Understanding the Databases of Premodern China: Harnessing the Potential of Textual Corpora as Digital Data Sources

Much of my work over the past dozen years or so has focused on harnessing digital methods and resources to the study of premodern Chinese phonology and philology. Those of you who are familiar with my online dictionary system for mapping the sounds of early Chinese texts, the Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, or who have seen some of my studies of phonorhetorical patterns in early Chinese texts will perhaps be well aware of the new types of research that have emerged from harnessing textual databases and digital corpora to advanced analytical algorithms and computational methodologies. I'll begin with the work I've been doing to convert premodern Chinese dictionaries, prognostication manuals and ritual materials, and commentaries on the classics to modern data structures, and then in Part II, turn to how these techniques might be applied to literary works and historiographies, finishing up with a review of a couple of new digital analytical toolkits I've been developing, along with a new type of visualization interface. As I see it, the real key to much of this work is understanding the formulaic and systemic nature of these texts, from the level of the single text up to the collection or anthology and even at the large-scale archival level. Modern computing systems are excellent tools for systematization and quantification; while they may have difficulties with nuance and deeper literary or humanistic analyses, highly organized systems of knowledge play to their strengths, and I think we can be grateful that so many outstanding varieties of complex and advanced systematized knowledge in China have been preserved in written form over the millennia, and passed down to us.