Dr. Sunkyu Lee will present her paper titled "Ethnicized Infrastructures of Borderlands on Ming-Qing Maps" on July 11, 2024 at the Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies conference in Berlin, on the afternoon panel Digital Research: Case Studies.
This presentation analyzes the infrastructures depicted on maps and explores their roles in the construction of ethnocultural differences and the drawing of territorial boundaries in borderlands. Existing scholarship highlights early modern features of cartography and ethnography in late imperial China, while most studies largely treat them as separate fields of study. In addition, few studies have undertaken a comparative study of the infrastructures illustrated on the maps. Using a new annotation tool called IMMARKUS, I compare painted and printed maps depicting the Sino-Mongol frontier to examine how each map represented different social groups’ engagement with infrastructures. In doing so, this presentation aims to explain an interplay between cartography and ethnography with a particular emphasis on borderland infrastructures.