Chinese Singaporean Temples: Digital Humanities Approaches to Frequency Lists of Sponsors
July 6, 2022
Once the oldest Chinese temple in Singapore, the Fuk Tak Chi Temple was built in the 1820s by the Hakka and Cantonese communities. One of the first stops for Chinese immigrants, the temple was devoted to the deity Tua Pek Kong and served as the headquarters of the Hakka and Cantonese communities in Singapore. The temple was closed on 6 July, 1994 and converted into a museum in 1998.
During the British colonial era, hundreds of thousands Chinese immigrants arrived in Singapore. From 30 in 1819, the number of Chinese immigrants grew to 164,181 in 1901. The establishment of temples led to the formation of socio-economic and political groups of Chinese migrants based on dialect (known as bang). The location of each temple would indicate the initial spatial concentration of a dialect group.
In ‘Chinese Singaporean Temples: Digital Humanities Approaches to Frequency Lists of Sponsors’ (Journal of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities, 2020), Assistant Professor Xu Duoduo (Department of Sociology, Hong Kong University), Professor Kenneth Dean (NUS Chinese Studies), Associate Professor Marcus Bingenheimer (Department of Religion, Temple University) and Associate Professor Francis Bond (NTU Linguistics and Multilingual Studies) examine the influence of donors to Chinese Singaporean temples by assessing the frequency in which they were mentioned in various epigraphs. By studying these epigraphs, the team also mapped the social connections in pre-modern Singapore by drawing the connections between sponsors of Chinese temples. These sponsors included individuals, associations, stores, ships, factories, and groups of people with shared social roles such as Buddhists.
Epigraphs in Chinese Singaporean temples are valuable resources for the study of the pre-modern history of Singapore. Epigraphs commemorate an event and its participants. A typical epigraph on a stone is composed of a title, a preface stating the event, a panel displaying the major organisers, a long list of sponsors, and a dateline together with the corresponding people erecting the stone.
These epigraphic texts depict the social network and interactions among community leaders, civilians, and organisations. The act of inscribing texts into stelae can be considered a way for common people to build up memory or history by themselves. The texts also highlight the contributions of donors to the temples.
The study applied a digital humanities approach, utilizing Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to mark up the texts of “Chinese Epigraphy in Singapore, 1819 – 1911”, Python to extract information under various labels, DocuSky to produce graphic presentations analysing the frequency that sponsors’ names were mentioned, and Palladio and Gephi to provide graphic presentations of sponsor networks throughout the different temples.
By analysing the group donors, the researchers found that Cantonese associations were founded by more or less the same contributors, whereas Hokkien associations were founded through contributions from various different communities. Since the Hokkien community had the resources to organise multiple associations, to maintain an apparent balance, the Cantonese community used the same social resources repeatedly to form organisations in a relatively equivalent number to the Hokkien clans. The formation of Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese bangs was therefore a strategy to counter the Hokkien bang, which seemed overpowering in comparison.
Read the article here.