Author ｜
Ling-ling Lien, Wei-jun Yeh
Abstract ｜
The present paper investigates the history and contexts surrounding the emergence of social surveys within periodicals of the late Qing dynasty, primarily discussing how surveys as a “new literary category” operated as a device from which to pursue accuracy and practicality while dismantling what was considered harmful or backwards in the publications of students abroad in Japan. The development of this genre not only expressed new forms of knowledge and communication but was also a social act, namely prescribing norms, organizing societies revolving around surveys, creating specialized columns within publications, and inviting public participation. Zhejiang chao《浙江潮》, Jiangsu《江蘇》, and Yunnan《雲南》, all issued around 1903-1907, were the earliest periodicals to publish survey conventions of any kind. Being the forebearers of survey reporting, these publications attempted to establish clear definitions of the new category. The receiving and editing of related articles, however, were rife with difficulties, and the distinctions between survey writings, news reports, letters, and opinion pieces were ambiguous, demonstrating the shifting boundaries of columns. But it is precisely within this process that we can observe the collisions of new literary categories and the trial and error behind the establishment of concrete social practices. This paper employs digital research tools to identify shared themes across survey reports by using machine clustering of co-occurrence networks, themes which are supplemented by lexical classifications performed manually to decipher the connotations of textual forms. We have also discovered that “new” and “old” are far from diametric in these processes. The tables, figures, and narrative styles, all of which contain traces of traditional local gazetteers, used by social surveys grafted new and old together to form a new category of survey, one which was gradually accepted and circulated.
keywords ｜
social surveys, students abroad in Japan, digital humanities, co-occurrence networks, text mining