Dataset for “Materiality, Symbolism, Technology, and Politics: A ‘Four‑Lens Prism’ Model f

Six CSV files support the analysis of ethnic pictorial manuscripts from Yunnan-Guizhou. The data includes coding of agricultural tool morphology across five manuscript versions, symbol-ethnic group co-occurrence frequencies, and a policy-artifact time series from 1730 to 1790. Author Xin Wu published this dataset on figshare in 2026 under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Analyze the evolution of agricultural tool morphology based on coding across five manuscript versions.
• Study the relationship between ethnic groups and symbolic imagery based on co-occurrence frequency data.
• Examine the interplay between historical policy and material culture based on the 1730–1790 time series.
• Compare technical specifications of looms based on data from historical images and contemporary artifacts.
• Assess standardization in visual representation based on the index comparing official versus folk pictorials.

Strengths

• Includes a policy-artifact time series with a defined 60-year range (1730–1790).
• Contains data structured for direct replication of specific figures and a table from the associated paper.
• Comprises six distinct CSV files covering multiple analytical dimensions like morphology, symbols, and technical comparison.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is very small at 12.4 KB, indicating limited scope.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Xin Wu.

Collection Method

Likely created through manual coding and analysis of historical pictorial manuscripts.

Time Range

Includes data from 1730 to 1790.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-05 09:12:49; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Focuses on the Yunnan-Guizhou region of China.