Digital Approaches to Late Imperial Chinese Literature: Exploring Quasi-historical Texts

Friday, September 19, 2014
Room S050 | CGIS South | Harvard University

The ever-increasing availability of digital information on pre-modern Chinese texts, from online bibliographic records to fully digitized transcripts, is allowing scholars to adapt mathematical and statistical tools for literary analysis. In this presentation, Paul Vierthaler addresses the promise and some of the drawbacks of using digital techniques to analyze broad stylistic differences among late imperial Chinese texts. Stylometry, developed by linguists and widely used in author-attribution studies, shows promise for illustrating differences in style among various genres of late Imperial writing. This, in turn, provides insight into why traditional bibliographers often classified unofficial histories as novels.

Paul Vierthaler is a 2014-2015 An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His dissertation is titled "Quasi-history and Public Knowledge: A Social History of Late Ming and Early Qing Unofficial Historical Narratives," and his PhD is from Yale University.