Digitally Detecting the Strange: Crime, Ghosts, and Other Odd Things in Late Imperial China

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This class is an introduction to the unusual and strange in late imperial Chinese literature through digital analysis. We will focus on works that engage with the nature of evidence and reality: stories about crime and detection, ghosts, encounters with foxes, and other odd narratives. The stories we read, mostly written in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, are found across a wide array of textual genres popular in early modern China. Students will also learn to leverage a variety of digital methods to analyze these stories, covering approaches from textual analysis and mapping to network analysis and the public humanities.

• Matthew Sommer, Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Introduction
• Judith Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine
• Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
• Ruth Anhert et al, The Network Turn
• Chen Song, Governing a Multicentered Empire: Prefects and their Network
• Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative

The course finishes with a final public facing project (though it is up to individual students to decide if they want to make it actually public). These projects will be websites or multimedia projects containing roughly 2,000 words of content (or the equivalent) and will deploy at least two methods learned in the class. There will be six short assignments throughout the semester that scaffold to the final project.

Term Assessments:

• Presentation or performance - 10%
• Papers/writing assignments - 50%
• Participation - 10%

Final Assessments:

• Final paper, problem set, or project - 30%

• Multimedia Student Project Required
• Statistical, design or other software use required

None.