Deep Dive into Digital and Data Methods for Chinese Studies

Light lunch will be provided. Free and Open to the Public.

The recent rise of medical history as an analytical lens to study the history of early religions raises new questions: What is medicine? In what sources can we find it?

This presentation introduces a case study of how to adapt digital tools to study medicine and religion in China, focusing on the distribution of drug terms in religious and medical sources from the Six Dynasties (220-589). After constructing a text database and attaching bibliographic data about the texts, Docusky can track the distribution of large term sets (I collected 12,000 drug names) according to time, space, sect and genre. This facilitates entirely new kinds of historical argument. I will demonstrate three examples, showing 1) new evidence of Buddhist transmission of medicine to China and the new historical questions it leads to, 2) how to use the toolset to make context-discovery of unknown sources, and 3) using geographic data of materia medica to argue for regional origins of primary sources. The paper further considers the philological violence done to primary sources when working in digital media.

Dr. Michael Stanley-Baker 徐源 is assistant professor in History and at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches medicine and religion in early medieval and contemporary China. He developed tools for the study of religion and medicine in China with National Taiwan University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and is now developing them for the study of multi-lingual primary sources for medical history across the classical world. He also serves as Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM). More information is available at https://michaelstanley-baker.com/digital-humanities/

The “Deep Dive” series is co-sponsored by the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) and the Asia Library, and is co-directed by Mary Gallagher (Professor of Political Science and Director of LRCCS) and Liangyu Fu (Chinese Studies Librarian, Asia Library). Question about the series? Please email Liangyu Fu at liangyuf@umich.edu .