China Historical Christian Database Launch

On Wednesday, July 27^th at 9 am USA Eastern Standard Time, the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University will showcase the first version of the China Historical Christian Database (CHCD). Supported by the United States’ National Endowment for the Humanities and hundreds of private donors, the CHCD quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). Working with dozens of institutions around the world, the CHCD has the largest dataset on Christianity in China ever assembled. Now users can do large-scale analyses of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant missions—separately or combined. Scholars can download the data and perform their own queries, or they can visit the intuitive web interface to do such things as count the number of mission hospitals opened in China, discover whether missionaries moved toward or away from a natural disaster, find the Cyrillic and Chinese names of many Orthodox priests, and display the social networks of female Christian educators. However one accesses the CHCD, the power of parsing close to two million data points over a four hundred year period is ground breaking, and gives scholars the chance to ask new questions and find new patterns. This is an opportunity to learn about the project, see the web interface demonstrated, ask questions, and be the first to get the link to this new and free digital resource. To participate in this live Zoom event, please register here.