Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies

Jeffrey Tharsen

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 large-scale network 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 (cooccurrences, direct and indirect) 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.

https://textual-optics-lab.uchicago.edu/