DHAsia Presents | Designing Next-Generation Computational Systems for Philological, Phonorhetorical and Literary Analysis, by Jeffrey Tharsen

Over the past two decades, the rise of digital media and digital technologies has led to the application of computational methods to the analysis of language, literature, and history, and has spawned a variety of innovative approaches to both individual texts and textual corpora. Large-scale digitization projects have provided a wealth of outstanding textual resources, but we are only just beginning to understand how best to approach them and how to design custom algorithms to exploit their underlying structures.

With various types of premodern Chinese corpora as primary examples, but relevant to other languages as well, this lecture provides a foundational overview of specific toolkits and platforms designed for philological, phonorhetorical and literary analysis, and presents strategies for designing next-generation data architectures and new types of computational tools to more fully exploit the untapped potential of the digital text and the digital archive.