Video Introduction to Late Qing Full-text Database (1833~1911) and Chinese Periodical Full-text Database (1911-1949)

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Hello. My name is Dan Knorr and I teach in the history faculty here at Cambridge.

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Today, I'm going to be introducing one of the databases of electronic primary sources in Chinese that we have access to via a library subscription.

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If you go to the Chinese Studies E-Resources page, we'll see this right at the very top.

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We've got the late Qing full text database (Wan Qing qikan quanwen shujuku)

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and then also linked to it the Chinese periodical Fulltext database 1911 to 1949

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(Minguo shiqi qikan quanwen shujuku). And as you can see, just from these brief descriptions,

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there's a tremendous amount of material included in these databases, material that isn't full text searchable.

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The titles of the articles and periodicals are searchable, but you can download the material as PDFs.

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So it's a really rich and very useful collection of materials that you can look at.

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So we'll go ahead and click on one of these to open it up. They're split apart on the library site, and they're split apart here, too.

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But really, you can use both of them together without any sort of problems.

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We've clicked on the use button and we'll just wait for a minute to open up and

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I'll show you how you can search through both of the databases at the same time.

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It will pop up here on the left side of the screen, this is a full list of all of the databases that are theoretically available through the quanguo baokan suoyin

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slate of products. The ones that we have access to are in this

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kind of darker text and all of them already have green checks next to them.

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So we are going to be searching through both the late Qing and Republican era materials, as you can see here.

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Also by the date range, by default, the interface is opened up to the literature search, advanced search section.

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You can see there are other search options, but really the advanced search is going to be the most useful.

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There's also a literature navigation section that's useful to us, and I'll talk about that in just a minute.

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So those are the kind of two ways of searching through it that you're going to want to use.

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So here you've got a couple of search options to look at.

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Most of these are self explanatory. The literature source means the name of the periodical in question.

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This is a database of periodicals published in this time period.

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I should note that I'm looking at the English language version of the interface on the interface also includes 22 and find it.

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So if you'd rather do that issue is the issue number of the periodical.

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So if you know the periodical that you're looking for and the issue number,

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but maybe for some reason not the title of the article, then you could use those in combination.

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CLEC means Chinese Library Classification System.

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So this is a alphanumeric system of classification to look up different topics to play around with that if you like.

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The abstract search option I haven't found to be especially useful.

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There might be some articles that have abstracts themselves.

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For others, it's just the first couple of lines of text that have been made searchable.

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Again, it's not a full text database in the sense that you're able to search through the entirety of the text of the articles.

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There are a fair number of articles where it's just the title that searchable anyway,

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so you probably don't want to rely too much, at least at the outset on that abstract search function.

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There are few more options over here. You've got a fuzzy versus precise search option.

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Probably be okay sticking with fuzzy most of the time less may be you're searching

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for a name and getting too many irrelevant search results or something like that.

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And then there are a couple of different ways to compound searches on each other.

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You can use this dropdown box here to refine and alter search results, and you can also add multiple search conditions.

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So to give a quick example of how this works, I'm going to search for information articles related to an aspect of history that I work on.

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So I work on a Jinan during the Qing Dynasty, especially in the late 19th, early 20th century.

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One of the things that happens in China is that there's a commercial district that's opened up in the last years of the Jing its Shang Bu,

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so we're going to go ahead and do a quick search for a Shang boom. And we'll limit that to the years that I think I'm going to be interested in.

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Let's say 1900 to 1912 and you'll see, you know, really quick once this loads up the wide range of materials that you're going to get.

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So I've got 709 search results to go through as I start looking through this.

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I like any I've got a young nanchang buju, you know.

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Oh yes, this probably isn't related to Jinan, it's somewhere else. So that's probably true of a lot of these different search results.

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So I want to do a bit of refining in there. So let's go ahead and do a search in results for Jinan to try and narrow things down a bit.

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So we started out with 709 search results and this got us down to 52.

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So that's pretty useful.

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But I'm worried that we might be missing out some things because we're only getting hits on articles that have the word characters genes on in that.

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So if we've got something that's talking about the genome in Chengdu,

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but it doesn't happen to have a gene on somewhere in it, then that's going to be a problem for us.

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So in this case, we've got an article that appears in the genome bar but just has Chengdu in the title.

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Well, okay, there might be other kind of ways to narrow it down.

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Let's try going back to our search for shampoo and we're going to just do the search all over again.

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So we'll get back to our 709 search results. And let's do a slightly broader search to refine things.

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Let's do search in results. We'll keep general.

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But we'll do an awe search. Let's just try Shandong, the name of the province.

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So it's specifying by province instead of by city. Name doesn't happen enough gene on in the title of the periodical.

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Then maybe this will give us some extra heads. And lo and behold, it does.

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We went from 52 search results up to 115.

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So we've probably, you know, expanded the range of materials that we've caught in our search basically,

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and got some more things that are going to be relevant to us that's going to be really useful.

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So if you've got an article that you're interested in,

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you can go ahead and click on that article and that will open up a page that gives you a couple of different options.

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You can browse through the issue of the periodical as a whole.

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You can open up this specific article in a new tab as a PDF and see.

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And then you can download that PDF or you can see what you've got there.

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Or you could just click the download button to just download it directly.

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Of course, if you're downloading individual PDFs,

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make sure to make a notation to yourself of where exactly that material is coming from so that you can site it appropriately.

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One thing you might not notice I think is actually really powerful about the database is that you can not only search for individual articles,

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but you can also browse by periodical issues in old periodicals.

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So this periodical name appears actually a clickable link.

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If you click on it, then it's going to take you to a view of the page for the periodical as a whole,

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it's going to show you the full range of issues by year that are available from this periodical,

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and it also gives you very helpfully brief introduction to that periodical.

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Down at the bottom on this, you can get a sense of the full range of materials from that periodical that are available.

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You can browse entire issues, browse titles from issues,

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and you can use this search within button to open up with a page that lists all of the articles from that given periodical.

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So you can do searches within that. And again, you can download all of these articles to your machine to read for later.

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Now you'll notice that when we've done this search within function, it's taken us to the literature navigation section of the site.

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And this is really useful if you want to find periodicals that match a particular criteria.

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One thing we're going to make sure that we are in the modern periodical section of the interface.

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One thing I think that's really powerful is that it's got this place of publication search option.

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So, you know, we know that there's a lot published in Shanghai, for instance.

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So we've got almost 23,000 total periodicals in the database.

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For fun, let's see how many of those from Shanghai? 6841.

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So more than more than a quarter of those are coming from Shanghai.

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But if you're working on like a smaller city like Jinan, maybe there aren't so many periodicals published there.

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And so if you do a search for things that were published in Jena, and then you get a smaller and more valuable,

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I think a selection of periodicals, you know, available from Jinan.

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If you're someone like me who's interested in the late Xing,

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you can pretty quickly go through and identify the ones that have material related to the lynching based on the year when they were first published.

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So that's really powerful. Just for fun.

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Let's look for one more city. Let's look for Xi'an, another slightly kind of, you know, not so many publications from there as from Shanghai.

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More than Jinan, though. So we've got 223 search results.

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And the other option for searching in here is by the organiser name or the kind of institution that's

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you know, or person that's publishing this. So this first result, for instance, we see there's a xuesheng shenghuo she.

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Say you're interested in students in China in the 1940s or the Republican period

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and you say oh—xuesheng shenghuo she—that sounds like something that might not just be a local thing.

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Maybe they've got a connection to a periodical somewhere else.

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You can use that organiser search option to have a go at that.

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And in this case, we see oh yeah, there is another periodical that's connected to this xuesheng shenghuo she

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and that is being published in Changsha.

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So you've got a couple of options there to find periodicals that might be interesting to you.

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So whether you're looking for individual articles on a particular topic or periodicals that were published in a particular place and time,

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there are a couple of different, really useful ways to utilise this database.

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And again, a tremendous amount of resources that are going to be readily accessible to you to download as PDFs from within this database.

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So really, just about any topic that you're working on in late 19th, early 20th century China, in all likelihood,

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you're going to be able to find something that's useful to you in this database if you play around with it a little bit.

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So I'd encourage you to have a go. Good luck with your research. I hope this video has helped you out.

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And thank you so much for watching.