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6 – 9 May 2025
The Lectureship and Workshops are organised by Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK, supported by Bei Shan Tang Foundation.
On-site attendance and Zoom Webinar live streaming are available for the 2 lectures. The 2 workshops are ONLY open to the local research community who have experience in digital scholarship research for on-site attendance.
Online broadcasting will be available on ZOOM.
Date: May 6, 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm (Tea Reception at 4pm)
Venue: LT1A, Cheng Yu Tung Building, CUHK
Language: English
When Professor Bol first began to understand the value of digital humanities methods and use them correctly, first in conjunction with the China Historical GIS since 2000 and then with the China Biographical Database project since 2005, the processes were slow. Effective use required coding in Python and iterative training. Although it took weeks and months then, today it can be done in seconds and minutes. Ultimately the AI revolution is not just transforming the digital humanities, whether we like it or not it will also transform the humanities. What is not to like?
Online broadcasting will be available on ZOOM.
Date: May 8, 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm (Tea Reception at 4pm)
Venue: LT1B, Cheng Yu Tung Building, CUHK
Language: English
The study of China’s intellectual history has given particular attention to philosophical and moral thought. Professor Bol proposes to broaden the field by making “learning” the focus of study. This would suggest that the traditions of learning focused on the domains of institutions, literature, and “heaven-and-earth” are on a par with philosophy. But are these domains of learning actually of equal importance? Whether they are or not, Professor Bol will argue that the real and necessary differences between domains make the attainment of ideological unity impossible.
Co-organised by Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK and CUHK Library. ONLY open to the local research community who have experience in digital scholarship research for their on-site attendance.
Date: May 7, 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:30pm – 5:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library, CUHK
Language: English
CBDB is a large relational database devoted to the study of men and women in China’s historical record. It is the result of 20 years of effort by the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at the Peking University, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. This workshop will briefly introduce the project, its sources, and its past and future development. We will then turn to step-by-step training in the use of CDBB and methods of visualizing data through network and spatial analysis. Participants can download the database from the CBDB website and open it in Microsoft Access.
Co-organised by Institute of Chinese Studies, CUHK and CUHK Library. ONLY open to the local research community who have experience in digital scholarship research for their on-site attendance.
Date: May 9, 2025 (Friday)
Time: 2:30pm – 5:30pm
Venue: Digital Scholarship Lab, University Library, CUHK
Language: English
The challenge in introducing digital methods into history and the humanities courses is that most students are still unfamiliar with the methods. How can we avoid spending our time teaching the technology, which is not a typical strength of scholars of history and literature in the first place, at the expense of the topic of the course? Professor Bol will report on my experience this year using various AI methods to teach a course on the history of literature and art in Ming dynasty Suzhou.
Prof. Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research concerns the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China, NeoConfucianism in History, and Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100-1600, the co-author of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching, co-editor of Ways with Words, and various journal articles. He co-directed the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. He directs the China Biographical Database project, a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, currently with 640,000 historical figures.
