“Taming the Digital Dragon” at Peking University

On 9 January 2024, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Peking University hosted Christian Henriot for a conference on “Taming the Digital Dragon. Textbases, Datafication, and the Study of Modern China” to present the current stage of development of the ENP-China project. The conference was followed by a presentations of the on-going projects at the Center of Digital Humanities (located at the I.A.I.) and a lively exchange about potential collaborations.

Since the mid-1990s much has been written about digital history and how the Internet and the dematerialization of historical sources are transforming the ways in which historians can muster their materials. The major shift, however, occurred when historical sources became available in full text format. This finally opened the way to approaches and methods based on text analysis and natural language processing, though with a particular challenge due to the very nature of historical sources. The ENP-China project has been at the forefront of developing a set of resources — text database, spatial database, and HistText — that break through the limits of historical investigation on modern China.

To add to the pleasure of coming back to Beijing after four years and meet with Chinese colleagues, there was a pleasant winter cold and sunny weather all over campus.