Rediscovering Chinese History through Data: Incorporating Digital Humanities Pedagogy into Data-Driven Learning of Chinese History

Abstract

Digital humanities activities and methods are increasingly common in undergraduate humanities classrooms but are still absent in most Chinese history courses. With the objective of creating and streamlining in-class activity segments and assignments for understanding Chinese history from a data perspective, this project formulates and designs a student-centred learning approach for CityU courses in Chinese history within the UGC-funded BA Chinese and History programme. The pedagogical activities integrate existing online datasets with handpicked innovative digital tools for mapping locations, drawing timelines, annotating historical texts, and looking up digital biographies from imperial China. Other than being used extensively and integrated into the course design, the resultant checklists, prompts, and troubleshooting guides from the project will be disseminated on three online outlets, its pedagogical implications for learning will be presented at three conferences as well as published as a bilingual paper on history teaching. Through the data-driven learning activities that it develops, this project will give CityU students the opportunity and the resources to adopt a more active learning strategy for Chinese history by exposing them to the digital humanities.