Digital History, Translation and Intellectual History

Speaker: Hilde De Weerdt

Time: 6 pm CET 22, 29 September 2022

Hilde De Weerdt is a Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History at KU Leuven and a Senior Researcher at IISH. Professor De Weerdt is broadly interested in social, political, and intellectual history, both within an East Asian context, and within a comparative or global historical framework.

She actively works on developing digital research methods and tools and has co-designed the text annotation and reading platform MARKUS with Brent Ho, and two text comparison modules COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS with Mees Gelein.


Lecture 1: Designing a Digital History Project

The first meeting will focus on a new project by Professor De Weerdt on the social history of material infrastructures. We will discuss how to design a digital history project using the questions, sources, and methods I aim to explore in this project. This is ongoing work but with two PhD students, Liu Jialong and Xiong Hueilan.

Core reading: 

Hilde De Weerdt, Xiong Hueilan, and Liu Jialong. Rethinking Space and Power in East Asia: Digital Approaches to the History of Infrastructure (Report), Ming studies 81 (2020), 76-87 https://doi.org/10.1080/0147037X.2020.1736862

Other recommended reading:

Hilde De Weerdt. Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS, Journal of Chinese History 4.2 (2020), 519-527 https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.23


Lecture 2: Translation and global intellectual history

The second meeting will focus on how a recently published article in global intellectual history came about. We will discuss how this gradually emerged from a collaborative translation project that also resulted in the design of several digital initiatives including two digital text comparison modules (COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS). We will also discuss how to work with early modern European-language digital libraries.

Core reading: 

Hilde De Weerdt. Modeling Tang Emperor Taizong and Chinese Governance in the Eighteenth-Century German-speaking World, Global Intellectual History 2022 https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2022.2104741 

Other recommended reading:

Hilde De Weerdt. ​Considering Citizenship in Imperial Chinese History, Citizenship Studies 23:3 (2019), 256-76,  https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2019.1603272 

OR

Citizenship and Subjecthood in the Historiography on Imperial China, in Guo Zhonghua, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021, pp. 32-47. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003225843-4/citizenship-subjecthood-historiography-imperial-china-hilde-de-weerdt 

Hilde De Weerdt, Glen Dudbridge and Gabe van Beijeren. The Essentials of Governance.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/essentials-of-governance/408B5E3D8EACA0BAC285231E8498F2E5

Hilde De Weerdt, Gabe van Beijeren, Hu Jing, Brent Ho, en Mees Gelein. Reading The Essentials of Governance Digitally, v2,  https://chinese-empires.eu/zgzy/index.html​  

Links:

MARKUS

Instructions for PARALLELS

PARALLELS

COMPARATIVUS

The Sieve

Biblioteca Sinica 2.0

CCT-Database