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Historical Research through the Lens of Women: The Ming Qing Women's Writings Digital Archive and Database
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2020
Abstract
This essay provides an overview of the goals, main features, and digital tools of the Ming Qing Women's Writings (MQWW) project, which contains more than 400 collections of literary writings by women (17th – early 20th centuries). The website (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/) makes accessible a free archive of scanned images of texts with searchable components and a downloadable database. It highlights MQWW's functionalities and actual and potential applications for literary, biographical, and historical research.
- Type
- Utilities
- Information
- Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: Digital Humanities , July 2020 , pp. 499 - 504
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020
Footnotes
The Ming Qing Women's Writings project would not have been possible without the initial generous funding by the Richard Charles & Esther Yewpick Lee Charitable Foundation of Hong Kong and the collaboration with the Harvard-Yenching Library (2003–2005). I am also grateful to subsequent funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Henry Luce Foundation of the US, and others; and to the support provided by all the participating libraries, not least of all McGill University Library. I am deeply indebted to the dedicated work of graduate assistants at McGill, Peking University, and East China Normal University.
References
1 They are, in the order of collaborating in the project, Harvard-Yenching Library (2003–2005), Peking University Library (2008–2009), Sun Yat-sen University Library (2011–2015), National Library of China (2012–2019), East China Normal University Library (2012–2018), Chinese University of Hong Kong Library (2018–2019), Hong Kong Baptist University Library (2018).
2 There are at the time of writing 384 collections in MQWW. The total will be more than 400 after the December 2019 update.
3 Examples of publications that utilize data and texts from MQWW are essays in The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing, ed. Grace S. Fong and Ellen Widmer (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Li, Xiaorong, “Eating, Cooking, and Meaning-Making: Ming-Qing Women's Poetry on Food,” Journal of Oriental Studies 45.1–2 (2012), 27–44Google Scholar; Wang, Yanning, Reverie and Reality: Poetry on Travel by Late Imperial Women (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014)Google Scholar. PhD dissertations and MA theses produced in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have also drawn on texts and data from MQWW (personal communication from colleagues and students), e.g., Wang Yiyun 王怡云, “Nüxing zuowei zuozhe: cong shige de jiaodu chongkan Qingdai nüshiren” 女性作為作者：從詩歌史的角度重看清代女詩人 (PhD diss., Guoli Chenggong daxue, Taiwan 2014).
4 Created by then Luce Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Song SHI in collaboration with Elizabeth Thomson, Systems Analyst, and her colleagues, McGill Library Digital Initiatives.
5 See the experiment by Jia-jia Hu with word frequency in women's poetry in MQWW, visualized in two word clouds, in “Exploring Lives of China's Ming-Qing Female Poets,” Cultural and Religious Studies 5.9 (2017), 557–68; and Grace Fong and Song Shi, “Pilot Experiments with Data in Ming Qing Women's Writings (1368–1911),” presentation at the Quantitative Criticism Lab conference Digital Humanities beyond Modern English: Computational Approaches to Premodern and Non-Western Literature, Dartmouth College, April 24–25, 2019.
6 Information provided by Elizabeth Thomson using Google Analytics, October 7, 2019.
7 Compiled by Hu Wenkai 胡文楷, first published by in 1957, revised edition 1985, and augmented edition by Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008. Some titles in MQWW were not recorded in Hu Wenkai.