The China Christian Database: An Essential Digital Tool for the Cartography and Prosopography of Christianity in China

SPRING 2018 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEE

PI: Daryl Ireland, Research Assistant, Professor of Mission

What is the Challenge?
The study of Christianity in China is often met with the question, “What does Beijing have to do with Jerusalem?” Nationalist historiography and post-colonial theory have tended to relegate Christianity to the status of “foreign,” thus rendering it peripheral to the story of China. Yet, as more recent studies have demonstrated, Christianity has undergone a process of localization and “sinicization” since it arrived in China, and its historical experience can provide an essential window through which to understand the revolutionary changes of identity, politics, and geography that took place in China during the modern period. That said, the disparate and constantly evolving nature of Christianity within China has presented key challenges to its study: historical agents were highly mobile, relational networks were constantly in flux, and historical resources remain disparate. Thus, it continues to be difficult to triangulate historical research and accomplish meta-level analyses of Christianity in China.

What is the Solution?
The solution is to create and populate an online relational database that will track major Christian institutions and people in China between the 16th-20th centuries, and to make this data available for students, teachers, and general research purposes through a user-friendly online platform that includes both textual search and geographic visualization. Together, this dual approach is intended to create a powerful, easy-to-use teaching and research tool while making the accumulation of historical data into a relational database as intuitive as possible. 

What is the Process?
To create and design an online relational database (currently considering Directus or Airtable). These tools offer accessible collaboration interfaces and built-in APIs that allow for the linking of the database with web applications. The database will be designed around two main entities: people and institutions. However, as this is a relational database, it will also be oriented to understanding how these main entities relate to 1) each other, 2) religious affiliations, 3) organizational structures, and 4) geography. As such, the database could be utilized to map the complex relationships between people, institutional structures, and their environments. The second goal of the project would be to work with SAIL to create a custom website that would allow for researchers and students to interact with the database in an easy-to-use way.