benlehman

I'm researching a very interesting text right now. Well, not interesting in its contents so much as the things that it could be used for. It's called the Suishoudengjidang (roughly: file registry of things that passed through our hands -- it sounds better in Chinese). It's a record of all incoming and outgoing communication from the Grand Council, a group that advised the Emperor and basically acted as the nerve center of the Qing empire. Every single piece of communication is logged with a summary, date, imperial comments (if any) and various other bits of data. In all, it amounts to a huge amount of data about the internal functioning of one of the largest and longest lived governments in the world.

I'm hoping to do some basic mathematical analysis on it, looking at things like "does the volume of bureaucracy grow over time and, if so, how much?" or "do crises create more or less communication with the capitol?"

I think that there are pretty interesting implications for modern governments, as well.