Rewriting the Past: Historical Big Data and a Scholarship of Discovery

School of Humanities and Social Science
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon
Hong Kong S.A.R.

9-10 June 2014

Meeting program as a PDF

Organized by Cameron Campbell (HKUST), James Lee (HKUST), and Bin Wong (UCLA) with support from the HKUST-UCLA Collaborative Faculty Grant Program.

This two-day meeting brings together researchers who are constructing and analyzing large collections of historical East Asian micro-data. Participants include researchers working with household registers and genealogies, educational and examination records, GIS and spatial data. These records are drawn from a variety of settings in China, Japan and Korea. By introducing our projects to each other, we hope to identify potential areas for comparison in research and cooperation in training in relevant social science and humanities disciplines such as history, economics, demography, and sociology, as well as potentially related disciplines such as development economics and public health.

We have organized this meeting in response to recognition that the quantitative study of history is changing. In East Asia as elsewhere, the ability to create, analyze, and share large, complex datasets from archival and other sources is transforming the quantitative study of history. Detailed analysis of these new databases allows for new focus on describing and understanding complex patterns of similarity and difference across time and space. This represents a major departure from traditional approaches to quantitative history, which emphasized estimation of aggregate indices to be used in cross-national comparisons and reconstruction of trends.

Session I, on day one, will be devoted to Introductions to Sources. These are brief, broad overviews of each source that help provide a context for the detailed discussion for the roundtables on specific types of variables. These overviews do not need to provide comprehensive overviews of the contents of different datasets, since that should come out during the roundtables. The presentations will include one from Ken Smith, the Director of the Utah Population Database, one of the largest and longstanding such data collections in the world.

Session II, on days one and two, will be devoted to a series of roundtable discussions of Shared Research and Training Interests. The goal of the roundtables is to identify areas for future comparison and collaboration. In addition to summarizing relevant variables in their existing data, participants are welcome to identify relevant sources that could be transcribed and linked to produce additional variables. We encourage participants to prepare one or two page handouts for each of the roundtables they will contribute to that list these variables, along with key features. Initial contributions to roundtable discussion may be brief reviews of the material in the handouts, leaving time for discussion. Participants are encouraged to send in background materials introducing their data to be distributed in advance of the meeting.

Session III, on day two, will be devoted to Graduate Student Presentations. Students will present work on progress using novel datasets.

June 9, 2014 (Monday) Venue: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Time
8:30am	Coffee and light refreshments
9:00am	Welcoming remarks and overview	James Lee, Cameron Campbell
	Session I: Introductions to Sources	Session Chair: Satomi Kurosu
9:10am	East Asian Historical Population Registers	Hao Dong, Satomi Kurosu, Wenshan Yang
9:30am	The Past and Future of Historical Demography in Korea	Sangkuk Lee and Byunggiu Son
9:50am	集体化时期山西农村档案资料中的数据运用及其考证 (Use of Data from Collectivization-era Rural Shanxi Archival Materials for Research)	Yingze Hu
10:10am	The Utah Population Database	Ken Smith
10:30am	Break
10:40am	Careers of Qing Officials in the Jinshenlu	Yuxue Ren

11:00am	科举文献可供计量研究的方面 (Possibilities for Quantitative Research with Keju documents)	Haifeng Liu
11:20am	Introduction to the Database of Chambers of Commerce in Modern China	Haiyan Fu
11:40am	The Yellow River and the Northern Frontier: Spatial Analysis and Big Data for Environmental History	Ruth Mostern
12 Noon	Data on the Social Origins of Republican-era College Students	Hongbo Wang, James Lee
12:20 Noon	Lunch

1:20pm	Open discussion of Session I Introduction to Sources

	Session II: Roundtable Discussions of Shared Research and Training Interests

2:20pm	Roundtable: Family Organization and Demographic Behavior	Moderator: Ruth Mostern
	Emphasis on family and demographic outcomes such as health, disability, adoption, migration, and marriage type that are rarely considered in traditional studies of historical demography. Discussion leaders: S. Kurosu: adoption, marriage, migration in SAC/33NAC C. Campbell: adoption, disability, migration in the CMGPD S. Lee/B. Son: Korean sources W. Yang: Taiwan household registers
3:20pm	Break
3:30pm	Roundtable: Education/employment Occupation, position or title, educational attainment, literacy, social class	Moderator: James Lee
	S. Chen: Positions and titles in the CMGPD-SC H. Wang, E. Zang: Republican-era and post-1949 college students
4:30pm	Roundtable: Inequality and Land Distribution Landholding, possessions	Moderator: Cameron Campbell
	Discussion leaders: S. Chen: Landholding in CMGPD-SC M. Noellert: Landholding data in 20^th century Shuangcheng Y. Hu: Landholding in the Shanxi data
7pm	Dinner

June 10, 2014 (Tuesday) Venue: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Time
8:30am	Coffee and light refreshments

	Session II (Continued) : Roundtable Discussions of Shared Research and Training Interests

9am	Roundtable: Inequality and Social Categories Institutional or administrative affiliations, ascribed characteristics, heritable social statuses, ethnicity	Moderator: Sangkuk Lee
10:00am	Roundtable: Collaborative Summer Training	Moderator: Wenshan Yang
10:50am	Break
11:00am	Roundtable: Comparison, collaboration, and funding	Moderator: Ken Smith
12:00pm	Lunch

	Session III: Graduate Student Presentations	Chair: Bin Wong

1:00pm	Industrial sector and choice of major at Suzhou University	Emma Zang
1:20pm	Ethnicity, demographic behavior, and attainment in Shuangcheng	Bijia Chen
1:40pm	Between Civil Code and Commercial Custom: The Chinese General Chamber of Commerce and Partnership Liability in Republican Shanghai	Xiaowen Hao
2:00pm	Multi-Generational Approaches to the Study of Kinship and Stratification	Xi Song
2:20pm	Break
2:30pm	The multi-generational effects of kinship and marriage networks on the social status of Yangban elite in Joseon Korea	Sangwoo Han
2:50pm	Huizhou Merchants: Trade Networks, Lineages, and Commercial Institutions, 1750-1911	Meng Zhang
3:10pm	The ‘Nanjing’ trade: Hokkien Merchants and the Rise of the Shanghai-Manila Route at the turn of the 19th Century	Guillermo Ruiz-Stovel
3:30pm	Break
3:40pm	Class labels and land reform in Shuangcheng	Matthew Noellert
4:00pm	The Modern Chinese banking industry and government bonds – study from the perspective of cliometrics	Jie Liu
4:20pm	Discussion of graduate student presentations
7:00pm	Dinner

PARTICIPANT ROSTER

Family name	Given name		Institution	Status
Campbell	Cameron	康文林	HKUST	Faculty
Chen	Bijia	陈必佳	HKUST	MPhil Student
Chen	Shuang	陳爽	University of Iowa	Faculty
Chen	Ting	陈婷	HKUST	PhD Student
Cheng	Wei	程伟	Xiamen University	PhD Student
Dong	Hao	董浩	HKUST	PhD Student
Fu	Haiyan	付海晏	Central China Normal University	Faculty
Guillermo	Ruiz-Stovel	麥莫	UCLA	PhD Student
Han	Sangwoo	한상우	Ajou University	PhD Student
Hao	Xiaowen	郝小雯	HKUST	MPhil Student
Hu	Yingze	胡英泽	Shanxi University	Faculty
Kurosu	Satomi	里美黑須	Reitaku University	Faculty
Lee	James	李中清	HKUST	Faculty
Lee	Sangkuk	이상국	Ajou University	Faculty
Liu	Haifeng	刘海峰	Xiamen University	Faculty
Liu	Jie	刘杰	Central China Normal University	PhD Student
Liu	Guanglin	劉光臨	HKUST	Faculty
Mostern	Ruth	馬瑞詩	UC Merced	Faculty
Noellert	Matthew	倪志宏	HKUST	PhD Student
Ren	Yuxue	任玉雪	Shanghai Jiaotong University	Faculty
Smith	Ken		University of Utah	Faculty
Son	Byunggiu	손병규	Sungkyunkwan University	Faculty
Song	Xi	宋曦	UCLA	PhD Student
Wang	Hongbo	汪洪波	HKUST	Faculty
Wong	Bin	王国斌	UCLA	Faculty
Yang	Wenshan	楊文山	Academia Sinica	Research Fellow
Zang	Shaolu	臧晓露	HKUST	MPhil Student
Zhang	Meng Ang	张萌	UCLA	PhD Student