Content uploaded by Shih-Pei Chen
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Shih-Pei Chen on Jun 16, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Local Gazetteers Research Tools: Overview and
Research Application
Shih-Pei Chen, Kenneth J. Hammond, Anne Gerritsen, Shellen Wu and Jiajing Zhang
doi:10.1017/jch.2020.26
Abstract
This article gives an overview of the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), including its
development, technical features, methodology, and examples of research applications by
members of the Tu 圖working group. The use of LoGaRT is illustrated with four brief intro-
ductions to projects that draw on visual materials from the local gazetteers, including ritual-
related illustrations, city layout maps, and maps with western cartographic features. See the
websites for more detailed information on LoGaRT and other research projects using it.
1
Keywords: locality; digital humanities; urban space; ritual illustrations; chorographic maps
Purpose
Local Gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志) have been major sources for studying historical
China: they were compiled to describe local administrative units. Local governments
have compiled and updated them ever since the twelfth century, and they cover both
well-populated and less-well-populated regions such as border zones. Most importantly,
they contain consistent kinds of information about localities across geographical regions
and time periods. Information at this granularity is not easy to find elsewhere.
There are more than ten thousand distinct titles of local gazetteers in libraries, muse-
ums, and archives around the world. Many of them have been digitized as both scanned
images and searchable full texts, enabling unprecedented opportunities to study this
genre from a collective perspective—treating the genre of local gazetteers as a concep-
tual database for historical inquiry. Most local gazetteers with searchable full text are
accessible to scholars through commercial vendors.
2
Despite the useful reading environ-
ments that commercial databases provide, the lack of analytic tools in these online
© Cambridge University Press 2020. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/), which permits
non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is
properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in
order to create a derivative work.
1
Shih-Pei Chen, Calvin Yeh, and Sean Wang, “LoGaRT: Local Gazetteers Research Tools,”Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science, accessed September 5, 2019, https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/
research/projects/logart-local-gazetteers-research-tools. Shih-Pei Chen, Dagmar Schäfer, and Qun Che,
“Local Gazetteers Working Group,”Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, accessed September 5,
2019, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/departmentSchaefer_SPC_MS_LocalGazetteers.
2
There are mainly three players: Eruditon (Airusheng 爱如生), with its 4,000 titles in the Zhongguo
fangzhi ku 中國方志庫issued in two batches in 2013 and 2016, was the first in the market with a stable
user interface that supports different ways of search including full-text search, a good reading interface with
parallel display of a scan of the original and transcribed text and more. Diaolong 雕龙offers another 4,000
titles. EastView joined the market later with around 7,000 titles (only a portion of which include searchable
digital texts) sourced from National Library.
544 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
collections means the commercial products are not so helpful in terms of collective
understanding and analysis of the genre.
Method: Using Local Gazetteers with a Collective Lens
In 2014, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science started a research project to
study the nature of local knowledge and the role of local gazetteers in Imperial China. The
large number of digital gazetteers led us to develop computational methods for effective
research. LoGaRT, the Local Gazetteers Research Tools, were first developed in 2016 for
this purpose. The underlying philosophy is to treat all the gazetteers available in digital
format as a conceptual database for historical inquiries in order to ask questions at larger
scales—scales not necessarily bounded by geographical regions, time periods, or individual
effort. In other words, LoGaRT helps scholars study digital gazetteers with a collective lens.
Search and Visual Overview
LoGaRT is aimed at facilitating “collective analyses”by enabling scholars to quickly
grasp the overview of any search result. In LoGaRT, scholars can conduct searches at
the three levels of book, chapter/section, and page text and can explore the composition
of the search results with visual analytics. For example, in Book Search scholars can see
both a list of book titles that are currently linked with LoGaRT and the dates of the edi-
tions and the places the gazetteers document. Figure 1 shows the composition of 3,999
digital gazetteers from Erudition’sZhongguo fangzhi ku in terms of their geographical,
dynastic, chronological, and administrative distributions. Such a utility helps scholars to
understand the basis of their studies.
The same visual analytic tool is linked to any search at book, section, or page text
levels, providing scholars a way to quickly grasp the overview of any search result to
understand its composition.
3
Although LoGaRT’s Page Text Search is very similar to
general full text search, its Section Search is a feature unique among all current local
gazetteer databases.
4
LoGaRT’s engine searches for section titles based on our work
to add a three-level hierarchical Table of Contents to our database.
5
Figure 2 shows
the Table of Contents editing interface in LoGaRT. This massive effort has proven to
be very worthwhile—scholars can now search by section titles to identify which local
gazetteers include those specific sections, or they can bring all sections on the same
topic together regardless of edition, time, and place. In Ian Matthew Miller’s case,
3
This visual analytic tool, named LGMap, is customized from the open source tool PLATIN (Place and Time
Navigator). It allows scholars to upload data with temporal and geospatial attributes in a tabular format, either
Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Microsoft Excel format, and then it creates visual representations of the
uploaded data in a map, a timeline, and user-specified pie charts. Users can interact with any of the three visual
components to see more fine-grained composition of the data. See examples and source code at PLATIN: Place
and Time Navigator—A tool for the interactive visualization of geospatial and temporal data, http://platin.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/. For a detailed use case of this feature working with full text search see Shih-Pei Chen, “Remapping
Locust Temples of Historical China and the Use of GIS 重制陳正祥之蝗神廟分佈圖與淺談GIS 的使用,
Review of Religion and Chinese Society 3.2 (2016), 149–163. doi:10.1163/22143955–00302002.
4
One issue that scholars should pay attention to is the way that each databases counts “matches”or
“hits.”While some databases use the total number of occurrences of the search term as the number of
hits, LoGaRT uses the total number of pages in which the search term(s) appear as its result number.
This number is smaller than the number of all occurrences.
5
This work was done through a collaboration between MPIWG and the Nanjing University of
Information Technology and Engineering. CAO Ling led a team of graduate students who manually
typed in the section titles, start and end page numbers, and levels in the hierarchy.
Journal of Chinese History 545
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
searching for logging (muzheng 木政) in Section Search enabled him to discover when
and where logging was important enough to warrant a section.
6
Scholars can combine
Section Search with Page Text Search to weed out irrelevant full-text search results. The
display of section titles in Page Text Search results is informative for understanding the
contexts of mentioned keywords.
Text-Tagging: Data Collection Across Local Gazetteers
Beyond search and visual analytics, LoGaRT also comes with a text-tagging interface to
help scholars work more effectively with structured texts. Gazetteers commonly orga-
nize information in lists: of buildings, local products, officials, etc. Text-tagging
makes up for the difficulty computers have with finding similar structures across differ-
ent gazetteers. An example is the listing of book titles in Figure 3 from the School sec-
tion (xuexiao 學校志) of the Guangxu Jishui county gazetteer (吉水縣志).
7
The core
functionality of LoGaRT’s tagging interface was originally developed in 2013 to extract
posting records in the Posting sections (zhiguan 職官志) for the China Biographical
Figure 1. LoGaRT’s visual analytics interface, showing the geographical, dynastic, chronological, and administrative
distributions of the 3,999 titles included in Zhongguo Fangzhi Ku
6
See more analyses in Ian Matthew Miller, “Regional Patterns of Forestry in Four Maps,”Roots and
Branches: Growing Histories from the Ground Up, December 18, 2017, https://medium.com/roots-and-
branches/regional-patterns-of-forestry-in-four-maps-eb3d8c2237e0.
7
This example is provided by Joseph Dennis, who has been using LoGaRT in a study of school library
collections in the Ming, Qing, and Republican China. See his “School Library Book Collections in Ming,
Qing, and Republican China,”accessed April 28, 2020, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/school-library-book-collections-ming-qing-and-republican-
china-0.
546 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Database (CBDB).
8
MPIWG continued to improve this function after 2014, making it a
flexible tool for tagging texts and extracting data from any structured section. By tag-
ging, we refer to the action of a user to highlight a segment of text and specify the attri-
bute it represents in the text, normally by giving it a semantic label defined by the user;
in this case from Joseph Dennis it would be book title, number of volumes, distributed
by, and so on. Figure 4 shows part of the digital text of Figure 3 as tagged by Dennis.
Any tagged text in LoGaRT can then be converted to a data table, as shown in Figure 5.
LoGaRT’s tagging interface comes with a set of functions supporting the tagging
workflow, from defining a tagging Topic, defining corresponding Tags, to
SmartRegex, a toolkit helping scholars to define “regular expressions”to capture
re-appearing text patterns and to automate tagging. All these functions help scholars
apply the same settings (in Topics) to texts with similar contents and structure,
which might have been identified through Section Search or Page Text Search. By tag-
ging with LoGaRT, scholars are able to collect similar kinds of information across local
gazetteers to answer questions at larger scales than before. After seeing several histori-
ans using LoGaRT, we also realized that tagging (in particular, structured texts) helps
scholars to deep-read texts in a very different way from reading to understand—it ele-
vates scholars’understanding even of texts they have read several times, by paying more
Figure 2. The Table of Contents Editor in LoGaRT, hosting sections titles, begin and end page numbers, and up to
three levels of content hierarchy
8
This work was sponsored by the China Biographical Database project at Harvard University. See
Weiqian Peng, Hui Cheng, and Shih-Pei Chen, “Cong quan wen dao biao ge: di fang zhi zhi guan zhi
zhong zi liao zhi ban zi dong xie qu.”從全文到表格:地方志職官志中職官資料之半自動擷取[From
text to data: extracting posting data from Chinese local gazetteers], Shu wei dian cang yu shu wei ren
wen 數位典藏與數位人文, 1 (2018), 79–125. doi:10.6853/DADH.201804_1.0004.
Journal of Chinese History 547
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
attention to the structures of knowledge implicit in the organization of information in a
gazetteer.
Research Application: the Tu 圖Working Group as an Example
Nearly forty scholars have visited MPIWG to use LoGaRT in their research projects in
the past four years. Some of them have published results already and others are in prep-
aration. The website gives lists of individuals and research projects. Most LoGaRT
research focuses on textual information. Although the local gazetteers is mainly a
text genre, it includes visual materials, mostly maps and spatial illustrations in the
fore matter of gazetteers, and occasionally images accompanying particular texts.
LoGaRT’sTu-related functions help scholars discover where images are and what
Figure 3. The first page of the list of school library
collection reported in the Guangxu period Jishui
county gazetteer (1875). Image credit Zhongguo
Fangzhi Ku
Figure 4. The corresponding digital text of Figure 3, with scholarly tagging. Each color represents a semantic label
defined by the scholar, such as book title, number of volumes, distributed by
548 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Figure 5. The data table converted by LoGaRT based on the tagged text in Figure 4
Journal of Chinese History 549
use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of
kind of information they depict, and thus to study the roles of visual materials in knowl-
edge production and transmission in Imperial China.
The Tu Group brought in four scholars with research projects that used visual mate-
rials. With LoGaRT they identified 63,497 pages with images (PWI) in the 3,999 titles
in Erudition’sZhongguo fangzhi ku and helped us identify needed functions for
researching images. Each scholar developed a collection of pages, saved as a CSV file,
listing the identifying number, book title, administrative unit, dynasty and reign period,
year of publication and the year of the edition, as well as the latitude and longitude of
the location associated with the gazetteer.
Once a collection has been developed, the individual image pages can be displayed
using a “carousel”function, which allows the researcher to scroll quickly through the
image set (Figure 6). This facilitates the rapid review and comparison of images.
Each image can then be tagged with terms from a list of seventeen terms developed
by the researchers, allowing for the creation of subsets within the original collection.
LoGaRT also allows several forms of graphic display of information. For example,
LoGaRT collections can be geovisualized in CHMap developed by Nung-yao Lin,
which displays a map that shows the locations of pages with images and the number
of pages located within a given locality.
9
This can be scaled up or down to provide
greater detail or a broader overview (Figure 7). A statistics function displays quantitative
information such as the number of pages within a given reign period, or the distribution
of pages by province. Statistical information can be displayed as a bar chart, line chart,
or pie chart. These features allow for the analysis of patterns within the dataset.
The brief reports below show how the tool has been applied in practice.
10
Anne Gerritsen: Representing Ritual in Local Gazetteers
There are a significant number of non-spatial images in gazetteers, varying widely from
agricultural implements to human figures, and from animals and plants to graphs,
charts and photographs. Once they were tagged it became possible to organize them.
The largest sub-group are images related to ritual: musical instruments and other
implements used in ritual performances, depictions of human figures holding a feather
plume in various ritual postures, charts that specify who and what should be positioned
where during ritual performances, and so forth. The ritual postures usually appear in
sets of twenty-four images in the gazetteers, while the musical instruments and ritual
implements generally appear in less regular sets, ranging from small collections of
five or six implements to extensive series of more than forty objects.
The 1756 gazetteer of Xiangtan county in Hunan illustrates this.
11
There are thirty-
five pages depicting ritual implements, including the mountain vessel (shanzun 山尊)
for offering wine depicted in Figure 8. These are followed by seventeen pages depicting
9
For CHMap’s stand-alone version and further information on basemaps, see Qun Che, Shih-Pei Chen,
and Nung-yao Lin, “The WebGIS Platform of Historical Maps of China,”Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, accessed September 5, 2019, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/webgis-plat-
form-historical-maps-china.
10
These works are based upon research conducted while affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, and sources were made available during this affiliation via Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin’s
CrossAsia portal.
11
Ouyang Zhenghuan 歐陽正煥and Lu Zhengyin 呂正音, eds., Xiangtan xian zhi 湘潭縣志,
Harvard-Yenching Library Chinese Local Gazetteers Digitization Project- Shan ben fang zhi (1756,
n.d.), accessed 9 August 2019.
550 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
twenty-one separate musical instruments and stands for banners and flags. Finally,
there are twenty-four pages with ritual postures, each with four separate postures (see
Figure 9), as well as a page depicting the feather plume (di 翟) and flute ( yue 籥)
held in the left and right hands, respectively.
LoGaRT functionality allows for various kinds of analysis of this visual material. We
can identify when these sets of images related to ritual start to appear in the gazetteers
(in Qing especially in gazetteers produced during the Qianlong, Tongzhi and Guangxu
reign periods), and where they did (Hunan gazetteers, of which the Xiangtan gazetteer
is one, stand out for extensive sets of ritual materials). More fine-grained analysis allows
us to identify subgroups within the larger sets. For example, amongst the depictions of
musical instruments is a yu 敔, a wooden tiger, reclining on a platform or base, with
spikes along which the player runs a wooden drumstick (zhen 籈), as depicted in
Figure 10. The percussive sound of this instrument usually indicates the end of the
musical performance. The wooden tiger is usually part of the musical instrument series,
but variation in the representation of the yu suggests there was not a single but several
sources for these images.
Figure 7. Geovisualization of LoGaRT image collection in CHMap
552 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Ken Hammond: Visual Representations of Urban Space
How were cities and towns mapped and visually represented from the Song through the
Ming? An initial search with LoGaRT generated a set of 4,200 pages with images. It took sev-
eral months to tag them, with most pages being excluded as not being places, or being of
larger (e.g. counties) or smaller (e.g. schools) units. After a final examination there was a
set of 235 maps of cities and towns, all but one from the Ming. The CHMap function showed
that the majority of these came from the Jiangnan region, and that images of urban places
decrease dramatically as one moves away from the coast and out to the perimeters of the
empire.LoGaRT does not eliminate the need for reading and inspection, but it dramatically
enhances the researcher’s ability to rapidly identify the visual materials relevant to one’s
study, and it makes the aggregation and display of that material a much easier process.
Shellen Wu: Frontier Settlements and Modern State Building in Late Imperial and
Republican China
Maps are the largest category of images in gazetteers. In this case the goal was to see
changes in the content of maps from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to 1949.
Figure 8. One of the ritual vessels included in
Xiangtan xianzhi (1756) 8.38b-39a. Harvard-
Yenching Library Chinese Local Gazetteers
Digitization Project
Journal of Chinese History 553
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
LoGaRT allowed narrowing the search to within the 10,000-image limit of most of its
GIS and statistical functions.
Features appear in local gazetteers that have already been widely adopted by local elites,
making the content of gazetteers evidence for the acceptance of certain ideological and con-
ceptual change, in this case the spread of science in China as seen through maps and images.
The result of this research would take the transmission and spread of science out of the
treaty ports and missionary schools to map a new atlas of science in modern China.
For example, beginning in the late Qing period in the 1900s, city maps still look very
similar to maps from earlier periods but, in addition to temples, schools, and benevolence
halls, they show the location of police stations, girls’schools, and other new institutions
such as agricultural experimental stations. Republican period maps sometimes contain
information about the map-maker. Many of the Republican maps follow Western map-
ping conventions and contain features like a compass rose and altitude lines. Agricultural
experimental stations, in particular, proved tremendously popular with late imperial lite-
rati, Qing officials, and, later, revolutionaries and reformers. Maps and images from the
Yunnan Dali County Gazetteer (Dali Xianzhi Gao 大理縣志稿, 1916) illustrate this. It
contains a sophisticated four-page series of contour maps of Dali port, as well as a city
map that features schools and the agricultural experimental zone. Both the editor-in-chief
and the compiler were prominent revolutionaries in the Xinhai Revolution. The
Figure 9. Four of the 96 postures in Xiangtan
xianzhi (1756) 8.69b-70a. HYL Chinese Local
Gazetteers Digitization Project
554 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
editor-chief, Zhang Peijue, was an early member of Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary Alliance,
the Tongmenghui. Zhang was executed in 1915 following his arrest by the Yuan Shikai
government and died a martyr of the revolution. The chief compiler, Zhou Zonglin,
was an educator and principal of a high school and teacher’s college in Dali. He too
had joined in the Xinhai Revolution. The biographies of the two men and the contents
of the Dali County Gazetteer suggest that New Learning and the spread of the sciences
accompanied a variety of advocates to their hometowns and villages, far from the major
treaty port cities. By the late Qing and early Republican period, local elites from
Yunnan in the southwest to Jilin in the northeast had embraced reforms and established
schools as the bases from which to spread their ideas. This is one instance of how LoGaRT
may change our current conception of the spread of science and revolution in modern
China. LoGaRT’s image search functions allow the use of gazetteers for new avenues of
research in Chinese history and the history of science.
Zhang Jiajing: Research on the Longitude and Latitude of Guangdong Provincial
Gazetteer Maps in the Qing Dynasty
During the late Qing period Chinese cartographers started to adopt Western carto-
graphic techniques and their maps began to make use of projection, longitude, and
Figure 10. Two of the musical instruments
included in Xiangtan xianzhi (1756) 8.55b-56a.
HYL Chinese Local Gazetteers Digitization Project
Journal of Chinese History 555
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
latitude. They also used hypsographic methods in expressing topography, such as
hachuring, hill shading, and contouring. Local gazetteers during the Qing contain a
large number of maps, which were generally made by local scholars. LoGaRT was
used to identify all the gazetteer maps drawn with Western techniques with which a
database was created to chart changes in the number of maps and the spatial distribu-
tion of gazetteers with these new maps. Particular attention was given to similarities and
differences between gazetteer maps of different areas in the same historical period, the
potential social and technical reasons for these similarities and differences, and the
spread and application of Western cartographical technology in these maps.
Administrative maps from Guangdong provincial gazetteers were used to demon-
strate the scientific dissemination of modern cartography and survey methods. Five
Guangdong administrative maps from provincial gazetteers in the Qing dynasty were
identified by searching LoGaRT. The first and second were created in the Kangxi
period, neither of which contained longitude and latitude lines. The third one (see
Figure 11), with longitude and latitude lines, was published in the Daoguang period,
taking the longitude through Beijing as the prime meridian. Each grid is one degree,
and each grid is equal to 250 li. Yet it is not accurate, especially in the Leizhou 雷州
and Qiongzhou 琼州regions according to the Historical Atlas of China, and in fact
according to a local gazetteer it was made without field measurements. Where, then,
did the latitude and longitude data come from? The mapmaker, Li Mingche, was a
Figure 11. (Daoguang) Guangdong Yudi Zongtu. (Daoguang) Guangdong Tongzhi, Ruan Yuan, Chen Changqi, The
second year of Daoguang (1822). Image credit Zhongguo Fangzhi Ku
556 Shih‐Pei Chen et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
Daoist priest skilled in astronomy, calendrical calculations, and arithmetic. His book
Yuantian Tushuo 圜天圖說, which included two world maps, mentions map projec-
tion, longitude, and latitude. Possibly, he acquired knowledge of longitude and latitude
from Kunyu Quantu 坤輿全圖(1760), made by the Jesuit Benoist Michael (蒋友仁).
The accuracy of the fourth map, from the Tongzhi period, had significantly improved.
By then the national survey data from the Kangxi and Qianlong periods was accessible to
the general public through Ding Quzhong’s丁取忠Latitude and Longitude Table (輿地
經緯度里表, 1861). The geographical data in this fourth map came from previous maps,
books, interviews, and field measurements. Chen Li 陳澧1810–1882) and Zou Boqi 鄒伯奇
(1819–1869) were the mapmakers. Chen was a famous scholar in Guangdong and self-
educated in literature, geography, mathematics, and music. Zou also studied physics,
geography,andmathonhisownandcreatedthefirstcamerainChina.Zouhadagood
understanding of globe-shaped Earth theory and had participated in drawing Huangyu
quantu 皇輿全圖, which adopted the tangent conic projection.
The last map (see Figure 12) was drawn during the Xuantong period. According to the
local gazetteer, in addition to citing previous books, most geographical coordinates came
from a sizeable field survey team: nine people were responsible for mapping, twelve were
in charge of the survey, two translated Western maps, and four collected and organized
the maps. They had different backgrounds. One group had studied the Four Books and
Five Classics in traditional schools and had also studied astronomy, arithmetic and geog-
raphy. A second group had learned Western surveying and cartography in new schools or
Figure 12. (Xuantong) Latitude and Longitude Map of Guangdong Province. (Xuantong) Guangdong Yudi Quantu,
Guangdong Staff Section surveyed and mapped. The first year of Xuantong (1909). Image acquired from Zhongguo
Difangzhi Congshu
Journal of Chinese History 557
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
overseas. For examples, Huang Lunsu graduated from Fuzhou Shipyard, Zhong Jincheng
studied in the United States, Pan Yingqi graduated from Shixue College (實學館). A third
group was trained in professional Western-style surveying and mapping techniques. Gu
Chao, Zou Jin, and Lao Yingan had been involved in the process of settling a boundary
dispute between China and Vietnam. From this we see the gradual introduction on mod-
ern cartography from the Daoguang period to the end of Qing dynasty.
Access to Logart
Although LoGaRT was developed as software to work with any collection of digital local
gazetteers, it currently links to only the Zhongguo fangzhi ku from Erudition (Airusheng
愛如生) that is housed at the Berlin State Library. This dataset currently includes 3,999
local gazetteers, with some four million scanned pages, dating from the Tang dynasty
through the early twentieth century. This accounts for roughly half of known extant
gazetteers. Because this requires a special license, currently only MPIWG affiliates are
entitled to use LoGaRT during their affiliation periods. We have been exploring ways
to extend the access to LoGaRT, and we are planning on releasing a LoGaRT instance
with open access contents in the spring of 2020.
12
In the future we will release LoGaRT
as a stand-alone software package, allowing any institution to install it and link it with
collections of digital local gazetteers for which they have rights.
Using Philologic For Digital Textual and
Intertextual Analyses of the Twenty-Four Chinese
Histories 二十四史
Jeffrey Tharsen and Clovis Gladstone
doi:10.1017/jch.2020.27
Abstract
What does it mean to be able to study Chinese history at scale? What methods, tools, and
approaches will allow us to understand Chinese history and historiography from a larger
perspective over the longue durée, including linguistic, philosophical, ethnographic, and
literary concerns? In this article we present what we feel is one potential key to answering
these questions and provide an overview of the utility and value of harnessing this frame-
work for text-based historical research as a means to expand one’s scholarship to virtually
limitless scales.
12
This Open LoGaRT will contain around 400 titles of local gazetteers from the Harvard Yenching
Library rare book collection. We thank Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Max Planck Society for
their funding to digitize this set of local gazetteers as searchable full texts.
Jeffrey Tharsen, University of Chicago, email: jcarlsen@uchicago.edu and Clovis Gladstone, University of
Chicago, email: clovisgladstone@uchicago.edu
558 Jeffrey Tharsen and Clovis Gladstone
https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.26
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 82.117.82.148, on 16 Jun 2021 at 13:10:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.