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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAnatoly Detwyler \/ University of Wisconsin-Madison<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ———————————–<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Humanities scholarship is increasingly aided by forms of computational analysis, from natural language processing and text mining to network and geographical mapping. What unites computational techniques is their basis in data collection, manipulation, and analysis. To study data is to search out patterns and anomalies: what stands out might reveal new things\u2014or confirm received knowledge\u2014about historical relationships or aesthetic trends. Good analysis begins with good data: the distribution of a corpus or database will shape the kinds of questions one can ask, and the quality of the answers received. Such a statement comes as no surprise to anyone with a basic training in statistics, where sampling is an integral part of the science. This includes the social sciences, which for a long time have predominantly focused on the conceits of quantitative analysis (Marx, Freud, and Weber are now more likely to be read in history and literature courses!). <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But when it comes to the humanities, the new importance given to data\u2014especially literary and historical data\u2014has become part of a vital and ongoing conversation about the direction of the \ufb01eld. Is quantitative, data-driven analysis fundamentally different from our older practices of focused, careful reading, and the reconstruction of history using evidence? If data analysis and forms of close reading are to be reconciled, how should it be done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As high-stakes as they are, these questions are open-ended. They have no correct or final answer\u2014anyone who claims otherwise risks ignoring either the real gains or the real threats that data poses to humanistic knowledge production. One\u2019s response to such questions serves as a proxy for that person\u2019s attitude toward the \ufb01eld of \u201cdigital humanities\u201d that is currently spreading across university departments and centers inside and outside of China. As data\u2014and its many processes, from data\ufb01cation and digitization, to quantitative, scaled analysis\u2014become accordingly more prevalent, we are faced with the task of retracing its older manifestations and uses in our \ufb01eld. (of course, it is also important to examine the role of data in the development of modern existence and knowledge more generally). When, where, and how did early forms of data analysis and pattern recognition become integral\u2014 or even simply possible\u2014as tools of humanistic inquiry? Answering this question reveals forgotten or repressed historical episodes, where older generations scholars leveraged data analysis to read, think about, and ultimately produce new forms of cultural and historical knowledge. A prehistory of the digital humanities would thus give us important context for considering the situation of the digital humanities today\u2014including not just this new \ufb01eld\u2019s myriad attractions, but also its limitations, disappointments, failures, and the forms of resistance and skepticism that they engender. Perhaps such an inquiry would even revise the broader self-identity of our \ufb01eld, challenging longstanding assumptions about the divisions between humanities and quantitative disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The concept of a \u201cprehistory\u201d is itself problematic. The word calls attention to a gap between two eras, where the latter period anachronistically marks the former through the absence of some de\ufb01ning thing or quality. What is implied by binding two eras together is more than simply a thematic connection, and instead an assertion about continuity and even causality: prehistory thus both affirms conventional historical periodization and challenges it by expanding an event horizon, pointing to an earlier origin. When it comes to the digital humanities, a \ufb01eld that though still in its relative infancy, is already very di\ufb00use and famously di\ufb03cult to precisely de\ufb01ne, it is di\ufb03cult enough to write a coherent history of the \ufb01eld\u2014never mind excavating a prehistory! If one merely focuses on a fairly concrete marker such as the name \u201cdigital humanities\u201d (or less influential but more evocative terms such as \u201cdistant reading\u201d or \u201ccultural analytics\u201d) and simply tracks its appearance in scholarly discourse, the result is little more than a limited form of discourse analysis. It doesn\u2019t tell us the process by which members of a \ufb01eld achieved their self-awareness. And the fatal mistake of over-focusing on words is the fact that historical actors often lack the terms to describe their conditions of existence (one need only to think about the example of the word oxygen, which humans have been breathing for far longer than its identi\ufb01cation). In order to push beyond the epistemological boundaries of a name, one runs up against questions of ontology. What, really, is the historical object that is the \u201cdigital humanities\u201d? Does its \u201cdigital\u201d apply only to digital computers? If so, then the historical horizon wouldn\u2019t extend back beyond the 1950s, for example the early collaborations between the Italian Jesuit priest, Roberto Busa, and the computer company, IBM, which resulted in a concordance of St. Thomas Aquinas\u2019s work recorded entirely on punch cards. Or the 1964 conference organized by IBM on \u201chumanities computing\u201d and literary data processing, an event that inaugurated a fecund period of experimentation and dialog, including the foundation of the journal Computers and the Humanities<\/em> in 1966. A fuller understanding of the digital humanities before its period of consolidation in the late 1970s and 1980s must await further research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Already such projects illustrate how scholars have been experimenting with computers to explore questions related to text, authorship, and language for decades before the humanities became \u201cdigital.\u201d But these examples don\u2019t come near to exhausting the possible prehistory of the digital humanities. If one takes a more expansive approach to de\ufb01ning digital humanities by method and technique rather than by the role of the computer, then many vital connections spanning the computing era and the preceding century can be identified. Indeed, forms of counting and numeracy have been part of humanistic knowledge production since the early 1800s\u2014the period when the discipline of humanities itself emerged into what we now recognize it as. Examples range from nineteenth-century Germany philologists counting poetic meter of classic Greek poetry, to the experiments by the physicist, Thomas Mendenhall, to measure words by the number of letters in order to determine authorship of certain Shakespearean works. Like the history of the early computing age, this picture is still being \ufb01lled in. Within this early history, one of the most interesting cases is the role of quantitative analysis and statistical reasoning in formation and institutionalization of the humanities at Tsinghua University in the 1920s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Patterns: Distance as Knowing<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Insofar as this episode has a beginning, it is a lecture by the famous intellectual, Liang Qichao, that he gave at the Southeast University (Dongnan daxue) in November of 1922. The speech was transcribed and published in the widely-read Supplements to the Mornal News (Chenbao fukan)<\/em>, giving us a fascinating\u2014if overlooked\u2014record of an invention. In this speech, Liang introduced a new method that he was developing, titled \u201cstatistical historiography\u201d (Tongji lishixue).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n As its name suggests, the method applies the principles of statistics to historical data in order to identify historical trends and patterns. Liang\u2019s inspiration was the rise and fall of China\u2019s population across dynasties. This interest in historical population was not new, and had in fact for several decades drawn the close interest of late Qing intellectuals interested in social reform. Indeed, population was at the center of a growing interest in biopower such as Thomas Malthus and eugenics; and Liang himself had published an article on population in 1903 in the pages of his journal Xinmin Series Newspaper (Xinmin congbao)<\/em>. In this earlier piece, he looked to recent history to explain and criticize the unreliability of the Qing government\u2019s \ufb01gures and the state\u2019s poor management of the population. Twenty years later, however, Liang reversed the relationship between statistics and historiography. Instead of using history to explain a popular statistic (that of China\u2019s population as 400,000,000) and its implication for China\u2019s domestic and international situation, Liang now sought to put statistics in the service of writing history. (This doesn\u2019t represent a retreat from politics or contemporary significance, but rather Liang\u2019s interest in scholarly rigor, a turn that is re\ufb02ected in the ambitious works of scholarship that he produced in this \ufb01nal stage of his career). The new method, simply put, aimed to collect and appraise all the small details and facts that even a very careful scholar might otherwise ignore when reading historical accounts. As Liang memorably puts its:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2026\u2026\u6b32\u77e5\u5386\u53f2\u771f\u76f8\uff0c\u51b3\u4e0d\u80fd\u5355\u770b\u53f0\u9762\u4e0a\u51e0\u4e2a\u5927\u4eba\u7269\u51e0\u6869\u5927\u4e8b\u4ef6\u4fbf\u7b97\u5b8c\u7ed3\uff1b\u6700\u8981\u7684\u662f\u770b\u51fa\u5168\u4e2a\u793e\u4f1a\u7684\u6d3b\u52a8\u53d8\u5316\u3002\u5168\u4e2a\u793e\u4f1a\u7684\u6d3b\u52a8\u53d8\u5316\uff0c\u8981\u96c6\u79ef\u8d77\u6765\u6bd4\u8f83\u4e00\u756a\u624d\u80fd\u770b\u89c1\u3002\u5f80\u5f80\u6709\u5f88\u5c0f\u7684\u4e8b\uff0c\u5e73\u5e38\u4eba\u7edd\u4e0d\u6ce8\u610f\u8005\uff0c\u4e00\u65e6\u628a\u4ed6\u540c\u7c7b\u5168\u641c\u96c6\u8d77\u6765\uff0c\u5206\u522b\u90e8\u5c45\u4e00\u7814\u7a76\uff0c\u4fbf\u53ef\u4ee5\u53d1\u73b0\u51fa\u6781\u65b0\u5947\u7684\u73b0\u8c61\u800c\u4e14\u53d1\u660e\u51fa\u6781\u6709\u4ef7\u503c\u7684\u539f\u5219\u2026\u2026\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\u7684\u4f5c\u7528\uff0c\u662f\u8981\u201c\u89c2\u5176\u5927\u8f83\u201d\u3002\u6362\u53e5\u8bdd\u8bf4\uff1a\u662f\u4e13\u8981\u770b\u5404\u79cd\u4e8b\u7269\u7684\u5e73\u5747\u72b6\u51b5\uff0c \u62c9\u5300\u4e86\u7b97\u603b\u8d26\u3002[\u2026In order to obtain the full picture of history, it is not su\ufb03cient to watch great events of important persons of high social status. It is of more signi\ufb01cance to see changes of all social activities, which can only be possible through accumulating archives and comparing. Common people would certainly not pay attention to trivia, all sorts of which could be collected and categorized. In that process, one may find opportunities of discovering very significant social phenomena and very valuable principles\u2026 The purpose of statistics is to \u201cobserve macrotrends\u201d (Guan qi da jiao). It is to see the average normal situation of everything at their balance.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n As we look back a century, Liang Qichao continues to astound us with the breadth of his interests and his intellectual creativity. \u201cStatistical history\u201d is a quintessentially modern moment, representative of a proliferating interest in the Republican era in new scienti\ufb01c approaches to history and literature, and its sociological orientation represent as \u201cpassion for facts\u201d that is characteristic of the period.[1]<\/sup> But Liang\u2019s method stands out in particular as a precursor to later experiments with quantitative analysis by the Annales School and cliometrics. It is even possible to see it as a forerunner of the digital humanities, in particular the \u201cdistant reading\u201d of Franco Moretti, and his focus on \u201cunits that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes\u2014or genres and systems.\u201d[2]<\/sup> Indeed, when Jiang Wentao and I established our academic column in the journal Shandong Journal of Social Sciences (Shandong shehui kexue)<\/em>three years ago, we decided to adopt Liang\u2019s eloquent phrase \u201cObserving Macrotrends\u201d (Guan qi da jiao)as a title to honor this parallel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But while \u201cstatistical history\u201d opens a prehistory of the digital humanities, it also casts China\u2019s much older historiographical tradition in a new light. Specifically, Liang does not merely credit his invention to the introduction of western statistical science to China. Instead, he positions it as a synthesis between modern, western science and Qing Evidential Learning (Kaozheng xue)scholars such as Gu Donggao and his magisterial study, List of Big Events in the Spring and Autumn Period (Chunqiu dashi biao)<\/em>, a text which dis- integrates the classic Spring and Autumn period (Chunqiu)into a series of charts (biao ) organizing the names, events, and places into neat registers. The in\ufb02uence of Gu\u2019s work on Liang demonstrates the contingency and slipperiness of locating \u201cpre-history\u201d itself. Even if we look at List of Big Events in the Spring and Autumn Period<\/em> as a kind of origin point, we must acknowledge that its main technology, the chart, itself has a prehistory that goes back much further than the Qing. Indeed, as a way of grouping information and structuring it in a way that makes it accessible and easy to compare between points within a set, the charts resembles an early form of database, or data frame<\/em>. What is new in Liang\u2019s method is the use of numbers to symbolically manipulate the data (though the use of numbers for the representation of life and events is itself ancient, dating back far before written history. In English, \u201cdigit\u201d refers both to number as well to finger, denoting the latter\u2019s use as a numerical index. Humans\u2014and culture\u2014have always been digital). Historical Statistics (Lishi tongjixue) thus is a kind of originary event, but one that builds upon older practices and technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the context of 1920s China, Liang Qichao was more interested in looking forward to the future of scholarship. He envisioned a large-scale project of twenty-four general charts (tong biao) that would supplement China\u2019s twenty-four general history (tong shi). Though he would pass away before initiating this ambitious program, his method enjoyed broad purchase amongst his contemporaries, inspiring in the following decade a number of studies on the geographical distribution of historical \ufb01gures(and here we can draw another parallel with contemporary scholarship, Harvard\u2019s Chinese Biographical Database Project, which showcases the great wealth of prosopographical information in China\u2019s textual record). But nowhere is Liang\u2019s in\ufb02uence more evident than in the work of the classicist scholar, Wei Juxian (\u536b\u805a\u8d241899-1989), who worked directly to develop historical statistics into a universal method that anyone could use. The case of Wei is of particular interest to the prehistory of digital humanities because of his interest in moving beyond historical sociology into the realm of textual analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Using an Abacus to do History<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the mid 1920s, Liang Qichao, along with other prominent historians such as Chen Yinke (\u9648\u5bc5\u606a) and Wang Guowei (\u738b\u56fd\u7ef4)formed a core group of instructors within Tsinghua University\u2019s Institute of National Learning(Guoxue yanjiu yuan\u56fd\u5b66\u7814\u7a76\u9662), a short-lived but dynamic institution that played a key role in the development of China\u2019s modern scholarly episteme. This period, much like our own today, when academic institutions and scholarly disciplines are in great flux, reminds us that some of the most interesting ideas resulted from serious attempts to reconcile traditional and modern epistemologies and methods. While it is true that, retroactively, the discipline of National Learning has come to be considered as a conservative \ufb01eld of scholarship thanks in part to its nativism and its opposition to (or at least di\ufb00erence with) the cosmopolitanism of May Fourth intellectualism. But it is worth recalling that many of those associated with National Learning explicitly sought to investigate China\u2019s national history using new, modern tools. One of the best-known advocates of this project was Hu Shi\uff08\u80e1\u9002\uff09, who, along with Fu Sinian and Gu Jiegang, called for the \u201cre-organization\u201d\uff08\u91cd\u65b0\u6574\u7406\uff09of traditional historiography by bringing it into closer alignment with the tenets of natural science. As Hu famously exhorted, scholars should be \u201cbold in proposing one\u2019s hypothesis, and minute in seeking out evidence\u201d \u5927\u80c6\u7684\u5047\u8bbe\uff0c\u5c0f\u5fc3\u7684\u6c42\u8bc1.Within this move to scientize scholarly method, however, only Liang\u2019s historical method used statistical science, basing arguments on the calculation of average states rather than the identi\ufb01cation of logical inconsistencies. Within the National Learning, however, Historical statistics was relatively marginalized: it does not appear to have been taught to students, and Liang\u2019s colleagues did not adopt it for their projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The exception to this was the work of one student at the academy named Wei Juxian. Wei entered the National Learning with a somewhat untraditional educational background, having studied accounting in business school before switching to history. He would later recount how he was frequently teased by his classmates at Tsinghua, who, upon seeing him performing his research with an abacus in hand, derided him as an unintellectual \u201cmerchant.\u201d But Wei\u2019s interest in accounting and the tabulation of data made the empiricism of statistics especially attractive to him. During his time at Tsinghua, he worked hard to expand Liang\u2019s method into a fuller set of tools, publishing a series of texts explaining how to use statistics in the study of the past, and showcasing the results of such work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To get a clear sense of Wei\u2019s agenda, one need only to \ufb02ip through a key article that appeared in 1929, an abbreviated version of Wei\u2019s primary research project that was titled \u201cThe Method of Applied Statistics in the Reorganization of National Studies\u201d (yingyong tongji de fangfa zhengli guoxue \u5e94\u7528\u7edf\u8ba1\u7684\u65b9\u6cd5\u6574\u7406\u56fd\u5b66).That the article was published in Eastern Miscellany<\/em> ( Dongfang zazhi<\/em> \u4e1c\u65b9\u6742\u5fd7 ) one of the most widely-circulating popular journals of its day, suggests how Wei and the journal editors envisioned a broad appeal of historical statistics; and the article helped cement Wei\u2019s reputation as the leading advocate of the method. In Wei\u2019s hands, the application of \u201chistorical statistics\u201d expanded into \u201cstatistical historiography\u201d[\u7edf\u8ba1\u5386\u53f2\u5b66], where any text could become a kind of population of individual words or characters, all of which could in turn be counted and analyzed. The article firmly anchors the value of the statistical method in the rhetorical and visual appeal of data visualizations like graphs and tables, including over a dozen very \ufb01nely-crafted and beautiful pie charts, graphs, and other visualizations to compare language and content of the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuozhuan<\/em> commentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Several years later, following a series of lectures at Chizhi Academy (Chizhi xueyuan \u6301\u5fd7\u5b66\u9662)in Shanghai, Wei expanded on his article by publishing a textbook in 1934 titled simply Historical Statistics<\/em>, which aimed at operationalizing the method more fully. From articulating a definition of \u201cdata\u201d and how to extract it from a text, to how to calculate it and express it visually in order to infer historical facts, Wei\u2019s book stands as the most comprehensive explanation and demonstration of historical statistics. Here the historian is reimagined as a social scientist who surveys the past. Reviewing various observational methods that produce data, such as direct surveying or sampling, Wei proposes a new category, that of \u201cindexing\u201d (\u7d22\u9690, also glossed as\u5f15\u5f97), which refers to the process of extracting directly data from historical documents. Relying on his own experiences at Tsinghua, Wei describes the materiality and mental labor of indexing in detail, for example instructing the reader to avoid reading and notating a text at the same time because, he warns, the brain can\u2019t do both at once; or instructing the reader to use a pen or a colored pencil to mark places’ names, events, characters, or passages, and then collect them onto index cards (the format for which he provides a handy template). On its own, this discussion is a fascinating and original account of data-\ufb01cation. But it is folded into a larger description of statistical method that charts analysis across three stages, where make textual data increasingly abstract or processed: one begins with a statistical genealogy (tongji pu \u7edf\u8ba1\u8c31)that processes text, then turns it into to a statistical chart (tongji biao \u7edf\u8ba1\u8868)by expressing the data with numbers which can be statistically analyzed, and, \ufb01nally, summarizes the results of the analysis with a statistical graph (tongji tu \u7edf\u8ba1\u56fe), making them easy to understand and visually appealing. Armed with this protocol, anyone could perform statistical historiography. But what is particularly striking is how aptly this process describes digital humanities today. Any introductory course in China on the subject could assign this striking text for its \ufb01rst week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the explanation and illustration of this historiographical method takes up the \ufb01rst third of the work. The rest of the text also deserves mention in our critique of prehistories, for it is devoted to the subject of \u201cThe History of Statistics in China\u201d [\u4e2d\u56fd\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\u53f2]. Here, Wei shows an acute awareness of the need to couch his method in nativist terms and national history. Moreover, as writes in the introduction:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u4e2d\u56fd\u4eba\u7684\u4fdd\u5b88\u89c2\u5ff5\u4f20\u7edf\u601d\u60f3\u975e\u5e38\u7684\u5927\uff0c\u4ee5\u4e3a\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\u4e43\u662f\u5916\u6765\u7684\uff0c\u4e2d\u56fd\u7684\u56fd\u5b66\u7528\u4e0d\u7740\u7528\u5916\u4eba\u7684\u65b9\u6cd5\u53bb\u7814\u7a76\u3002\u6b8a\u4e0d\u77e5\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\u662f\u4e2d\u56fd\u7684\u571f\u4ea7\uff0c\u4e2d\u56fd\u7684\u53e4\u4eba\u66fe\u5c61\u4e3a\u7528\uff1b\u73b0\u5728\u5c06\u4e2d\u56fd\u571f\u4ea7\u7684\u56fe\u8c31\u5b66\u7565\u4e3a\u6539\u9020\u4e3a\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\uff0c\u4f7f\u4e4b\u7814\u7a76\u4e2d\u56fd\u7684\u56fd\u5b66\uff0c\u5f53\u8f83\u524d\u4eba\u7684\u6210\u7ee9\u4e3a\u4f73\u3002\u6545\u4f5c\u6b64\u4e2d\u56fd\u7edf\u8ba1\u5b66\u53f2\u4e00\u6587\uff0c\u4ee5\u4e3a\u547c\u9192\uff01 [Most Chinese, whose intellectual thinking could be very conservative, take statistics as from foreign nations, and think it is not necessary to study Chinese National Learning through foreign methods. They have no idea that statistics as a method is from this land, and their ancestors often used it. Now we are reforming Chinese learning on genealogies and charts into statistics, and use them to study Chinese National Learning, which would make more achievements than previous generations. Thus, I wrote this historical essay of Chinese statistics to awake people\u2019s consciousness.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t simply a cynical strategy to legitimate his method amongst his peers: Wei Juxian is earnest in his attempt to prove that various sorts of statistical practices occurred earlier in China than in Europe. But more interesting than the tendentious claim that statistics \u201coriginated\u201d in China is the Wei\u2019s wide-ranging discussion of various sorts of information management in Chinese history. This result is an unprecedented history of research on data practices in China that, from our vantage point today, constitutes a prehistory to the prehistory of digital humanities, a kind of endless layering that challenges the notion that contemporary digital analysis is unique or unprecedented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Conclusion: a flower that bloomed before its season and therefore left no seed<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Liang, Wei Juxian did not pursue the development of historical statistics beyond his initial engagement with it. What\u2019s worth paying attention to are not the results of these scholars\u2019 experiments, but rather the methods that they proposed to employ. Collectively these two scholars have left us with a fascinating episode that not only suggests possibilities for a more systematic history of information management and data analysis in modern Chinese scholarship, but also offers a vital point of comparison with which to examine our present moment. Here we have pointed to some of the more obvious similarities between historical statistics and digital humanities insofar as they both desire to marry together empirical or quantitative methods with a \ufb01eld of knowledge that is traditionally more interpretive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the differences are equally important. While it seems that the only thing missing is the automation of labor\u2014the tabulation, data extraction, and mathematical analysis\u2014 made possible by computers and modern interfaces, the latter technologies do create a marked di\ufb00erence in the scale and complexity of analysis. Historical statistics really could be conducted on an abacus. In contrast, a computationally heavy and reiterative process such as the fairly established technique of topic modeling (which allows one to analyze millions of documents at once and identify groups within the set by shared themes or \u201ctopics\u201d) represents a major leap in the capacity to identify patterns in data. Techniques like topic modeling are in fact so sophisticated that they pose a kind of black box, sealing the process of analysis from the human operator, thereby making the computer and its algorithm an active partner rather than simply a passive instrument. Another key di\ufb00erence with this period is attitudinal. Liang and Wei were both positivists, and embraced quantitative knowledge as a kind of certainty. Put differently, historical statistics represents a distinctly modernist passion for systems, rationalization, e\ufb03ciency and progress. If its promoters found it \ufb02awed, it was only because the technologies available in their day were inadequate to their vision. (And this is true despite this method\u2019s connections to earlier modes of scholarship\u2014given their interest in empirical knowledge and the authentication of texts, it is easy to imagine that scholars of evidential learning would have embraced Liang\u2019s positivist attitude.) The best examples of digital humanities scholarship are open and re\ufb02exive about the limitations of their results, both in terms of project design and statistical signi\ufb01cance and con\ufb01dence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together, the di\ufb00erences and likenesses can illuminate the historical speci\ufb01city of the digital humanities today. To a degree, this episode suggests that the digital humanities is not exactly derivative or an entirely recent import. Though, to be sure, I do not mean to imply that digital humanities somehow originated in China, either\u2014as I have emphasized, all origin stories are problematic. Instead, this episode is one, small piece within a larger, global puzzle that is episodic and largely discontinuous. But we don\u2019t need to draw a direct lineage between historical statistics and the digital humanities in order to gain inspiration from it. The Japanese scholar, Kojin Karatani, memorably described the work of the author, Natsume Soseki, as \u201ca \ufb02ower that bloomed before its season and therefore left no seed\u201d\uff08\u4e00\u6735\u5ffd\u7136\u4e4b\u95f4\u7efd\u5f00\u7684\u82b1\uff09. We could say the same thing about the Tsinghua scholars of the 1920s. But this \ufb02ower\u2019s season has now arrived. As the digital humanities grows today, let us recognize ourselves as inheritors of this earlier spirit of exploration and openness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u6ce8 \u91ca\uff1a<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts<\/em>: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation<\/em>–State<\/em>, 1900-1949Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2] \u201cConjectures on World Literature,\u201din New Left Review<\/em>, 1: January-February, 2000. Online at: http:\/\/ newleftreview.org\/II\/1\/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature (accessed 4\/15\/2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u7f16 \u8f91 | \u59dc\u6587\u6d9b<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u539f\u520a\u300a\u6570\u5b57\u4eba\u6587\u300b2020\u7b2c\u4e00\u671f\uff0c \u8f6c\u8f7d\u8bf7\u8054\u7cfb\u6388\u6743\u3002<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Humanities scholarship is increasingly aided by forms of computational analysis, from natural language processing\u2026<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3443,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[927,856,960,962,961,964,29,963,347,965],"class_list":["post-3438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-114","tag-927","tag-digital-humanities","tag-liang-qichao","tag-statistical-historiography","tag-wei-juxian","tag-964","tag-29","tag-963","tag-347","tag-965"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3438"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4417,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3438\/revisions\/4417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/achieve.dhcn.cn\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/\u56fe\u72472-5.png\")
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