On the potential of corpus-based handwriting analysis: a refined analysis of the Zhangjiashan tomb library

International audienceIn this talk, I will present work conducted towards an analysis of the scribal hands appearing in the Zhangjiashan M247 corpus, attempting to refine previous work that I have already presented on the topic in the light of the workshop’s suggested readings. Corpus-based handwriting analysis, I believe, has the potential to reveal the hand of the tomb occupant, particularly as a single hand might appear in multiple texts found therewith and in the very documents thought to be the most personal—agendas, diaries, etc. If we can identify the hand of the tomb occupant, this, among other things, will provide us with the smoking gun needed to lay to rest lingering doubts about the ‘realness’ of tomb texts as mingqi 明器 specially produced by funerary workshops. The Zhangjiashan M247 corpus provides us with an ideal set of circumstances in this regard, considering the presence of similar orthographies in the calendar table and the back-and-forth seen in the mathematical manuscript Suanshushu 筭數術 (see Mo & Lin, 2016). In this talk, I will aim to press further on the problem of distinguishing hands from scripts so as to concretise this relationship and draw further connections across the M247 corpus

Mercury and the Case for Plural Planetary Traditions in Early Imperial China

International audienceA paper on the tension between the astral sciences tianwen 天文 'heavenly patterns' and li 曆 'sequencing' as concerns their respective treatments of planetary behaviour--a tension foregrounding others between epistemologies, genres, and authorial cultures

What good's a text? Textuality, orality, and mathematical astronomy in early imperial China

Article submitted to Archives internationales d'histoire des sciencesInternational audienceThis paper examines a 226 ce debate on li 曆 mathematical astronomy at the Cao-Wei (226–265) court as a case study in the role of orality and person-to-person exchange in the transmission of astronomical knowledge in early imperial China. The li- and mathematics-related manuscripts to have come down to us from the early imperial period often suffer from textual corruption, the form that this corruption takes being rooted in a culture of manuscript transmission by visual copying. Where numbers are involved, such corruption can significantly affect a text’s readability, reliability, and utility, and it is hardly a surprise, I argue, that actors speak of learning li by any way but reading. In 226 ce, two men showed up to a debate with different versions of Liu Hong’s 劉洪 (fl. 167–206 ce) Supernal Icon li (Qianxiang li 乾象曆), the one—the assistant director of the astronomical bureau—trying to best it, and the other—Liu Hong’s disciple—trying to defend it. Reconstructing the tortuous route by which Liu Hong’s astronomy made it into each man’s hands via a transmission network spanning the Three Kingdoms, I argue that this debacle, and its conclusion, are to be expected from the mode of oral and written transmission particular to astronomy in this age

A Positive Case for the Visuality of Text in Warring States Manuscript Culture

International audienceThis talk explores the evidence for visual copying vs. oral transmission in duplicate Warring States manuscripts

The Shaming of the Assistant Director: A Debacle in Third-century Chinese Mathematics Reconsidered in the light of Manuscript Culture, Biography, and the Historiography of Science

International audienceThis talk examines the case of the public shaming of Assistant Director to the Astronomical Bureau Han Yi 韓翊 upon the debate stage at the Cao-Wei court in 226 CE. In short, Han Yi makes it through rounds of testing, deliberation, and recommandation with his solution to the limits of the late Liu Hong's 劉洪 (fl. 167–206) Supernal Icon li (Qianxiang li 乾象曆), but, on the day of the debate, one of Liu Hong's disciples shows him up with better eclipse predictions from a different version of his master's astronomical system. To place the event in context, I offer an overview of what we understand about the transmission of technical knowledge in this manuscript culture, of the suspicion harboured towards the written word by contemporary experts, of the transmission history of the Supernal Icon li across the war-torn political divides of the Three Kingdoms (220–280), and of the reception of these events in the later histories of Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513) and Li Chunfeng 李淳風 (602–670)

也有輪著寫的：張家山漢簡《筭數書》寫手與篇序初探

International audienceThis paper examines the bamboo manuscript Suan shu shu 筭數術 (Writings on Mathematical Procedures) from Zhangjiashan 張家山 tomb 247 (sealed ≥ 186 BCE) for evidence of multiple scribal hands. The Suan shu shu presents a particularly interesting case study in this regard in that it is one of the few manuscripts from this period to feature the signatures of 'checkers' (chou 讎), the three of which were presumably responsible for the quality of textual (re)production. Presenting our methodology, we explain how we distinguished two separate hands operative in the body and section headings of the manuscript. From there, we present the peculiar case of the section 'Shao guang' 少廣 (Reduced Width), where we see the two hands alternate back and forth between question and answer, leading us, in the conclusion, to suggest the possibility that this manuscript is a teaching document reflecting a master–disciple exchange

The Planetary Visibility Tables in the Second-Century BC Manuscript Wu xing zhan 五星占

This article is a study of the planetary tables in the second century BC manuscript Wu xing zhan. Products of computation in this and later texts are compared to what we know about contemporary bodies ofplanetary knowledge to highlight discrepancies between theory and practice, as well as pluralities of tradition, within the early imperial astral sciences. In particular, this study focuses on such tables’ apparent use of a solar calendar (as distinct from the lunisolar civil calendar) for the purposes of planetary astronomy; it also attempts to explain anomalous features of the Wu xing zhan’s planetary tables in the context of early manuscript culture

Science yield modeling with the Exoplanet Open-Source Imaging Mission Simulator (EXOSIMS)

We report on our ongoing development of EXOSIMS and mission simulation results for WFIRST. We present the interface control and the modular structure of the software, along with corresponding prototypes and class definitions for some of the software modules. More specifically, we focus on describing the main steps of our high-fidelity mission simulator EXOSIMS, i.e., the completeness, optical system and zodiacal light modules definition, the target list module filtering, and the creation of a planet population within our simulated universe module. For the latter, we introduce the integration of a recent mass-radius model from the FORECASTER software. We also provide custom modules dedicated to WFIRST using both the Hybrid Lyot Coronagraph (HLC) and the Shaped Pupil Coronagraph (SPC) for detection and characterization, respectively. In that context, we show and discuss the results of some preliminary WFIRST simulations, focusing on comparing different methods of integration time calculation, through ensembles (large numbers) of survey simulations

Informing the Financing of Universal Energy Access: An Assessment of Current Flows

Energy poverty is widely recognized as a major obstacle to economic and social development and poverty alleviation. To help inform the design of appropriate and effective policies to reduce energy poverty, we present a brief analysis of the current macro financial flows in the electricity and gas distribution sectors in developing countries. We build on the methodology used to quantify the flows of investment in the climate change area. This methodology relies on national gross fixed capital formation, overseas development assistance, and foreign direct investment. These high-level and aggregated investment figures provide a sense of scale to policy-makers, but are only a small part of the information required to design financial vehicles. In addition, these figures tend to mask numerous variations between sectors and countries, as well as trends and other temporal fluctuations. Nonetheless, for the poorest countries, one can conclude that the current flows are considerably short (at least five times) of what will be required to provide a basic level of access to clean, modern energy services to the “energy poor”.Energy Access, Energy Finance, Financial flows

也有輪著寫的：張家山漢簡《筭數書》寫手與篇序初探

International audienceThis article examines the bamboo manuscript Suan shu shu 筭數術 (Writings on Mathematical Procedures) from Zhangjiashan 張家山 tomb 247 (sealed ≥ 186 BCE) for evidence of multiple scribal hands. The Suan shu shu presents a particularly interesting case study in this regard in that it is one of the few manuscripts from this period to feature the signatures of 'checkers' (chou 讎), the three of which were presumably responsible for the quality of textual (re)production. Presenting our methodology, we explain how we distinguished two separate hands operative in the body and section headings of the manuscript. From there, we present the peculiar case of the section 'Shao guang' 少廣 (Reduced Width), where we see the two hands alternate back and forth between question and answer, leading us, in the conclusion, to suggest the possibility that this manuscript is a teaching document reflecting a master–disciple exchange