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Hamburg Buddhist Biographies Workshop

Since the time that Buddhist believers and practitioners began traveling and preaching in China, the stories of important proponents of the faith have been recounted and recorded. Bearing this in mind, the varieties of biographical material about Buddhists has been extracted from all sorts of sources and analyzed by many scholars, past and present. Although scholarship has traditionally been limited to the close reading of extant pre-modern historical sources, new research methods—particularly from the field of the Digital Humanities—have allowed us to gain new in-sights into the past and its people. At the same time, the study of modern and contemporary Buddhist religious life has greatly developed in the last decade, adopting different philological and ethnographic methods to study the modern genesis of a new Buddhism in China’s political and social culture. While the sources and methods adopted in the study of pre-modern and modern Buddhism differ in many respects, there is much to be gained from a discussion be-tween scholars of these two sub-fields of Chinese Buddhist studies.

This workshop [14-15 February 2025] will be a roundtable discussion promoting the exchange of research experiences as well as the development of ideas on various aspects of biographical studies. This discussion will be between senior and junior scholars of pre-modern and modern Chinese Buddhism, as well as leading experts in the Digital Humanities. Topics of discussion will range from the connections between hagiographies, (auto-)biographies, and historiographical sources, to the significance of social networks and geographical mapping in the creation of databases and other Digital Humanities tools. The full program is available here.

Keynote speaker: Christian Henriot (Aix-Marseille University)

Between Digital Archives and Algorithms: A Historian’s Approach to China’s Biographical Data

This presentation will examine the intersection of digital archives and computational methodologies in the identification, retrieval, and curation of biographical data, with a focus on advancing the historian’s study of elites in modern China. Using the Shenbao corpus and the Modern China Biographical Database as case studies, it highlights the challenges and opportunities introduced by digital tools and algorithms in historical research. The talk explores how data-driven approaches, employing advanced computational techniques such as named entity recognition, topic modeling, and network analysis, can extract, standardize, and visualize data with precision. These methods enable a detailed reconstruction of individuals, organizations, and events, offering fresh insights into the networks and social hierarchies that defined modern Chinese society. By integrating textual resources with biographical databases, the presentation demonstrates how digital methodologies harness the power of algorithms to enhance both the depth and scope of biographical research, illustrating their transformative potential in historical scholarship.

Christian Henriot
Christian Henriot

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Christian Henriot (February 8, 2025). Hamburg Buddhist Biographies Workshop. Elites, Networks and Power in modern China. Retrieved June 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13a8u


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