Visualizing Careers and Connections: GIS, Network Analysis, and the Prosopography of Middle-Period China

Prosopography, with a history dating back to the nineteenth century, experiences a revolution in the digital age in which a dazzling range of tools help scholars discover significant patterns of change hitherto buried in massive quantities of biographical data. This paper employs GIS and network visualization tools in a study of China’s political elite between the 10^th and the 13^th century.

This study relies on a relational database of several hundred elite families of my own design, but also draws upon other existing biographical datasets, including rosters of local officials and the impressive dataset in the China Biographical Database (CBDB) which is still being developed but already contains more than 120,000 historical figures. Using GIS tools and spatial data from the China Historical GIS Project, this paper maps out career paths of officials in middle-period China; with the help of network visualization software (Netdraw and Sonia), it reconstructs changing patterns of their marriage and correspondence networks over time.

Combining these maps and network graphs with more conventional textual analysis, this paper argues that between the 10^th and 13^th century China’s political elite became increasingly connected to their home locales. While officials before the mid-eleventh century often held offices across the country, abandoned their native homes for residence near the capital, and contracted marriages with families of diverse regional origins, those after the late eleventh century mostly served near their homes and married nearby.