Local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志) are major primary sources for the study of China’s local history. More than 8,000 titles of local gazetteers dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are still extant, covering nearly all populated regions of historical China. Written by officials and local gentry, these gazetteers documented topics far beyond geographical landscape, including flora and fauna, local products, temples and schools, officials and celebrities, local culture and customs, and much more. Given their consistent and database-like structure, Chinese local gazetteers as a genre are uniquely suited for research with a digital humanities approach.
Local gazetteers are well studied, but scholars often struggle to encompass in their analyses the vast amount of information contained within local gazetteers. With the large amount of readily made, full-text digitized local gazetteers, our working group embraces the potential of Digital Humanities to realize the full utility of this collection for addressing large-scale key questions in Chinese history. Central to this effort is the development of a suite of digital tools in house—the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT)—that helps scholars to unlock this treasure chest of local riches by transforming the genre into a scholarly enhanced database for new forms of digital historical analysis.
Since 2016, the working group organizes yearly workshops on specific research themes to attract cohorts of international scholars to work with LoGaRT to develop their individual research, including “Visual Materials (tu 圖) in Local Gazetteers” and “Astrological Contents (fenye 分野) in Local Gazetteers”. Group publications can be found on the group pages.
As the research activities at the Local Gazetteers Working Group are concluded in 2024, we are in the process of moving LoGaRT to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library) for service provision and for making it possible for researchers in Germany to use it to access licensed content.
