Mr. Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute is very glad to jointly organise the “Sharing from Distinguished Scholars in History and Literature”, together with the Department of History and the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology of Hong Kong Baptist University.
The four lectures of the “Sharing from Distinguished Scholars in History and Literature” were held on 26 June, and attracted nearly 400 participants at the venue and online. Please find below summary of one of the lectures:
Exploring Social Networks with Textual and Paratextual Data from Women’s Poetry Collections in Late Imperial and Republican China
Speaker: Grace S. Fong (Professor of Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University)
Date: 26 June 2023 (Monday)
Time: 11:15 am –12:45 pm
Venue: SWT 702, Level 7, Shaw Tower, Hong Kong Baptist University (no online broadcast available)
Language: English
Moderator: Binbin Yang (Associate Professor, School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong)
Abstract: This presentation is an account of a small pilot project that explored patterns of women writers’ social networks in three significant chronological periods in late imperial and modern China—the High Qing (1700-1839), Late Qing (1840-1910), and Republican era (1911-1949) by using data from the Ming Qing Women’s Writings digital archive and database (MQWW https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/). The project examined two categories of data provided by paratexts and texts in 332 poetry collections by women over the three periods to identify the significance of two types of Social Networks (A and B) connected to women’s writing and the publication of their collections : Type A broadly concerned the degree to which women’s participation as “actors and agents” who contributed paratexts to the “packaging” of other women’s poetry collections in these periods, and Type B explored the constitution of a woman poet’s own social and cultural community by means of poetic exchange. Through visualization of these data, the project aimed to show how women writers and their publications, by negotiating different genres of poetry and prose, could build social connections and linkages that crossed or affirmed spatial, gender, and ethnic boundaries in late imperial and early 20th-century China and at the same time to illustrate the potential of using digital tools and methods to enhance humanistic research.
Second lecture of the series, given by Prof. Grace S. Fong of the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, introduced the data and functions of “The Ming Qing Women’s Writing Digital Archive and Database”, which was founded in 2005, and presented a series of future expansion plans. She also mentioned that the HKBU Library also contributed this digital humanities project. The discussion session was chaired by Dr. Binbin Yang, Associate Professor of School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong.