In light of the accelerating nature of climate change and its effect, it is unsurprising that various entities increasingly resort to courts and tribunals to seek to address the many harms and wrongs that clearly stem from climate change. This article discusses the opportunities in this context for those who face displacement by the effects of climate change, an issue that is not necessarily at the heart of either climate justice debates or climate displacement debates. Discussions about how to respond to displacement arising in the context of climate change often focus on the ‘protection space’ or ‘assistance space’, in which those affected are conceptualized as actual or potential seekers of protection or assistance, who may or may not be owed refuge elsewhere on account of unmet needs for shelter, support or safety. This article takes a different approach and conceptualizes those affected as potential or actual seekers of justice, who may be owed rectification for inflicted harm. The article thus contributes to emerging scholarship concerning climate change litigation and climate harm reversal, by focusing on the corrective justice potential for those who face the specific issue of displacement stemming from climate change. To this end, the article provides the relevant practical and analytical background, and discusses key recent law and policy developments in both the domestic and cross-border spheres. The article considers not merely the nexus between displacement stemming from climate change and considerations of justice, but also how and where justice in this context is or may be sought.

This article examines the Baluba Association of Katanga (Balubakat) from its creation in 1957 until its dissolution in 1964, as well as its leader Jason Sendwe. Despite not receiving much scholarly coverage hitherto, Sendwe and the Balubakat played an important part in undermining the Katangese secession, along with the UN and the Congolese National Army (ANC). This article's focus on the Balubakat and Sendwe challenges the traditional historical focus on top parties, such as the National Congolese Movement (MNC), and their leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba, when examining Congolese decolonisation. Sendwe's pragmatic, non-aligned stance helped the Balubakat maintain the support of powerful institutions, such as the Great Lakes Railway Company (CFL). His ability to hold the Balubakat together also derived from its members’ common wish to oppose the Katangese secession. Yet the efficacy of Sendwe's leadership was best demonstrated after the party disbanded following his assassination.

This article aims to reconstruct a Millian argument for protecting a broad artistic freedom, as well as to delineate the exceptional cases in which censorship of works of art might be justified. Mill's On Liberty offers two lines of reasoning that might be used to defend the widest possible artistic freedom. The first is Mill's defense of freedom of speech in chapter 2, although this would apparently still allow for censoring art that serves to instigate harm. The second is his defense of “experiments in living” in chapter 3, but this might allow for censoring the exhibition or publication of artworks that constitute “offences against decency.” While this Millian doctrine on artistic freedom provides guidelines for coping with difficult cases in arts management, its limitations highlight the peculiarities of the arts and literature in relation to freedom and censorship.

MARKUS, a multilingual digital text annotation and analysis platform, allows historians and other researchers to construct datasets from primary sources available to them in full-text digital format. Originally designed for those working with pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts, MARKUS has developed into a multifunctional annotation platform that is particularly suited for the automated annotation, referencing, and visualization of named entities in modern and literary Chinese and premodern Korean texts, but many of its additional annotation features can be used to analyze and read texts in any language, as long as the electronic documents are encoded in the most common standard for language encoding, Unicode. Below I discuss the main goals and methodological features of MARKUS and the allied text comparison utility COMPARATIVUS. I will illustrate these with some examples of how MARKUS has been used in Chinese and Korean historical research.

What does it mean to be able to study Chinese history at scale? What methods, tools, and approaches will allow us to understand Chinese history and historiography from a larger perspective over the longue durée, including linguistic, philosophical, ethnographic, and literary concerns? In this article we present what we feel is one potential key to answering these questions and provide an overview of the utility and value of harnessing this framework for text-based historical research as a means to expand one's scholarship to virtually limitless scales.

This essay provides an overview of the goals, main features, and digital tools of the Ming Qing Women's Writings (MQWW) project, which contains more than 400 collections of literary writings by women (17th – early 20th centuries). The website (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/) makes accessible a free archive of scanned images of texts with searchable components and a downloadable database. It highlights MQWW's functionalities and actual and potential applications for literary, biographical, and historical research.

The widespread availability of digitized premodern textual sources – together with increasingly sophisticated means for their manipulation – has brought enormous practical benefits to scholars whose work relies upon reference to their contents. While great progress has been made with the construction of ever more comprehensive database systems and archives, far more remains not only possible but also realistically achievable in the near future. This paper discusses some of the key challenges faced, and progress made towards solving them, in the context of a widely used open digital platform attempting to expand the range of digitized sources available while simultaneously increasing the scope of meaningful tasks that can be performed with them computationally. This paper aims to suggest how seemingly simple human-mediated additions to the digitized historical record – when combined with the power of digital systems to repeatedly perform mechanical tasks at enormous scales – quickly lead to transformative changes in the feasible scope of computational analysis of premodern writing.

This article looks at a version of the “too-few-reasons” problem for reasons internalism stemming from the existence of cases of clinical depression. People with clinical depression lack motivation to do things like go to work or seek treatment for their depression. Internalism appears committed to saying that such people lack reasons to do these things since internalism makes having reasons depend on having motivations. But, intuitively, depressed people do have reasons to do them. This article considers a number of possible solutions to this problem, such as that depressed people have actual or ideal desires which explain their reasons, and argues that these solutions do not succeed.

This article gives an overview of the Local Gazetteers Research Tools (LoGaRT), including its development, technical features, methodology, and examples of research applications by members of the Tu 圖 working group. The use of LoGaRT is illustrated with four brief introductions to projects that draw on visual materials from the local gazetteers, including ritual-related illustrations, city layout maps, and maps with western cartographic features. See the websites for more detailed information on LoGaRT and other research projects using it.1

The number of internally forcibly displaced persons is growing every year across the globe and exceeds the number of refugees. To date, Ukraine has the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Europe, with about 1.4 million people forced to flee from the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Employing Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, the modalities of borders, and taking an intersectional approach, this article theorizes how IDPs are situated politically within a protracted conflict. Such an approach offers the chance to see how the reaction to the war brings authorities to see displaced people as a static category and reproduces a war-lexicon in policies, which fractures the space of everyday life. Drawing upon qualitative research on IDPs, the civil society, international organizations, and public officials in Ukraine, the article concludes that intersections of gender and older age with displacement, and the lack of state recognition of these differing groups of IDPs, together with the lack of the economic resources for social policy, produces multiple forms of social exclusion.

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project offers a modern digital solution to an age-old scholarly problem: a platform for annotating source texts for easy reference and retrieval, while facilitating easy access to original sources. Individuals or groups can upload scans of primary sources and annotate over the image, in multiple layers, toggling annotations on or off per research and reading needs. The project is hosted by Yale University.

This issue of the Journal of Chinese History aims to take stock of the effects of “the digital” on the study of Chinese history. We are doing this through a combination of research articles whose authors have made extensive use of digital resources and technologies and a set of introductions to non-commercial, open-access utilities and tools that scholars have created to support research in a digital environment. These hardly exhaust the universe of research or tools.

A brief introduction to historical Geographic Information Systems and the creation of the China Historical GIS. Introductions are given to the CHGIS datasets covering 221 BCE to 1911 and the many GIS datasets on nineteenth and twentieth century China created under the leadership of the late G. William Skinner.

This paper focuses on the historical politics of disaster records in Chinese local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志). Using records of mulberry crop failures as examples, the authors ask how gazetteer editors collated Yuan disaster records—initially collected to help prevent disasters and authorize the legitimacy of dynastic rule—in gazetteers and, in so doing, made them into ‘local’ knowledge. Digital humanities methods allow for both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and the authors deploy them to demonstrate how, in structured texts like the Chinese local gazetteers, they could help combine close reading of specific sections and larger-scale analysis of regional patterns. In the first part, the authors show how disasters were recorded in a Yuan Zhenjiang gazetteer to facilitate taxation and disaster prevention locally—a strategy rarely traceable in subsequent gazetteers until the Qing. In the second part, the authors shifted their perspective to the historical accumulation of data and what that reveals about the reception of Yuan disasters: whereas local gazetteers from the north generate long chronologies of mulberry disasters from the Ming to the Qing, others depict the south as disaster-free.