Conference Note

Conference Note: Anxieties of Abundance:Sources and Methods for Qing Studies in the Digital Age Emily Mokros (bio) Where is the field of Qing history going, and how will we get there? Scholars hailing from a range of disciplinary backgrounds tackled this question at a recent workshop at Johns Hopkins University by presenting "inside-out" inquiries into new sources, methods, and research in the field. The two-day workshop, titled Anxieties of Abundance: Sources and Methods for Qing Studies in the Digital Age, challenged participants to speak candidly about opportunities, frustrations, and fears that emerge as we each decide how best to cultivate and incorporate innovative methods into research and teaching in the field of Qing history. Participants read each other's work in advance, which freed the group to consider thematic and synthetic questions in conversation. Thus, panel and audience discussions focused not only on research outcomes, but also on larger questions of inequality of access and resources that are relevant across the humanities. In an introductory address, Tobie Meyer-Fong encouraged participants to use the workshop as an opportunity to share methods and advice, to engage in critical debate about the dangers and advantages of digitization, databases, and Digital Humanities, and to reflect on the state of the field, especially in terms of graduate and undergraduate training. From there, the first panel dove into the digital. In "Platform Design and Genre: The Case of The Ten Thousand Rooms," Tina Lu presented the intellectual and technological foundations of the Mellon-funded Ten Thousand Rooms project—an online platform for scholars and students to interact with historical texts in collaborative contexts. Paul Vierthaler's paper, "Computational Analysis of Intertextuality," [End Page 153] presented his cutting-edge work in stylometry (a method that analyzes texts from a perspective both "distant" for its comparison of many texts and "microscopic" for its scrutiny of character usage within those texts). Vierthaler's methods help him ask broad questions about fundamental patterns and eccentric outliers in late imperial Chinese literature. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel, Digital Humanities Librarian at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University, helped participants locate the connections between these methods in Chinese history and literature and ongoing projects in other humanities fields. The second panel on archives introduced three research projects on dynamics of the Qing state and archive. Each offered perspectives on how to unpack received visions of Qing history by dissecting and scrutinizing archives and genres. The paper by Emily Mokros, "The Archive Revealed: Gazettes and the Circulation of Political Information in Qing China," profiled the links between the Peking Gazette and the communications, archival, and bureaucratic functions of the Qing state, and showed how digital repositories enable us to study this bureaucratic source from new perspectives. In "An Encounter with Self-Fashioning: Lebao and His War Memoir, Pingding Jiaofei Jishi," Yingcong Dai used painstaking empirical research to reconstruct the career of the nineteenth-century military official Lebao, revealing realities that contradict the mythos fabricated by Lebao himself in an influential self-authored memoir. Maura Dykstra's paper, "The State Beyond Law: The Local Case, the Local Archive, and the Local State in Qing Bureaucracy," offered a revisionist look at the activities of the local yamen in Qing China, arguing that close scrutiny of documentary traces reveals the surprising prevalence of notarial work in the local yamen and the equally surprising independence of the local state from the central bureaucracy. The ensuing discussion dealt with central problems of how archives are shaped, censored, and distorted in both historical and contemporary eras. The workshop's second day opened with an especially interdisciplinary panel that brought together a historian, a librarian, and a literary scholar to talk about sources, access, and teaching in the digital age. With "Preaching Outside the Choir: Bringing 'Qing Docs' to the Undergraduate Curriculum," Pär Cassel shared notes from his experiment in using English-language newspaper sources from nineteenth-century China to guide undergraduate history majors to explore Chinese history "in the archives" rather than from the perspective of received traditions. Andy Schonebaum's "Friendly Libraries and [End Page 154] Serendipities" offered revealing comments from his own research process in the intersecting histories of fiction and

Conversation · Digitization · Discipline · Library science · Media studies · Social science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History

• Digital humanities and East Asian studies in 2020

  Open Access•Paul Vierthaler•History Compass•2020

  Add to list