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Digitalization and visualization of modern Chinese literature

Portfolio

Motivations

Can machines read and write literature in a meaningful way? What's different between machine reading and human reading? The better a machine reads, the better a machine can write. How do machines pose a threat or co-create with human writers? Can we evaluate and distinguish a text written by a human or a machine? Furthermore, how do we judge the qualities of different language translations of literature works? Can machines assist humans to build criteria of the qualities of different language translations of literature work?


Are we in the era where we can dispense with literary analysis done by humans?

We should ask if machines can read and write literature in a meaningful way at the first step. Can machine reading be compared to human reading?

Will novels and screenplays be authored by machines?

Rytr is a powerful AI novel-writing software program that can help human writers develop new ideas and storylines. It is based on a neural network that has been trained on over 500,000 stories. How does AI cast a threat or co-create with human writers?

How does a machine assist us to observe the structure in modern literature? How is it different from the form in Literature?

Topic models are widely used to uncover the latent semantic structure from text corpora (Yan, Guo, Lan, and Cheng, 2013). Applying topic modelling to modern literature opens up a new way for research.

Can machines assist humans to build the criteria of the qualities of different language translations literature work?

Human translators reconstruct the text from the source language to the target language. Can machines decode these languages meaningfully? We compared these results decoded by a machine of the source and the target laguages to see if they are close or not.

Recent Projects

Project 1

Translations with cultural differences: A comparison study of original texts, and English translation texts of the Chinese novel using topic modelling

Fortress Besieged written by Qian Zhongshu in the 1940’s is a novel which describes the situation of Chinese intellectuals during the vicious Chinese Civil War. In 1961, a Chinese literature historian Hsia Chih-tsing highly praised the novel’s comic exuberance and acclaimed it as “the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature; it is perhaps also its greatest novel” (Hsia, 1961).

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Project 2

Social network analysis of the novel Fortress Besieged

Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory.[1] It characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes (individual actors, people, or things within the network) and the ties, edges, or links (relationships or interactions) that connect them.

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Project 3

The Zeitgeist in Thirty Years of Modern Chinese Literature Using Topic Model

In this study, we employ LDA topic modeling, statistical models in clustering, to analyze masterpieces of modern Chinese fiction from 1919 to 1949. Much research takes the perspective of historical determinism or author-centric approach to explicate modern fictions, which has been criticized as unscientific because of subjectivity. Conversely, linear discriminant analysis, which operates the distribution of topics and words in a document, can reduce bias in subjective assessment that is related to close reading. We devote to incorporate digital technologies into literary history to create a productive dialogue between humanities and science.These include: A Madman’s Diary, The True Story of Ah Q, Sinking, Miss Sophia's Diary, A Story of Three Lovers, Midnight, Rickshaw Boy, Xiaoxiao, Family, One Rainy Evening, Shanghai Fox-trot, Tales of Hulan River, Marriage of Xiao Erhei , The Golden Cangue, Fortress Besieged.

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Project 4

Translations with cultural differences: A comparison study of original texts, English and Japanese translation texts of the Chinese novel using topic modelling

Different language of translations may be like a different piece of the puzzle which provides a perspective to the original text. Therefore, the results of the topics may be different and the focuses of the terms within the topics may also be different. However, it is interesting to test whether the cultural similarities may result in a more similar structure of translations. For instance, Chinese culture may be more like Japanese culture than English culture, therefore, the results of the topic modelling of Chinese texts (OT) and Japanese translations (JT) may be closer than OT and English translations (ET) or ET and JT.

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Project 5

A comparison of the tasks of topic labelling from a machine, the novice, and the expert

Are we in the era where we can dispense with literary analysis done by humans? The answer is at least not for the near future. Can the machine reading be compared to the human reading? In this study, we propose to compare the tasks of the machine labelling, the novice labelling, and the expert labelling to see if machines can read literature in a meaningful way.

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About us

Ling-Yi Huang

Hello! I’m Ling-Yi Huang. I hold a PhD degree in Communication and Journalism from National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. I have previously worked as a lecturer at the Literature and Media studies Department at Nanfang College of Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China from 2015-2017. Due to family reasons, I moved to Sweden and worked as a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at the Media and Journalism Department of Linnaeus University from 2017-2020. Currently, I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSV) of Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden. My research interests are new media studies, social media, digital humanities, digital politics and digital research methods. Besides, I have developed to an advanced level of both Python and R languages and I am using both to conduct research.





Wan-Zhen Fang

Hello! I’m Wan-Zhen Fang. I hold a PhD degree in Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies from Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan. I have been in a lecturer of the Department of Literature and Media at the University of Nanfang College of Sun Yat-Sen, Guangdong, China since 2017. My research interests are mainly in modernism of East Asian, modern Chinese literature, and cross-arts studies. What I bring forth now is the interdisciplinary research between humanities and science.

Contact info

Phone

+46 737290973

Email

chinesedigitalhumanities@gmail.com

Address

Stockholm, Sweden