On June 25, Professor Hilde De Weerdt will deliver a presentation titled Event-Based Social Histories of Infrastructure with CBDB in a keynote session during the Digital History Week at Peking University in Beijing. The event is co-organized by the Department of History, Peking University; the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History, Peking University; and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.
This presentation shows how CBDB has been embedded in our collective research project on the social history of Chinese material infrastructures and how the project can in turn contribute data and enlarge the scope of CBDB. The talk explains how CBDB personal names and official titles have been used in the annotation of entities and events in inscriptions about the renovation of city walls, bridges, and roads and have thus contributed to regional comparisons of the participation of individuals and various kinds of state actors in the construction, planning, renovation, and destruction of material infrastructures. We will also demonstrate how the project can contribute not only to the data in the existing data structure but also to a broadening and deepening of the social coverage of CBDB.