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Digital Humanities, Towards Reproducibility in the Human Sciences? 數位人文:推動人文科學的可重現性?

Type of event: Workshop (held mostly in English)
Date: September 26th 2024, 10h-16h
Place: Conference Room 2B, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei (map)

Inviting Institution: CEFC Taipei (French Center for Research on Contemporary China in Taipei)
Organizer: Marie Bizais-Lillig 畢茉莉

Participants:

  • Marie Bizais-Lillig (Strasbourg University, USIAS, Distam, France)
  • Ping-tzu Chu 祝平次 (National Tsing-Hua University)
  • Laurent Prévot (CNRS, CEFC, Taiwan)
  • Jen-jou Hung 洪振洲 (Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts)
  • Richard Tzong-Han Tsai 蔡宗翰 (National Central University)

Chinese studies has slowly taken a digital turn in the West for two decades now, while Taiwan, the Academia Sinica in particular, stands as a pioneer in this field, even before unicode revolutionized the possibilities for publishing, documenting, disseminating and exploring corpora in Chinese languages in 2005.

A computational approach to large corpora in disciplines such as linguistics, history, literature and sociology has modified the investigation process, making it possible to bring together information that was previously disjointed, and providing new ways of representing phenomena – e.g. network analysis.

Above all, methodological transformations have brought about a paradigm shift, with the idea that a case study was an illustration whose exemplarity could only be demonstrated if it could be substantiated quantitatively, or the principle that arguments should be retrievable and reconstructed by the readers of an argument. In other words, with algorithmic foundations, the use of computer tools to identify relevant data for a demonstration has given rise to the principle of reproducibility (or replicability) in the human and social sciences.

However, the interest aroused by artificial intelligence (AI) in a computational approach to corpora (written, oral, images, for example), whether for transcribing, annotating, documenting, exploring or analyzing, poses a real challenge to maintaining this principle of reproducibility.

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Presentation

History of a project

This blog is meant to document the story and development of a project. I will begin by recalling the few steps that changed the directions and methodology of my research.

In 2017, my understanding of the Shijing 詩經 [Classic of Poetry] was deeply transformed by the discovery of the Mao Shi caomu niaoshou chongyu shu 毛詩草木鳥獸蟲魚疏 [A Commentary on the plants, trees, birds, beasts, insects and fish of the Poems in the Mao tradition] by a certain Lu Ji 陸璣. I was expecting a commentary that would shed light on the meaning of the poems. Instead I found a list of plants and animals completed by explanations on their appearance, characteristics and use.