Building a Comparative Database for the Study of the Old and New Tang Histories

a comparative database that will allow scholars to visualise and analyse two historical chronicles of Tang China

Data Development
Database
East Asian Studies
tang-resized

In their modern print editions, the Old Tang History (945 CE) and New Tang History (1060 CE) comprise over 6,000 pages chronicling the politics, art, science, economics, and natural history of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). In the Spring 2018 semester, Professors Anna M. Shields and Wen Xin began designing the Tang History Database, an online, open-access edition of these monumental documents, and received their first CDH Dataset Curation Grant for 2018-2019. This year, with the help of a second CDH Dataset Curation Grant, a team of students will finish verifying digital transcriptions of the text. The team will then begin name-tagging people listed in the Histories using the Chinese Biographical Database (CBDB) and geotagging locations with data from the Chinese Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS) database. This work will create a richly interlinked text that will allow scholars to attend on the macro level to the patterns of difference between the two texts, and to traverse on the semantic level the links between people and places in Tang China.

Team

Project Director

Database Designer

Jeff Heller

Grants

2019–2020

Dataset Curation

2018–2019

Dataset Curation