Humanities Center, Digital Humanities Series: Jeffrey Tharsen, "Texts Talking to Texts: Computational Approaches to Large-Scale Premodern Chinese and Western European Intertextuality and Phonology," Wednesday, November 15th, 5pm, ZOOM

Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023 5 p.m.

Digital Humanities Series: Jeffrey Tharsen, "Texts Talking to Texts: Computational Approaches to Large-Scale Premodern Chinese and Western European Intertextuality and Phonology," Wednesday, November 15th,5:00 PM, ZOOM:https://csuchico.zoom.us/j/88561594318?pwd=MW5CZHpVRHUyOERSRW1WOVpOc09rZz09

Intertextuality has been a significant concern of scholarly communities around the world for centuries; fields like Redaktionsgeschichte in Germany and jiaokanxue 校勘學 in China have long provided evidence-based foundations for debates on the relationships between works, editions and authors. With the advent of digital texts and computational tools, new avenues for research into intertextuality have recently emerged. To this end we developed TextPAIR, a language-agnostic open-source unsupervised approach to detecting "text reuse" in any language or script. TextPAIR enables new forms of algorithmically-based research into and visualizations of relationships between textual communities, traditions and sources, detection of correspondences (from direct quotations to imperfect citations to allusions) across multiple languages and through various intellectual traditions, new ways to map the development of ideas and concepts over the longue durée, and insights into the sources of many of our most classic works, long obscured by time, space and/or lack of prestige.

Similarly, what would it mean to be able to hear classic works of poetry and prose from premodern eras recited in an algorithmic approximation of the dialect of their composers? How can we employ modern technologies to reveal subtle phonetic correspondences (assonance, consonance, alliteration) and rhetorical strategies based on sound patterns (antistrophe, epanalepsis) in these works? New methods and toolkits in computational linguistics have begun to provide substantive answers to these questions and lay a path for any who wish to use digital tools for similar endeavors, providing new insights into the methods employed by the authors and editors of our most hallowed texts and the literary and cultural practices and traditions that informed their composition and transmission.

Dr. Jeffrey Tharsen holds joint appointments as Associate Director of Technology and University Lecturer in the University of Chicago's Humanities Division.

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Humanities Center

Erin K. Kelly, Director

ekkelly@csuchico.edu