Event: Exploratory Seminar on Statistical Approaches Mining Texts in Literary Chinese
Location: Radcliffe, Harvard University
Title: A Short Journey of Digital Humanities at National Chengchi University
The Database for the Study of Modern Chinese Thought and Literature hosted by National Chengchi University contains digitized text files for historical documents that were published between 1830 and 1930. The database provides an important basis for experimenting ideas of doing research of Chinese history with digital facilities. In the past few years, we built a basic search engine so that researchers could request text materials that contained specific keywords. In recent years, we implemented software tools for analyzing the contents of the retrieved text materials for specific research purposes, and have published some results in digital humanities conferences in Taiwan.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of these recent experiments. The topics include the study of words about "idealisms" ("主義") in China, the burgeoning concept of "Chinese people" ("華人") in modern days, the emperor’s altitudes toward constitutional monarchy during the late Qing dynasty, the search of transliterated Chinese words, the changes in the perceptions about "equality" ("平等") in modern China, and an attempt to identify keywords with a statistical method. In addition, I will also report two examples of using tools of text analysis to answer questions hidden in two well-known Chinese novels – Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West.
In addition to reporting what we have experimented in the past years, I would also attempt to use a higher level view to examine our explorations. After and while exploring the applications of digital facilities to historical studies in Chinese, we have gradually sensed a collaboration pattern between historians and computer science people. The pattern appeared repeatedly in the past few years, and have proved its potential in field tests. At the same time, however, some problems were identified, which suggested the way for how we could make our research more rigorous.
If time allows, I will also provide an overview of an expended research project funded by the National Science Council. We recruited researchers in modern Chinese history, in modern Taiwanese literature, in post WWII Taiwanese history, and in more traditional Chinese history in a joined project. We would have a great chance to further examine the effectiveness of using digital tools in digital humanities studies.