Digital Methods in Chinese Studies

Week 10 (Mar 20, 22):

Tuesday: Midterm Project Presentations

Midterm Project Presentations. Please prepare a 7-minute presentation on your midterm project plus 3 minutes for Q&A. Submit your slides to the appropriate dropbox on Moodle before class.

Thursday: The “Localist Turn”

• Learning Objectives:
  • Understand the “localist turn,” its nature and historical significance
  • Map line features in Palladio
• Readings:
  • Nicholas Tackett, “The Capital Elite Marriage Network”
  • Robert P. Hymes, “Elites, Locality, and the State” (Cambridge History of China, Vol. 5, Part 2, pp.621-61)
  • Beverly J. Bossler, Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, & the State in Sung China (960-1279) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Chapter 4 (pp.78-94) and Chapter 8 (pp.156-175).
• Suggested Readings:
  • Song Chen, “Local Society and the Region under a Decentralized Rule: The Case of Sichuan in Song Dynasty”
  • Robert P. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: the Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung, pp.82-123.

Study Guide:

Today we will accomplish two goals.

• On the history side, we have learned from past weeks southern economic growth during the Tang-Song transition and the institution of the civil service examinations worked together to expand the scope of political participation, allowing an increasing number of men from southern coastal regions to enter civil service. Building on this knowledge, today we turn our attention to the social networks of China’s ruling elite in the Tang-Song period. Read the writings of Tackett and Bossler. Consider how elite behavior changed from the Tang to the Southern Song, and how these scholars account for this change.
• Presentations:
  • Khoi — Please prepare a short presentation of Tackett’s “The Capital Elite Marriage Network.”
  • Eben — Please prepare a short presentation of Bossler’s “Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, & the State in Sung China.”
• On the technical side, we will finish up our explorations with mapping. We will learn briefly how we may map routes and networks in space. ArcGIS offers a possibility, but Palladio is particularly helpful. We will work on Palladio together in class. If you have time and would like to get a feel for the tool before class, you may check out Posner’s very useful introduction to Palladio (“Getting started with Palladio”).