In April 2016, I will spend a week in Palo Alto as a DHAsia @ Stanford short-term resident. Many thanks to Tom Mullaney and Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford for organizing this program.
Here is the official DHAsia 2016 schedule.
If you are a scholar of East Asian literature and have an interest in computational methods, I recommend the February and March sessions. I particularly urge you to be acquainted with Richard So and Hoyt Long’s superb new project at the University of Chicago.
Events in April and May target historians. My contributions will try to give more attention to the visualization and analysis of network data, based in large part on what I learned at the NEH IATDH workshop in networks and network analysis in the humanities at UCLA IPAM in 2010 (already 5 years ago!).
Lastly, below you will find the abstracts for my public talk and workshop.
Intellectual History and Computing: Modeling and Simulating the World of the Korean Yangban
The intellectual history of early modern Korea is defined by the coalescence of four major schools of Neo-Confucian thought and a number of literary trends. These developments took place at a time of increasing localization of population, material resources, state institutions, as well as culture. The connections between the material and ideational aspects of the yangban aristocracy has been unclear, owing in large part to the reliance on case studies and an extraordinary attention given to a small number of personalities, sources, and locations. To address this shortcoming, this talk presents some quantitative analysis of structured data as well as semi-supervised and predictive interpretation of a large corpus on the basis of diction, style, and figures of speech. The long-term objective is to create a simulation model for the social environment and textual world of the yangban in early modern Korea. The pilot run draws from three data sources: (1) the roster of 5,000 civil service examination degree holders; (2) 12,000 nodes representing their extended kinship network; and (3) an estimated 7 million characters of prose extracted from 200 collected works.
How to Map, Visualize, and Analyze the Yangban Aristocracy
This workshop shares my experience with computational ways of addressing key issues in early modern Korean history. Computational history entails the processing of digitized or born-digital sources using software packages and algorithms designed for use in another discipline or industry. In addition, historians of East Asia may need to consider the support for Unicode encoding or rare Sinitic characters. I will demonstrate the strategies I developed to collate genealogical data and scrape a large amount of text with the aid of a macro program. Thereafter, I will discuss my adaptation of Cytoscape, a network visualization platform designed for bioinformatics, to analyze the robust ties of marriage that contributed to the self-perpetuation and regional division of the early modern Korean yangban aristocrats. The marriage networks will be compared against the patterns of localization discovered through spatial data and text analysis.