Network Data in the Early Chinese Periodicals Online Database (ECPO)

This paper introduces the Early Chinese Periodicals Online database (ECPO), based at the University of Heidelberg. It offers a short overview of the development of this research-driven database as it grew to incorporate additional projects. Today, the ECPO hosts a variety of textual and visual sources from the Republican period (1912 – 1949), as well as biographical data of twentieth-century academic and political elites. We aim to show how this database can be used and extended to pursue historical network research, even for scholars previously unfamiliar with digital infrastructures. The concluding part discusses privacy concerns in data curation and management, which are increasingly relevant for studies of twentieth-century actors and limit the potential to release and reuse these datasets, especially if they pertain to the People’s Republic of China’s political history.