Introduction

Introduction

The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a relational database of biographical information for China before the early twentieth century. Through the wide range of data it collects, CBDB offers many ways to examine the lives of past individuals and groups. While CBDB provides detailed information about people and can serve as a biographical dictionary, its more powerful use is as a tool for prosopography, the study of the lives of groups of people:

‘Prosopography’ is the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives. The method employed is to establish a universe to be studied, and then to ask a set of uniform questions – about birth and death, marriage and family, social origins and inherited economic position, place of residence, education, amount and source of personal wealth, occupation, religion, experience of office and so on. The various types of information about the individuals in the universe are then juxtaposed and combined, and are examined for significant variables. They are tested both for internal correlations and for correlations with other forms of behaviour or action. (L. Stone, 'Prosopography', in F. Gilbert and S. Graubard eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972)

CBDB also supports a second approach to analyzing the lives of large numbers of people. Social network analysis (SNA) has been a tool for studying group structure in the social sciences for many decades. Scholars, however, also have applied its techniques to data derived from historical documents. Charles Wetherell describes the project of historical social network analysis (HSNA):

Conceptualizing community as collections of personal relationships … provides historians with a blueprint for evaluating when, how and why people in the past used kin and non-kin in the course of their lives. The findings of social network analysts that people need and seek emotional and economic support of different kinds, from different kinds of people, suggest new analytical imperatives. It is not enough now to look solely at how people used kin in times of crisis. Rather, historians need to pursue how people in the past used the kin and friends they had, for different things, throughout the life course, and in the context of the opportunities they enjoyed and the constraints they faced courtesy of demography and culture. Other approaches might be applied to the problem, but HSNA contains the essential perspectives that cannot only advance the debate, but also help historians to meet Tilly's challenge to connect the lives of ordinary people to large-scale change in meaningful ways. (Charles Wetherell, “Historical Social Network Analysis,” International Review of Social History 43 [1998], Supplement)

In large measure, historians have used SNA approaches on small sample populations where the relations among all the member of the group are known, but CBDB hopes to provide data on relations among individuals in very large populations where the density of relationship data is adequate to produce statistically meaningful results about patterns in the social world of China’s past.

Because CBDB records information about where people lived, where they studied, where they served in office, what offices they held, who their parents were, who they married, and who they knew, all these aspects of life can be correlated for very large groups of people. We can ask if local marriage alliance were typical during a particular period or in a particular region, or for a particular level of office-holder or occupation. We can ask about kinship patterns within occupations for any slice of time and/or any region of China. We can look at regional patterns of sponsorship or partisan opposition. We can look at social, kinship and regional factors in promotions within the Buddhist monastic orders. We can ask who associated themselves with certain ideologues and teachers and where they lived. There is almost no limit to the types of questions that can be asked about the people in the database.

The challenge is how to phrase the questions in ways to which CBDB can respond. The goal of this User’s Guide is to provide you with enough information about CBDB, first, to use its interface for common types of queries and then to use other tools for more advanced queries of the dataset. Information about CBDB divides into three parts: general information about relational databases, the structure of CBDB in particular (the types of data it contains), and the interface for looking at the data in CBDB.