When Classical Chinese Meets Machine Learning: Explaining the Relative Performances of Word and Sentence Segmentation Tasks

We consider three major text sources about the Tang Dynasty of China in our experiments that aim to segment text written in classical Chinese. These corpora include a collection of Tang Tomb Biographies, the New Tang Book, and the Old Tang Book. We show that it is possible to achieve satisfactory segmentation results with the deep learning approach. More interestingly, we found that some of the relative superiority that we observed among different designs of experiments may be explainable. The relative relevance among the training corpora provides hints/explanation for the observed differences in segmentation results that were achieved when we employed different combinations of corpora to train the classifiers.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 2020 International Conference on Digital Humanities (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, ADHO

Institutional Contexts of Epistemic Knowledge in Pre-modern Societies

The use of writing for the preservation and transmission of administrative, scientific, literary and sacred knowledge has a long history. From the third millennium BCE on, many forms of social processes – intellectual, religious, political and others – have been increasingly materialized in the form of a variety of document types (tablets, bones, papyri, scrolls, parchments, books). Some of them were collected in archives or libraries that were dependent on royal palaces, governmental institutions and temples but also in private contexts. The publication Collect and Preserve assembles a number of studies devoted to material aspects of collecting texts in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Qumran, Medieval Japan, and Korea under the Chosŏn-Dynasty (1392–1910)

Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia

Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia offers a fascinating picture of the intricacies of regional and cross-regional networks and the complexity of Buddhist identities emerging across Asia.; Readership: All those interested in the history of Buddhism in East Asia and in East Asian Buddhist cultural practices, and anyone with an interest in the diffusion and transformation of Buddhism

Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia

Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia offers a fascinating picture of the intricacies of regional and cross-regional networks and the complexity of Buddhist identities emerging across Asia.; Readership: All those interested in the history of Buddhism in East Asia and in East Asian Buddhist cultural practices, and anyone with an interest in the diffusion and transformation of Buddhism

Preparing One’s Act: Performance Supports And The Question Of Human Nature In Early China

Since the 20th century, Chinese institutions have been recovering a growing number of ancient objects, among which figure manuscripts produced during the Warring States (453–221 BCE) era. These are the protagonists of this dissertation. Chapter 1 articulates the overarching goal of my study: the importance of rigorous philological and intellectual engagement to promote the significance of these manuscripts in and beyond the study of early Chinese history. In Chapter 2, I analyze manuscripts produced around 300 BCE as what I call “performance supports,” rather than self-contained philosophical and historical essays. My notion of performance supports incorporates observations about the composite nature of early Chinese manuscripts, but better accounts for other textual features, such as errors, abrupt endings, list-like passages, etc. Chapter 3 discusses the implications of my thesis. I show how performance supports were used in practices of knowledge management that relied on, but went beyond, the written medium. I explore oratory, recitation, literary compositions, and writings used to organize and retrieve knowledge. Second, I compare performance supports to other Warring States texts, so as to highlight the peculiarities of both groups and confirm that the concept of performance support is not an ad-hoc solution. Chapter 4 focuses on the performance support *Natural Dispositions Come from Endowment 性自命出, and reconstructs ways in which this manuscript functioned as the basis for central philosophical debates on human nature during the Warring States period. The dissertation is completed by a new philological study of *Natural Dispositions

The Time-Suturing Technologies of Northern Song Musicology

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.June 2019. Major: Music. Advisor: Gabriela Currie. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 371 pages.Scholars of ritual music in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) keenly sensed a temporal distance from the ancient sages that manifested as a divergence from canonical norms. To maintain a distinctive intellectual heritage and counterbalance outward-facing political and economic conditions, they located cultural identity in the idealized past. Given the overwhelming discursive importance of music, ministers and rulers alike sought to restore powerful practices and thereby transcend the boundedness of the dynastic cycle. Since their principal sources about antiquity, the textual classics, provided limited practical information about music, scholars had to supplement them with technologies grounded in linguistics, mathematics, and visualizations, which I explore in this dissertation. First, I observe how ritual music prescriptions were constituted in allusive or even paronomastic scholarly language. The Confucian principle of the rectification of names, stressing an enduring concord between words and reality, gave scholars rhetorical tools with which to critique at once society and music practices. Three case studies, treating the symbolism of the pentatonic scale, the discourse of harmony in the ritual bell-knife, and the implications of pitch metaphors, illustrate how reformers interrelated sociological commonplaces and concrete reform measures. Second, contrasting parallel mathematized and unmathematized music discourses, I trace the evolving relationship between mathematical and classical learning, showing how by Northern Song times mathematics could signify invariance. This discursive adoption afforded music reformers a precision that dovetailed elegantly with the royal prerogative of standardizing metrological systems. A case study explores the resilience of the numerical measurement of the standard pitch pipe across time and the overlapping metonymy that made it resistant to metrical reorganization. Finally, I contextualize the turn toward visual epistemology in the Northern Song in terms of classical precedent, the explosion of woodblock printing, and nascent archaeology. I compare two kinds of musical images, cosmological diagrams and prescriptive illustrations of ancient instruments. Though quite distinct in assumptions, intellectual pedigree, and style, both image types demonstrate a technology surpassing the power of text to organize, preserve, and disseminate orthodox musical practice. These technologies allowed the scholars to suture time, bringing them into more direct contact with their own exalted history

Contributions to the Study of Yang Xiong’s 揚雄 Fayan 法言

The present work offers several contributions to the study of the Western Han thinker Yang Xiong and in particular of his work entitled "Fayan". It concentrates on three areas that have received comparatively little attention despite their importance: the textual history of the "Fayan"; the three major commentaries that have shaped and continue to shape its reception (by Li Gui, Sima GUang, and Wang Rongbao); and the logic of the text’s composition and the way this was perceived in the Han dynasty