Resources for the use of social network analysis in the study of Chinese Buddhist history

Here are some resources for the use of historical social network analysis in the study of Chinese Buddhism. The source data stem from various projects, especially the Gaoseng zhuan projects at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (DILA) (formerly Dharma Drum Buddhist College). These collect relational (and other) data from 高僧傳-type biographies, but also have digitized secondary sources such as Hasebe Yūkei's tables of Ming-Qing monastic lineages (Hasebe Yūkei 長谷部幽蹊. 2008. “Min Shin bukkyō kenkyū shiryō 明清佛教研究資料 (僧傳之部) 1-3.” Tokyo: Manpakuji).

The evolving datasets offered here are prepared in formats that allow immediate use in open source SNA tools (such as Gephi) and are the basis for an ongoing series of presentations, workshops and papers. If you find any errors in the data, or would like to create or contribute data on social networks related to the study of Buddhist history, please get in touch.

Marcus Bingenheimer

July 2016 - now

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Datasets (for immediate use in Gephi):

• The main Chinese Buddhist - Historical Social Network Dataset (CB_HSNA). (c.16,700 nodes, and c. 25,000 connections) is now available on GitHub. (Unsure what to do with the data? Try the how-to.)
• Also a SNA usable version of the Chinese Bibliographic Database (CBDB). All nodes (persons) and edges (kinship and social association info), with separate tranches for Ming and Qing: cbdb_SNAusableData.zip [c. 21 MB]. Data courtesy of Harvard University, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, China Biographical Database (Ver. April 2018), https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb. For the CBDB data Luling Huang and I developed a Python script to slice the CBDB SNA data by time, gender, and ego-networks. Available on Luling's GitHub repository.
• A first Dynamic Network Example (gexf) (beta) of the Dao'an, Huiyuan and Kumārajīva triangle. Illustrates the timestamp technique that Gephi 0.9.1 seems to mandate. Screencast of how this could look like.

For those interested in the structure of the Gaoseng zhuan data, and more information on how to use the data:

• “Who was ‘Central’ for Chinese Buddhist History? - A Social Network Approach.” International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture. Vol.28-2 (Dec. 2018): 45-67. Open Access Journal Issues. Local copy.

• Marcus BINGENHEIMER, Jen-Jou HUNG, Simon WILES: "Social Network Visualization from TEI Data." Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(3), 2011, pp. 271-278. Doi: 10.1093/llc/fqr020. (SSCI)

• For literature on historical social network analysis in general see this bibliography.

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