From Textual to Historical Networks: Social Relations in the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China

In this paper, we combine natural language processing (NLP) techniques and network analysis in order to systematically map the individuals mentioned in the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, thus revealing its underlying structure. We depart from previous studies due to the distinction we make between the subject of a biography (bionode) and the individuals mentioned within a biography (object-node). We examine whether the bionodes form sociocentric networks based on shared attributes (provincial origin, education, etc.). Our major contribution consists of annotating the links between individuals in order to: (1) question the assumption that word cooccurrences equate to actual relations; (2) define a more accurate classification of relationships among elites in republican China. We demonstrate that political and professional relations in this population outweigh the types of social ties commonly accepted in scholarship on modern day China. We ultimately develop a method that can be applied to similar corpora in a critical and comparative perspective.