Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Reginfra (Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History)
Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31
RegInfra analyses how infrastructures such as city walls, roads, and bridges contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, and equally how they contributed to countervailing trends including local tensions, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations in late imperial Chinese history (ca. 1000-1900). We aim to map, compare, and critically analyse the material infrastructures on which Chinese polities of the past have been constructed.
Key objectives include:
• mapping the appearance and disappearance of infrastructures on an open access spatial analysis platform based on the digital annotation of the extant textual and archaeological record;
• conducting comparative social and spatial analyses of the distribution of infrastructure features, their construction, maintenance, breakdown, uses and cultural meanings, and developing a regional history of infrastructures on this basis;
• comparing data derived from the historical textual record and from modern archaeological reports and modelling processes of infrastructure development and decline;
• publishing research in the fields of history, digital archaeology, and infrastructure studies that will substantially revise existing historiographies on the nature, durability, and efficacy of material infrastructures and contribute to emerging historiographies that place socio-economic and cultural developments in regional contexts and cross-border contact zones;
• developing an event-based digital annotation method that will be made available for use in various languages;
• developing a method for the automated extraction of data on infrastructure in Chinese archaeological reports including an ontology and a machine learning model
Through these activities we aim to foster broader debate about the past and present uses and meanings of historical infrastructures and their digitization.
Key objectives include:
• mapping the appearance and disappearance of infrastructures on an open access spatial analysis platform based on the digital annotation of the extant textual and archaeological record;
• conducting comparative social and spatial analyses of the distribution of infrastructure features, their construction, maintenance, breakdown, uses and cultural meanings, and developing a regional history of infrastructures on this basis;
• comparing data derived from the historical textual record and from modern archaeological reports and modelling processes of infrastructure development and decline;
• publishing research in the fields of history, digital archaeology, and infrastructure studies that will substantially revise existing historiographies on the nature, durability, and efficacy of material infrastructures and contribute to emerging historiographies that place socio-economic and cultural developments in regional contexts and cross-border contact zones;
• developing an event-based digital annotation method that will be made available for use in various languages;
• developing a method for the automated extraction of data on infrastructure in Chinese archaeological reports including an ontology and a machine learning model
Through these activities we aim to foster broader debate about the past and present uses and meanings of historical infrastructures and their digitization.
In the first 18 months the project was set up and the team (https://www.infrastructurelives.eu/team-members/(opens in new window)) worked on building corpora and creating data. In the past year we have finetuned, finalized, and published two digital services: the event annotation service COMARKUS (https://comarkus.xmarkus.org/(opens in new window)) and the image annotation platform IMMARKUS (https://immarkus.xmarkus.org/(opens in new window)). The code and instructions for these two services have also been published. We started development on the search and retrieval system X-MARKUS and the spatial and quantitative analysis and visualization platform MUNDa in which entity, event and image annotations can be turned into customized databases that can be queried and analyzed. In addition, team members have started writing individual and joint publications on theoretical, methodological, and source-related questions as well as historical analyses relating to the sociopolitical, material , and environmental history of city walls, roads, and bridges. The team also held a highly successful workshop on the comparative history and archeology of city walls.
We have developed an extensive high-quality open linked dataset on infrastructure-events in late imperial Chinese history covering so far 8 provinces (Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Sichuan, and in allied project Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang) for bridges and walls and all provinces for roads. We have also developed an event or cluster annotation service allowing for the grouping of individual annotations into data clusters according to user-defined data models for the more accurate analysis of texts. We added an in-depth semantic image annotation service. We expect to deliver a search and retrieval system and spatial analysis platform that allows for the joint examination of text and image annotations. We also expect to integrate AI at every step of the annotation and analysis process, furthering its use for humanities and social science data annotation and visualization.