Chinese periodicals present researchers with a number of challenges: they are 1. physically dispersed and often poorly preserved, 2. voluminous, 3. multi-generic and intellectually demanding. Many scholars have therefore used the periodical press as a source, but few scholars have tapped these sources comprehensively and attempted to study the medium as an entity in itself. Our answers to these challenges have been, first, to form a multidisciplinary Research Team which is crucially engaged in, second, building a database prototype, ECPO (Early Chinese Periodicals Online).

ECPO was originally created by the Heidelberg Digital Humanities Unit, the Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA), in collaboration with Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. It joins together several important digital collections of the early Chinese press and makes them available to scholarly communities around the world. It is distinguished from all other existing databases of Chinese periodicals in that it not only provides image scans, but also preserves materials often excluded in reprint, microfilm or digital (even fulltext) editions, such as advertising inserts and illustrations. In addition, it incorporates a sophisticated body of metadata in both English and Chinese, including keywords and biographical information on editors, authors and individuals represented in illustrations and advertisements. By framing the journals with this body of metadata, ECPO enables researchers to establish interconnections between, for example, given individuals, topics or illustrations, and to chart their relationsships within particular issues of periodicals, over the entire run of a particular periodical, and across different periodicals. These capabilities open new horizons in Chinese studies; using ECPO, the researcher is able to nuance, challenge, and potentially refute existing narratives of history and cultural change.

The project, sustained by an international team of researchers in Canada, Europe, Asia and the United States, builds on six years of interdisciplinary work and provides a model for the collaborative development and scholarly use of the digital humanities. ECPO’s unique inclusion of bilingual metadata makes the database’s rich, research-deduced materials accessible to scholars beyond the field of Chinese studies. Taking Chinese journals as its starting point, the project thus opens up new vistas for research in media studies more generally, and models best practices in digital humanities research.

Head of Research Project

Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg)
Prof. Joan Judge (York University, Toronto)
Prof. Christopher Hamm (University of Washington)
Dr. Chien-ming Yu (Academia Sinica)

Team

Prof. Catherine V. Yeh (Boston University)
Prof. Michel Hockx (SOAS London)
Prof. Julia F. Andrews (Ohio State)
PD Dr. Anne Kerlan (CNRS Paris)
Dr. Ling-ling Lien (Academia Sinica, Taipei)
Doris Sung (York University)
Liying Sun (Heidelberg)
Sophy Chen (AAT Taiwan Manager)
Matthias Arnold (HRA Heidelberg)

The project started in 2015 and is still ongoing, while being 
sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation, DFG, SSHRC and CCK Foundation.