Approaching pre-modern China through the computer: the benefits and risks of using electronic resources in sinological research

Around the middle of the 1990s, Chinese Studies both in China and around the world irreversibly entered the digital era. Only a decade later, the means and resources for studying premodern Chinese civilization have dramatically changed. Online library catalogs, Internet-based bibliographies and indexes, electronic journals and books, and fulltext databases, many of which were beyond the wildest imagination of scholars of the previous generation, have now become indispensable tools for daily research. Especially noticeable is the largescale digitization of premodern Chinese texts which has, literally, revolutionized the informationseeking behavior and research process of today’s sinologists