Core Institutions and Editors

Core Institutions

• The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University 哈佛大學費正清中國研究中心
• Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica 中央研究院歷史語言研究所
• Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University 北京大學中國古代史研究中心

Updates

As of 2015, the Tang Research Foundation is supporting a 3-year project for a comprehensive prosopographical investigation of the Tang period based on excavated epitaphs (墓誌), official documents, and private writings.

As of 2012 CBDB projects include a redesign of the database structure, a project to incorporate all relevant data in the Ming Biographical Index 明人傳記資料索引, harvesting of all data in the biographies of the official history of the Song dynasty, and preparing Tang and Five dynasties data for upload.

As of August 2009 work was continuing on data extraction from the Wang Deyi Index.Wang Deyi's Index to Yuan Biographical Materials 元人傳記資料索引 was being readied for tagging. The 40,000 entries in Gong Yanming's record of Song dynasty examination degree holders was being prepared for tagging.

As of June 2009 the project was continuing with the automated tagging and data extraction from over 24,000 biographies in the Wang Deyi Index. To date we have been extremely successful (with precision and recall rates in the high 90 percents) in extracting dates of and age at death, entry into office via examinations, place of origin and migration, alternative names, kinship, and office titles. The project was also developing approaches to extracting information on social relations in biographies.

During the summer of 2009 Prof. Yao Ping will be working on tagging biographical data in approximately 6000 Tang dynasty grave biographies (墓志銘). We expect to include the data in the CBDB database in the fall of 2009.

Beginning in the summer of 2009 work began on tagging the over 18,000 biographies Wang Deyi's Index to Yuan Biographical Materials 元人傳記資料索引.

As of February 2009 the editorial team at Peking University began reviewing files produced by our text-mining system to extract data from Wang Deyi’s revision of the Index to Song Biographical Materials 宋人傳記資料索引. Procedures were developed to extract data in all CBDB categories from this text.

Work has begun on creating a list of official titles under the Liao dynasty in preparation for the inclusion of Liao dynasty biographical data.

The Ming Qing Women's Writings Project directed by Prof. Grace Fong of McGill University received a grant  to create interoperablility between that database and CBDB. This also added about 5000 Ming and Qing women writers to the CBDB database.

The Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica contributes data from its Ming Qing Name Authority Files to CBDB.

Prof. Nicolas Tackett of the University of California Berkeley contributed biographical data on about 30,000 Tang and Five Dynasties figures, the evidentiary basis for his prise-winning book The destruction of the medieval Chinese aristocracy (Harvard 2014).

In 2015-2017 the Tang Research Foundation supported a project to comprehensively include biographical data on Tang figures.

Please click an item of interest on the left.