Organized by the ERC-research project 'RegInfra and InfraLives projects' (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Date: May 18-21, 2026
Organizers: Wangzhi Xi, Hilde De Weerdt, Dawn Zhuang
Location: Leuven, Belgium
What new questions become possible when we treat the history of material infrastructure as series of events embedded in social, political, economic, and environmental processes? This workshop brings together historians and social scientists working on late imperial China to explore this question through structured, quantitative approaches.
Over the course of four days, the RegInfra and InfraLives teams will present the goals of the project, event-based data models, examples of data visualizations, and analytical approaches. Invited scholars will introduce datasets on demographic, economic, political, environmental, and geographic aspects of late imperial China, with an eye to how these materials might be brought into dialogue with the infrastructure event data. Discussions will center on questions such as: How does infrastructure construction correlate with demographic data? What relationships exist between taxation levels and building costs or labor resources? How might jinshi data illuminate patterns of local elite investment? We welcome input on analytical methods for integrating infrastructure event data into socio-economic and socio-political analysis, including spatial analysis, time-series approaches, or network modeling.
Through hands-on sessions working directly with data samples, group discussions, and collective reflection, the workshop aims to map out promising directions for collaboration, identify practical requirements for cross-database interoperability, and explore how infrastructure event data can illuminate broader questions in quantitative socio-economic and socio-political history. Expected outcomes include preliminary guidelines for cross-database interoperability, identification of priority research questions for collaborative analysis, and discussion of potential joint publication projects.
Program
