A Distant Exploration of Literary Writings and Historical Documents in Classical Chinese
Date and Time: 11 Nov, Wednesday, 2-3 pm
Speaker: Prof Chao-lin Liu, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Chair: Dr Christopher Rosenmeier, University of Edinburgh
Zoom link for registration:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqduCqpjsiHNO2QW8Fvp0ktYATr0H3MAuy
Abstract:
We design and employ software to analyze the contents of literary writings and historical documents. In the burgeoning stage of digital humanities in Taiwan, relatively simple yet interesting analysis of famous novels of Ming and Qing dynasties were used to stimulate the interests in digital humanities of the humanities researchers. Gradually, we move onto more practical analysis of the poetic works of the Tang and Song dynasties. Methods of text analysis assist us to look for useful information in historical documents in both classical and modern Chinese, and part of which represents our collaboration with the China Biographical Database Project of Harvard University. In recent years, we apply similar methods to analyze Taiwanese poems and local gazetteers. More recently, we extend our efforts to optical character recognition to digitise hard copies of classical Chinese texts. Aiming at achieving a more advanced level of algorithmic competence, we also explore the applicability of deep learning methods to the problems of word segmentation for classical Chinese poems and the problems of sentence splitting for historical documents that were also written in classical Chinese. We shall share selected experience in this brief presentation.
About the speaker:
Prof. Chao-lin Liu obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan. His research focuses on data analysis and knowledge exploration, digital humanities, computational linguistics. Now he is the Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Computer Science and the Associate Dean of the College of Science, National Chengchi University. Prof. Liu is the incumbent president of the Taiwanese Association for Digital Humanity.
Please pre-register here:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqduCqpjsiHNO2QW8Fvp0ktYATr0H3MAuy
This lecture is hosted by Asian Studies & the University Library, University of Edinburgh, National Central Library of Taiwan and Centre for Chinese Studies, Taiwan.