Call for Applications: Research Workshop: Chinese Local Gazetteers

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin (Department III, Artefacts, Action, and Knowledge, Director: Prof Dagmar Schäfer) invites applications for a

Research Workshop: Chinese Local Gazetteers, July 1st to 31st, 2017

for up to six participants. Successful candidates will be invited to work collaboratively at the MPIWG from July 1st to 31st, 2017.

Applications are welcome from senior researchers with research proposals inquiring into the issue of standards and norms: in editing and compilation, categories of presentation or terminological use.

We invite comprehensive and comparative research regarding the ways in which localities name things across territory and periods; as well as how the representational formats: texts, objects, genres, and terms in local gazetteers were recorded, clustered or decentralized, generally presented or regionally specified. We want to raise these questions by querying the local gazetteers as local genre and by exploiting the new possibilities that Digital Humanities offer for large text corpora such as the Chinese Local Gazetteers.

This workshop invites senior scholars to work collaboratively to investigate the methodology of treating the whole genre of Chinese Local Gazetteers as a database. We will ask, what can our digital tools bring to the study of knowledge terminology in local gazetteers? By quickly extracting and expediently analyzing data from local gazetteers across regions, it is possible to deal with large amounts of data and to look into the materials’ terminology variations in a continuous and complete way. Preference will be given to topics relevant to the histories of science, technology, and medicine and dealing with issues of local materiality, knowledge terminology, and how they are entangled with local societies and social networks. An introduction to the available digital tools developed within the framework of the Local Gazetteers Project of Dept. III as well as exemplary projects from the past workshops can be found at:

https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/departmentSchaefer_SPC_MS_LocalMonographs.

Applicants must have obtained their PhD before July 2015. Applications should contain a cover letter, CV, and project outline (no more than 1000 words), all in one PDF file, to localgazetteers@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.

Please note that a special workshop for Predoctoral Students will be announced separately.

Successful candidates will receive a scholarship commensurate to rank and reimbursement for return travel expenses from the participant’s home institution.

Deadline for submission: 28 February 2017

Please note that only successful candidates will be notified.