数字人文与清代官员仕途研究

Digital Humanities and the Study of Career Trajectories of Qing Officials

数字化时代的到来给史学研究者带来研究方法的变革,越来越多专题性历史数据库的涌现,对人文学者掌握和利用数据库的技术手段方面也带来新的挑战。在将清代缙绅录建设为史学量化数据库的过程中,利用人物姓名、籍贯等关键信息构建有效的内部连接是追踪官员仕途迁转的关键,而跨数据的外部连接能够进一步拓展数据分析维度,补充科考名次、出生年月、家族背景等影响仕途的重要因素。利用明经通谱中的拔贡名册和缙绅录连接比较,可以得到各科拔贡生员入仕的人数比例。在分析拔贡不同的入仕途径过程中,不能忽视履历、方志等史料中对官员捐纳等信息的搜集,同时在任职时间等方面,这些信息可与缙绅录数据库中的信息互补,勾勒出更完整的官员仕途路径。在团队跨学科合作方面,缙绅录就开发检索平台、互动式可视化界面都进行过尝试,但存在成果难以维护和共享利用等问题,为数字人文在史学领域的发展提供思考借鉴。

Historical research has experienced a paradigm shift with the development of digital techniques.At the same time, the creation and dissemination of more and more historical databases pose challenges to scholars in terms of identifying appropriate methods to analyse such data.Taking the construction and analysis of a database of Qing officials based on Jinshenlu as an example, this article introduces the methods that we applied to link the records of officials across time and between sources.Using an existing package for nominative linkage, we identified records belonging to the same official and assigned unique identifiers to them so that we could group them and produce career histories.Nominative linkage across diverse databases is a key starting point for the analysis of historical sources.Linkage between Jinshenlu and Mingjingtongpu helps us to calculate the exact number of Bagong who finally entered the civil official system for each class.By searching through other archives, we further identified more complete career paths of cases who start with different positions.We hope that our experience will provide a reference for other scholars facing similar problems.Also, by sharing our experience of interdisciplinary collaboration and additional issues, we hope that we can draw attention to challenges and possible solutions for researchers who are exploring digital humanities as a way of doing historical research.