Department of History, Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology & Mr. Simon Suen and Mrs. Mary Suen Sino-Humanitas Institute, HKBU

Abstract

This presentation is an account of a small pilot project that explored patterns of women writers’ social networks in three significant chronological periods in late imperial and modern China—the High Qing (1700-1839), Late Qing (1840-1910), and Republican era (1911-1949) by using data from the Ming Qing Women’s Writings digital archive and database (MQWW https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/). The project examined two categories of data provided by paratexts and texts in 332 poetry collections by women over the three periods to identify the significance of two types of Social Networks (A and B) connected to women’s writing and the publication of their collections : Type A broadly concerned the degree to which women’s participation as “actors and agents” who contributed paratexts to the “packaging” of other women’s poetry collections in these periods, and Type B explored the constitution of a woman poet’s own social and cultural community by means of poetic exchange.Through visualization of these data, the project aimed to show how women writers and their publications, by negotiating different genres of poetry and prose, could build social connections and linkages that crossed or affirmed spatial, gender, and ethnic boundaries in late imperial and early 20th-century China and at the same time to illustrate the potential of using digital tools and methods to enhance humanistic research.