On August 17, 2021, The Center for Global Christianity and Mission (CGCM) was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for their project “China Historical Christian Database: Mapping the Spatial and Social Networks of Christianity in China, 1550-1950.” This peer-reviewed grant is one of only 20 Digital Humanities Advancement grants awarded nationally by the Endowment, which support “the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field.”
The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the spatial and social networks among Christians in modern China. Because Christian missions were the first to educate ordinary girls, the CHCD makes it possible, for instance, to isolate when and where girls’ schools first appeared in China, and who were at these vanguard institutions. It also becomes possible to identify which Jesuits the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz corresponded with in China, where they were working, and who else was in their social network. The possibilities are almost endless. People curious about climate change can use the CHCD to see how floods and famines drew or repulsed missions; those interested in the development of trade networks can study how religious actors played a role; a person can go to the CHCD to learn when, where, and with whom a translator worked to translate Confucian texts in English; someone researching her own genealogy can find biographical data about relatives. The CHCD opens new possibilities for understanding the connections between the East and West.
The Center for Global Christianity and Mission has been working on the China Historical Christian Database for three years. With support from the Hariri Institute, it built a proof-of-concept model in 2019. In 2020, funding from the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA) and the BU Center for the Study of Asia (BUCSA), made it possible to gather input and feedback on the project from more than 250 scholars worldwide. Researchers in multiple fields are eager for something that can provide quantifiable data on Christianity in modern China, and now that will be possible. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities will make the first iteration of the CHCD public in January 2022.