A Prosopographical Database for Chinese History: The China Biographical Database Project

Peter Bol, Harvard University

The China Biographical Database is a relational database project that began in 2005, jointly developed by Academia Sinica, Peking University, and Harvard University. It currently has data on the careers, kinship, social associations, and writings of over 530,000 men and women, mainly from the early seventh century through the early twentieth century. The goal of the database is to enable complex queries about the lives of small and large groups and classes of individuals. This paper will give particular attention to the evolution of the computational methods the project has developed to extract data from historical texts with high levels of recall and precision, leading to the current use of AI techniques to solve problems that were largely intractable with traditional methods.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 71. Databases for the Quantitative History of China