Podcast 8: Paul Vierthaler on text analysis and stylometry

DH East Asia Podcast
DH East Asia Podcast
Podcast 8: Paul Vierthaler on text analysis and stylometry
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This episode is an interview with Paul Vierthaler on how he has used text mining and analysis with large corpora of pre-modern Chinese literature. Paul discusses how and why he learned how to code – while in the middle of dissertation writing – and how he integrated what he found into a broader quantitative-qualitative project. He then outlines his latest research, which uses sequence alignment and stylometry to analyze and guess the authors of a wide swath of anonymously and pseudonymously authored books written in late imperial China.

Relevant links:
Paul’s website
Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities
Fiction and history: polarity and stylistic gradience in late imperial Chinese literature (article on cultural analytics written by Paul)
Analyzing printing trends in late imperial China using large bibliometric datasets (another article written by Paul)
Ten thousand rooms project
China Biographical Database

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