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.
Research methods employing large-scale databases of digital texts and digital lexica can assist in the detection of the ways phonetic patterns worked in concert with semantic and syntactic structures in premodern Chinese narrative texts. When applied to the speeches by eminent ministers preserved in the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Discourses of the States, close examinations of the tripartite framework of sound, meaning, and structure allow a deeper understanding of the phonorhetorical techniques employed by their composers (and/or transmitters), emphasizing key terms and imparting subtle feelings of grandeur and harmony. In comparative context, analyses of stylistic elements at scale provide insights into the rhetorical choices made by different authors in formative periods of Chinese literature, choices that informed and influenced future writers and scholars for millennia thereafter.
What does it mean to be able to study Chinese history at scale? What methods, tools, and approaches will allow us to understand Chinese history and historiography from a larger perspective over the longue durée, including linguistic, philosophical, ethnographic, and literary concerns? In this article we present what we feel is one potential key to answering these questions and provide an overview of the utility and value of harnessing this framework for text-based historical research as a means to expand one's scholarship to virtually limitless scales.
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