Project Title:

Chinese Students Studying Abroad in the U.S. 1900-1920

Problem Statement:

How did Chinese students in U.S. universities use their key organizations and bulletins to stay connected with each other, stay informed about developments in China, shape student opinion and behavior, and reflect on their experience?

Approach:

  • Develop a corpus of fulltext primary and secondary source materials within Hathi Trust collection area relevant to the topic.
  • Develop some geographical data visualizations, such as locations of national or regional conferences, home states or cities of the officers of organizations and/or editorial boards of student bulletins.
  • Design a visualization to show the “home topics” of the key monthly bulletin over time, as a way to highlight the key topics about Chinese politics or events of interest to Chinese students studying abroad in the U.S.
  • Design an interface through which users would be able to explore the reflections and exhortations of students as written up in student publications, biographies or other primary sources.

Audience:

Me. Potentially some of my friends who are from China and have been students in the U.S.

Skills Needed:

Creation of spreadsheets. Data visualization. Hathi Trust allows API and data downloading of OCR text, and also it’s possible to request the creation of datasets for pre-1923 materials, and I would like to experiment with that but wouldn’t have the programming skills to make anything out of the data once I got it.