Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article examines Late Imperial Chinese prognostication practices in relation to weather and climate, as they appear in local gazetteers 方志 (fangzhi) – a sort of local history or reference book – from across the country. My focus is on the so-called "farmers' prognostications 農占 (nongzhan)." Where and by whom were weather prognostications used? How great were the internal differences within China? What were the main methods used to predict the year's harvest? The research's scope is limited by the available sources: out of the many thousands of extant gazetteers, I strictly work only with those works published during the two first Qing 清 (1644–1912) reigns Shunzhi 順治 (1644–1661) and Kangxi 康熙 (1662–1722). The geographical area is determined by these sources but basically corresponds to the Han-majority provinces of "China proper."

AbstractMany scholars have used local Chinese county gazetteers for historical and socioeconomic analyses, yet little research has examined the completeness of coverage or the biases in reporting that characterize the compilation of these gazetteers. In this paper, we provide a novel source for studying Chinese political movements and local history under the communist regime after 1949: the internal-discussion drafts of county gazetteers (xianzhi pingyigao). Our findings constitute the first study to use internal review drafts to examine the authenticity and credibility of county gazetteers. Prior to their publication, gazetteer drafts are compiled by a team of editors and typically receive at least three rounds of rigorous internal review. These internal-discussion drafts are subject to a prolonged and strict process of self and external censorship. Our analysis engages in a close comparison of text samples extracted from two versions of local gazetteers collected from four counties in Guangxi province. Compared to the draft versions, we find evidence of serious data manipulation and a tendency to underreport historical events in the published editions. Our research evidently demonstrates the process of historiography editing and reveals how local history is presented through the lens of government public documents in China.

AbstractStar field affiliation is an important part of ancient Chinese gazetteers. The gazetteers of Taiwan in the Qing Dynasty presented many 'different opinions' about the star field affiliation of Taiwan. These different opinions illustrate the difficulty of self-consistency in traditional Chinese star field affiliation theory and reflect the influence of the concept of grand unification on traditional Chinese geographical knowledge. During the Qianlong period, with the introduction of Western surveying and mapping knowledge, the sundial began to replace star field affiliation and became a new geographical positioning theory. Taiwan, whose geographical positioning also completed the transformation from the star field affiliation to sundial theory at the end of the Qing Dynasty, witnessed the replacement of traditional Chinese place knowledge with cosmopolitan knowledge. Looking back at the writings regarding the star field affiliation in Taiwan gazetteers in the Qing Dynasty, there was both debate and consensus.

A large amount of geographic information is contained in text documents available in the Web. For instance, forum messages posted by students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may contain references to places. Unfortunately, this information is not exploited, although it can be useful to further understand the topics of the courses. Therefore, the authors propose an approach to instantly provide additional information to MOOC students about geographic features found in publications at course forums. The results are displayed through our tool, ORBIS, which automatically highlights the geographic entities in the texts. With this tool, the student gets access to additional information in the same environment, without disruption, interacting with maps and spatial relationships with other entities. Information on locations mentioned in text is obtained from queries posted to the gazetteer Linked OntoGazetteer. The authors applied their prototype to the students' posts in the forum space for the Geo-MOOC titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution course, offered by the Pennsylvania State University.