Hacking Chinese Studies: An Introduction to Text Mining for Chinese Literature and Culture

Course page

This seminar is an introduction to leveraging the processing power of modern computers to study Chinese culture. This course will introduce you to a variety of newly developed digital tools, algorithms, and datasets that allow us to pursue new insights into traditional Chinese literature and culture. You will engage with new scholarship being published in the rapidly expanding field of the digital humanities and learn how to create digital research projects from scratch.

• Anne Burdick, From Humanities to Digital Humanities
• Paul Vierthaler, Fiction and Stylistic Gradience in Late Imperial Chinese Lit
• Michael Stanley-Baker, Mapping the bencao
• Wendy Hsu, Digital Ethnography: Toward Augmented Empiricism
• Laura McGrath, More Specific, More Complex
• Hilde de Weerdt, Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets

See instructor for complete list.

There will be six short assignments implementing digital methods and a final paper/project totaling around 2750 words due at the end of the semester.

Term Assessments:

• Presentation or performance - 15%
• Papers/writing assignments - 30%
• Participation - 25%

Final Assessments:

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

Statistical, design or other software use required

None.