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.