Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7256950

Sturgeon, Donald;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7256963

Observed textual similarities between different pieces of writing are frequently cited by textual scholars as grounds for interpretative stances about the meaning of a passage and its authorship, authenticity, and accuracy. Historically, identifying occurrences of such similarities has been a matter of extensive knowledge and recall of the content and locations of passages contained within certain texts, together with painstaking manual comparison by examining printed copies, use of concordances, or more recently, appropriate use of full-text searchable database systems. The development of increasingly comprehensive and accurate digital corpora of early Chinese transmitted writing raises many opportunities to study these phenomena using more systematic digital techniques. These offer the promise of not only vast savings in time and labor but also new insights made possible only through exhaustive comparisons of types that would be entirely impractical without the use of computational methods. This article investigates and contrasts unsupervised techniques for the identification of textual similarities in premodern Chinese works in general, and the classical corpus in particular, taking the text of the Mozi 墨子 as a concrete example. While specific examples are presented in detail to concretely demonstrate the utility and potential of the techniques discussed, all of the methods described are generally applicable to a wide range of materials. With this in mind, this article also introduces an open-access platform designed to help researchers quickly and easily explore these phenomena within those materials most relevant to their own work.

Nicoll-Johnson, Evan;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7256976

During the Liu-Song 劉宋 dynasty (420–79), Pei Songzhi 裴松之 (372–451) compiled an elaborate set of annotations to the history of the Three Kingdoms era, Sanguozhi 三國志. Several decades later, during the Liang 梁 dynasty (502–57), Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標 (462–521) compiled similar annotations for Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, a collection of pithy anecdotes concerning prominent figures from the Han through Jin dynasties. These annotations were products of a new era of textual production, in which fervent interest in historiography and book collecting reached new heights. Though building on earlier traditions of commentary and exegesis, the influence of this newly expanded network of textual circulation can be seen in the sheer variety of sources Pei and Liu cite, as well as in their meticulous and unprecedented attention to bibliographic detail. This has made it possible to use their annotations to trace the compilers and titles of hundreds of texts that would otherwise be completely unknown. Relying on this wealth of information, earlier studies have tabulated the titles of all cited sources to create lengthy bibliographies. But in doing so, they divorce this bibliographic information from the context in which it was originally embedded. This study uses data mined from these annotations to create a series of network diagrams, which illustrate how citations of older texts create connections among the various chapters of the two texts to which they were appended. By considering the networks of textual relationships created through annotation, this study reveals the importance of otherwise marginalized texts in the construction of historiographic knowledge and sheds new light on how scholars of the early medieval period made use of, and made sense of, the increasingly vast sea of text to which they had access.

Zorkina, Mariana;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7256989

This article focuses on computational analysis of Tang dynasty “poems on things” (yongwu shi 詠物詩) and some of the most common objects described in them. Modern technology offers many possibilities for new approaches to the study of poetic language, and this article discusses some of the tools that can aid in semantic analysis of separate words or poems. These include so-called word embeddings, vector representations of word semantics, and “fingerprints” that are calculated on the basis of word embeddings to represent semantics of whole texts. Applied to classical Chinese poetry, they can show some of the paradigmatic groups of images and their distribution between concepts of happiness and sadness, loneliness and companionship. Finally, topical grouping of poems on things is discussed and explored with the help of fingerprints to look for formal principles behind the grouping of the texts.

Liu, Chao-Lin;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7257002

Digital tools provide instrumental services to the study of Chinese poetry in an era of big, open data. The authors employed nine representative collections of Chinese poetry, covering the years 1046 BCE to 1644 CE, in their demonstrations. They demonstrate sophisticated software that allows researchers to extract source material that meets multiple search criteria, which may consider words, poets, collections, and time of authoring, paving the way for new explorations of Chinese poetry from linguistic, literary, artistic, and historical viewpoints. Analytic tools help researchers uncover information concealed in poetic works that are related to aesthetic expressions, personal styles, social networks, societal influences, and temporal changes in Chinese poetry. The increasing accessibility of digitized texts, along with sophisticated digital tools, such as the ones these authors developed and demonstrate here, can thereby enhance the efficiency and effectiveness for exploring and studying classical Chinese poetry.

Mazanec, Thomas J.;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7257015

This article combines qualitative and quantitative methods to rethink the literary history of late medieval China (830–960 CE). It begins with an overview of exchange poetry in the Tang dynasty and its role in the construction of the poetic subject, namely, the poetic subject's distributed textual body. A total of 10,869 poems exchanged between 2,413 individuals are cataloged to seek the structure of the collectively imagined literary relations of the time. This catalog is subjected to social-network analysis to reveal patterns and peculiarities in the extant corpus of late medieval poetry, which in turn prompt close readings of the sources. These readings lead to four conclusions about the history of late medieval poetry: (a) Buddhist monks were hubs of literary activity, (b) the poet Jia Dao became an increasingly important site of connection over time, (c) the concept of “poetic schools” is not a useful lens through which to view the Late Tang, and (d) poets at the center of the network are increasingly characterized by their mobility. This combination of network analysis and close reading highlights the dynamic nature of Chinese literary history, providing insight into the ever-shifting conjunctures of forms, genres, expectations, and relations in the late medieval literary world.

Zhaopeng, Wang;Junjun, Qiao;Translator, Thomas J. Mazanec,;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7257028

This article uses data to analyze the geographic distribution and transformation of the poetic world in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). There are two ways we can examine spatial distribution and movement in Tang poetry. The first is a static examination of poets' hometowns (jiguan 籍貫). This method looks at the distribution of poets during a specific period to understand where greater or lesser numbers of poets were born, which places could be considered the center of Tang poetry, and what kinds of geographical changes occurred over time in the Tang literary world. The second is a dynamic examination of poets' activities. When we compare various Tang poets, what differences and changes can we find in the places they lived and traveled? Are the poets' spatial distribution patterns even, or do they favor certain regions? Where were the centers of poetic activity in this period? Were they the same as the political center (the two capitals), or were they located farther out in the provinces? Were they in culturally or politically developed areas or in more remote, less developed ones? In which areas was poetic activity most frequent and intense? This article attempts to answer these questions with data.

Clifford, Timothy;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7257041

Well over one hundred classical essay anthologies were published during the printing boom in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ming dynasty China. These anthologies testify to a voracious appetite for “ancient-style prose” (guwen) among the expanding reading public, and their contents represent a valuable resource for studying the formation of taste during this crucial moment in literary history. But how are we to compare the contents of such a large group of anthologies, when each individual anthology contains at least a few hundred individual selections? How might such a method clarify or revise our understanding of Ming literary culture? This article describes how Gephi was used to compare the contents of thirty-four anthologies and visualize clusters of anthologies corresponding to distinct editorial strategies. The author argues that the synchronic and diachronic relationships among these clusters suggest a new way of narrating Ming literary history in terms of successive waves of alternative canon building, each wave representing a new critique of the civil service examination curriculum's overriding focus on model examination essays. He also shows that, whereas the Qin-Han and transdynastic canons were first promulgated in a mix of government and commercial anthologies, the xiaopin 小品 (informal essay) canon was purely the invention of early seventeenth-century commercial printers.

Huang, Yi-Long;Zheng, Bingyu;Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7257054

By investigating two literary allusions, chuzhi 蜍志 and lüdai 呂袋, found in poems from the Ming-Qing period, this article seeks to discover new ways to combine traditional philological techniques and digital research methodologies in the study of Chinese literature. The article illustrates several procedures through which scholars today can use digitized versions of large compendia such as the Peiwen yunfu 佩文韻府 (Thesaurus Arranged by Rhymes) to efficiently and rapidly find solutions to their questions regarding obscure historical or literary references. In addition, through a thorough study of one of the poems composed by Yiquan 宜泉, a close friend of Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, and an individual called “Fourth Brother Li” that the poem was dedicated to, this article also shows the special power of electronic textual research to analyze the different ways social networks were formed and how they functioned during this era.

Mazanec, Thomas J.;Tharsen, Jeffrey R.;Chen, Jing

2018 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture

doi: 10.1215/23290048-7481583