Fellows Seminar - Studying the use of words to decipher representations of nature and people in first millennium China

Digitization of a Collège de France volume and annotation using Vision (Calfa)

By Marie Bizais-Lillig, 2021 Fellow

The Chinese Knowledge in Poetry (CHI-KNOW-PO) project mainly focuses on Chinese texts of the first millennium beyond genre distinction. Based on the understanding that literati were involved as much in everyday physical activities (managing agriculture or leading an army, for instance) as in intellectual life (which led them to write poems), the aim of the CHI-KNOW-PO project is to identify how the representations of the world that emerge from the texts they wrote were shaped by both practical and cultural knowledge.

The project draws on three ressources. Firstly, it is based on a textual database that is still under development. Secondly, it necessitates a knowledge base that has taken the from of a large bio-bibliographical and lexical relational database. Finally, it relies on a computational exploration of texts, leading to textual, historical and cultural analyses. This talk will introduce the tools developed and used in the project through the presentation of four case studies which involve the study of co-occurrences, sequential text repetition and citation.

• Read more about Marie Bizais-Lillig and her USIAS project: The role played by poetry in the economy of knowledge in medieval China.