The Narratives section is devoted to studies of the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China produced by the ENP-China team or external contributors. We welcome contributions based on original and direct analysis of the BDRC or on the data files that we have made available in our data repository on Zenodo. All the papers and research notes produced by the ENP-China team are available as pamphlets in the DH Lab series on the PEERS platform.

X-Boorman: A digital revival: This is an introduction to the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China and to our endeavor to produce an enhanced digital version of this great scholarly resource.

X-Boorman: The Boorman factory: The Biographical Dictionary of Republican China was the result of a succession of editorial decisions, especially on the selection of the individuals that were selected for inclusion in the dictionary. It was also the product of a large number of contributors, who were named, but whose name was not associated to the individual biographies. In this paper, we present and discuss the process and rationale of elaborating the BDRC.

Mining the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China: This article describes preliminary experiments conducted in the context of the ENP-China project, which examines the transformation of elites in modern China. The project is centered on exploiting information from untapped textual sources at a large scale which requires to investigate new methodologies for data-rich history and to rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP). The first experiments presented in this paper were designed on a smaller scale and better-known materials to test and develop adequate tools and methodology - at a humanly manageable scale - before eventually enlarging the corpus and scale of analysis. We focus on the Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (BDRC) edited by H. Boorman and aim at extracting biographical information and transforming a conventional dictionary into a reservoir of data on elites in modern China.