Chinese Knowledge and Poetry Medieval Library
Chinese Knowledge and Poetry Medieval Library
In the Chinese Empire, texts were highly valued and played a fundamental role in the construction of a sophisticated society. Rituals, social interactions, personal recognition, and political institutions highly depended on the ability to write in regulated ways. Among other features, texts of the medieval period (3rd - 10th century) are characterized by intertextuality – i.e. borrowing fragments of older texts to compose new ones. This phenomenon has been documented for literary pieces, especially poetry.
The CHI-KNOW-PO project means to adopt a more integrative perspective that overcomes the bias of a fragmented conception of texts produced by distinct modern disciplines. It aims to demonstrate that the textual realm in medieval China (220-907) was continuous and that intertextuality was not specific to poetry. As a consequence, snippets of knowledge, along with textual fragments, circulated through many different genres.
The CHI-KNOW-PO project embraces a large body of belletristic texts, scholarship (dictionaries, encyclopedias and commentaries in particular), technical knowledge (essays mainly) from the first millenium, along with the classic Confucian anthology of the Shi 詩 (Poems).
Image-corpus
In order to carry a diachronic study of this very large corpus, the CHI-KNOW-PO team makes use of computational tools, and combines distant and close reading methodologies.
Text mining strategies include the identification of networks of semantic equivalents (rather than synonyms per se) in medieval China, the localization of precise or fuzzy cooccurrences, and the detection of textual overlaps.
The project focuses on the theme of plants, which hold a central position in Chinese poetic grammar. The plan is to reconstruct the paths that textual fragments concerning plants travelled, within the CHI-KNOW-PO body of texts.
A conscious consideration is to give repositories of knowledge such as lexicons and encyclopaedias, which have been largely neglected and therefore remain marginal in sinological research, the same attention as valued textual heritage, given that these repositories played an essential role in education and erudition.
The project verifies how pieces of information circulated through all kinds of texts by using established methodologies such as philology and textual analysis, along with computational tools. By revealing and investigating networks of texts, which partially share common representations of plants, the project demonstrates the role played by poetry in the economy of knowledge in medieval times.
More specifically, the project means to evaluate the extent to which medieval poets borrowed expressions directly from original sources and show what inspiration these poets found in compiled sources. The project also helps qualify how different textual genres were vectors of knowledge and determine if poetry also constituted a repository of knowledge. Such a shift in perspective challenges the line drawn between “documents” and “literary texts” and links together disconnected texts. It thus paints a more accurate picture of literati activities in medieval China and reassesses preconceptions related to the impact of specific texts, the process of composition and the definition of knowledge.
The CHI-KNOW-PO project generates three main outputs.
First, the project develops a knowledge network under the form of a relational database where information about the texts under study, periods of history, authors and people mentioned in the texts, semantic categories, and lexical entries.
Second, the project shares a set of text mining tools, which queries the corpus to identify cooccurrences and map down textual overlaps.
Finally, the project edits and structures a large set of texts from Antiquity to the Middle Ages under open Creative Commons licenses.
This Website presents the corpus produced by the CHI-KNOW-PO team equipped with filtering tools derived from the CHI-KNOW-PO database.
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Lien vers la bibliographie Zotero
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Liens vers - l’espace Jupyter où seront consultable la base de données et testables les scripts de fouille de texte - le GitLab du projet - La collection Nakala CHI-KNOW-PO