynasties, with a particular focus on the literati elite’s migration and marriage networks, state-society relations, and local religion. He has served on the executive and steering committees of the China Biographical Database Project (CBDB), and he makes extensive use of digital methods in his teaching and scholarship, ranging from data mining and text analysis to network analysis and historical GIS. In 2021–2022, in collaboration with Professor Henrike Rudolph and Dr. Zhao Wei, he co-edited two special journal issues on network analysis: “Beyond Guanxi” for the Journal of Historical Network Research and “From Metaphor to Model: Network Analysis as an Approach to Research and Criticism” for the Chinese-English bilingual Journal of Digital Humanities jointly sponsored by Tsinghua University and Zhonghua Book Company. His publications “Local Society and the Region under a Decentralized Rule” (分権統治下における在地社会と広域地方), “Governing a Multicentered Empire,” “Writing for Local Government Schools,” “‘Short Scrolls’ and ‘Slanderous Reports’,” “Patterns of Integration,” among others.
