From Tag to Map: Extracting and Visualizing Historical Chinese Data in Time and Place

This paper introduces research on the textual construction of local materialities in historical China�s local monographs. The corpus consists of 1,800 monographs from the 12th to 19th c. Semi-automatic extraction and text-tagging are used to analyse terminological and conceptual changes of material identities in this genre�s chapters on taxes and local products. GIS technology is applied for visualization. Computationally aided analysis will be critically assessed against research results received by traditional afoot text-analysis such as a 1980s mapping of locust temples.