Speaker: Donald Sturgeon, 2015-16 Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Moderator: Arunabh Ghosh, Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University.
Textual parallels among early Chinese transmitted texts are extensive and widespread, often reflecting complex textual histories involving repeated transcription, compilation, and editing spanning many centuries and involving contributions from multiple authors and editors. Partly as a consequence of this complexity, establishing with certainty even approximate dates of authorship for texts and parts of texts is a challenging task. In this presentation, I demonstrate how digital methods grounded in textual and statistical evidence can help us better understand and visualize some of these complex relationships, and how digital methods may offer additional clues as to the likely provenance of disputed texts.