Taming the Digital Dragon

Digitized sources are opening new possibilities for Chinese history, but turning large textual collections into historical evidence poses substantial methodological challenges. Taming the Digital Dragon explores how digital tools and computational methods can help historians address these challenges and pursue new lines of inquiry. Drawing on the ERC-funded “Elites, Networks and Power in Modern Urban China” (ENP-China) project, the volume brings together case studies and methodological reflections focused primarily on late Qing and Republican China. Its first part presents a digital research ecosystem: the Modern China TextBase, the Modern China Biographical Database, the Modern China Geospatial Database, and the HistText interface, designed as open, reusable research tools. The second part puts computational methods into practice—from social network and sequence analysis to natural language processing and the linking of biographical records—to investigate elite formation, professional trajectories, bureaucratic power, public discourse, and social knowledge. The third part documents the sources and corpora underpinning this research, including newspapers, periodicals, archival materials, and reference works. Connecting the construction of digital resources with their use in historical interpretation, Taming the Digital Dragon offers historians of modern China, digital humanists, and researchers working with digitized sources concrete examples of how computational approaches can extend historical inquiry.