Project Overview
China Biographic Database (CBDB) is a database of the lives of premodern Chinese historical figures. The database includes over 520,000 individual biographies and works, with support from more than 150 scholars.
Sources
The CBDB gathers information from various sources. It uses historical records for the basic facts about each figure’s life. It uses local gazetteers to learn where and when people lived. It includes letters between historical figures for social connections. It uses records from government offices to list their job titles and timelines. It adds information from poetry to capture more personal information. It also uses published research to fill in missing details.
Processes
The CBDB works to turn old books and records into digital data. It scans and digitizes historical texts, then extracts key details such as names, places, job titles, family ties, social connections, and important events. They also use matrix and graph methods to find hidden relationships between people. For people without clear death dates, they label them with a dynasty as a reference.
Presentation
The CBDB uses various interactive methods. It maps each district as a dot on a digital map, and users can see how many people lived there during specific historical periods. It presents life spans in a scroll-like format. It uses word clouds to show keywords for each dynasty. It uses bar charts to show how many people were born or died in each time frame. It uses pyramid charts and bar graphs to compare male and female life expectancy, with a separate chart showing the overall distribution. It links birthplaces and death places with connected blocks to show movements between places. It visualizes social relationships as networks.
Question
I noticed that event data was extracted but not presented. I wonder how we might present them? One way could be to build a word cloud for each person.
Academic fields in conversation with
The CBDB connects to history, sociology, anthropology, and East Asian studies. It helps researchers in these areas explore the lives of Chinese historical figures and historical patterns across different periods of China.
Who made the website
The CBDB project was initiated by the Harvard-Yenching Institute. The platform is now maintained by the CBDB Management Committee, a collaboration between several institutions, including Harvard University, Academia Sinica, Peking University, ChineseAll Digital Publishing Group, and so on. These researchers continue to expand and update the database.
