Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TEXTCOURT (Linking the Textual Worlds of Chinese Court Theater, ca. 1600-1800)
Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2022-09-30
Court theater was a core part of Chinese court and performance culture for centuries, yet its texts have never been amply studied. There are several reasons for this: their low status in Chinese literary history as ‘authorless’ performer’s texts, the vast quantity of texts and the difficulty of accessing them. In recent years, several major reprint projects of the relevant primary sources now allow wider access to the corpora; yet the lack of an existing analytic framework to study anonymous Chinese performance texts on such a large scale continues to present a huge challenge to researchers. As a result, Chinese court drama, though rich in potential and information, remains a complex series of isolated, fragmented, and closed textual worlds, neglected in literary history and disjointed from other areas of studies. The lacuna is especially glaring given the quantity and richness of the extant texts: performance practices and other aspects of material culture are preserved alongside dramatic content. Furthermore, court theater was among the most ‘outward facing’ of all Chinese genres, shown to foreign ambassadors. Many visitors recorded what was often their only impression of Chinese theater culture.
To re-link these closed, disjointed, and fragmented textual worlds, this project builds the first digital archive of court drama scripts and related foreign records. Centring on the textual database, the project aims to establish links among the textual worlds of Chinese court drama, following these main lines of inquiry: How do we read these court plays and how can they be integrated with mainstream Chinese drama studies and literary history? Were court drama texts only found in the palaces or also elsewhere? What additional or different data can we retrieve from foreign records, and what does this tell us about the intercultural reception of performance and visual cultures? How do we fully exploit and utilise the rich information about Chinese court drama embedded in these texts, and more importantly, make the collected data accessible both to future researchers and to the general reader?
The TEXTCOURT project focuses on four types of links: LINK1, internal links between scripts in the textual web of court drama; LINK2, external links to individuals and occasions; LINK3, external links to visual and material cultures; LINK4, cross-cultural links which situate Chinese court drama in its global context. Focusing on these links will illuminate the intersections and interconnections between the textual worlds of court drama.
The project will produce the first textual studies of Chinese court drama, including a court drama textual database (beta version, with ongoing additions, now publicly available online via the project website https://textcourt.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) a series of publications on digital editions and extended text-based research topics, and an anthology of English translations for the general reader. These outputs will remedy the lack of textual studies on Chinese court drama, contributing towards our understanding of Chinese theater history and world court cultures. The methodology the project develops to study a large corpus of authorless texts could be applied to other Chinese genres such as folk tales and dialect songs.
To re-link these closed, disjointed, and fragmented textual worlds, this project builds the first digital archive of court drama scripts and related foreign records. Centring on the textual database, the project aims to establish links among the textual worlds of Chinese court drama, following these main lines of inquiry: How do we read these court plays and how can they be integrated with mainstream Chinese drama studies and literary history? Were court drama texts only found in the palaces or also elsewhere? What additional or different data can we retrieve from foreign records, and what does this tell us about the intercultural reception of performance and visual cultures? How do we fully exploit and utilise the rich information about Chinese court drama embedded in these texts, and more importantly, make the collected data accessible both to future researchers and to the general reader?
The TEXTCOURT project focuses on four types of links: LINK1, internal links between scripts in the textual web of court drama; LINK2, external links to individuals and occasions; LINK3, external links to visual and material cultures; LINK4, cross-cultural links which situate Chinese court drama in its global context. Focusing on these links will illuminate the intersections and interconnections between the textual worlds of court drama.
The project will produce the first textual studies of Chinese court drama, including a court drama textual database (beta version, with ongoing additions, now publicly available online via the project website https://textcourt.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) a series of publications on digital editions and extended text-based research topics, and an anthology of English translations for the general reader. These outputs will remedy the lack of textual studies on Chinese court drama, contributing towards our understanding of Chinese theater history and world court cultures. The methodology the project develops to study a large corpus of authorless texts could be applied to other Chinese genres such as folk tales and dialect songs.
The project has been set up to proceed in three phases, namely, Phase I on ‘Recruitment and Generating Digitalized Texts’, Phase II on ‘Research on Digitized Texts: Making the Four Links’, and Phase III on the ‘Dissemination of Output’. At midterm, the project has concluded the first phase and is now fully engaged in Phase 2.
In the first phase (Years 1-2), the project focused on (A) recruiting and training the team members, and (B) building the digital archive.
(A) The project has recruited in total two postdoctoral researchers for the project. Postdoc 1, specialising in Traditional Chinese Literature, joined in October 2020. Postdoc 2, specialising in Chinese digital humanities, was recruited from a competitive field of candidates in 2020 and joined the team in September 2020. The project doctoral student was recruited and joined in Fall 2020, and her research focuses on examining the visual and material representations of imperial power in the “grand plays” at the court of Qianlong. To date, the project has also recruited 8 local research assistants and 3 overseas research assistants to work on various aspects for the project under the guidance of the PI and postdocs.
At the beginning stage of the project, the PI organised a Training Workshop on “Digital Approaches to Pre-Modern Chinese Texts: Theory and Practice” (8-9 January 2020). Participants were given a chance to have a close look at broader issues in the field of Digital Humanities through two presentations by our guest speakers, Donald Sturgeon and Erich Kesse, as well as an introduction to the behind-the-scene groundwork of the TEXTCOURT project.
After recruiting our first group of research assistants, the full project team participated in two eight-week courses organised by the Taylor Institution Library at the University of Oxford, “Digital Editions” and “Introduction to Digital Humanities” between January to March 2020.The former led to the project’s first attempt at creating a TEI-encoded digital edition of a court play. As newer members joined the team, they also participated in the courses subsequently, publishing two other TEI-encoded digital editions of court plays. Links are given in the section “Progress beyond the state of the art…” below.
Throughout the course of the project, the team has regularly held internal research labs (14 in total) and TEI labs (17 in total) to provide a platform for training and to share findings among team members.
(B) In building the digital archive, the TEXTCOURT project team performed the following:
- identified 2,000 drama scripts and associated foreign records related to Chinese court drama. In our database, a “script” is a digitized hardcopy version of a piece of Chinese court drama; a “play” is a term covering multiple scripts/versions of the same dramatic piece. For illustration, the First Quarto edition of Hamlet would be a “script”, as would the Second Quarto edition, First Folio edition, etc.; the “play” Hamlet refers to all the different editions it is found in. The difference is key to understanding our progress in building the digital archive.
- selected 200 plays to form our core database (a representative selection of plays which can be dated to the 1600-1800 period with relative confidence). A further selection of plays have been made available as an extended database- these court plays cannot be positively identified as being from the 1600-1800 period and may have been composed later.
- digitized 165 scripts out of a total of 203 scripts in the core database. We await images from our partners to proceed with the remaining ~40 scripts.
- found 249 foreign records (59 English, 52 French, 2 Latin, 3 Italian and 132 Korean) and digitized these.
- created a website to make our digitized texts available to the public. In addition to full text search functionality, the website groups related texts by keyword, and allows users to quickly view plays that mention an entity (person, place, object or occasion) in common, or which mention an analytical group of related entities (such as musical instruments, places in a particular province, etc.). By revealing links between plays on multiple axes that would otherwise be obscured, the website supports the project aim of relinking the fragmented textual worlds of Chinese court drama.
- Postdoc 1 designed a TEI schema for Chinese court drama to underpin the website. The existing drama TEI schema does not provide for many unique features (such as arias) of Chinese court drama, and so an appropriate tagging system had to be developed to reflect these in XML. The TEI schema also provides for the tagging of entities (people, places, objects, and occasions) and the assigning of these entities to one or more analytical groups in order to maximise the links that can be drawn between the plays in the database
- To reflect on the experiences of database construction and to collectively explore the application of digital methods in the field of Sinology, Postdoc 2 organized an online talk series on computational methods in Sinology.
In Year 3, the project proceeded to the second phase. Building on the newly established digital archive, the team began to use the database for textual research in relation to the four links identified by the project.
Early results, focusing on LINK 1 (textual links among court plays, and between drama and other literary genres) were presented in two journal articles, one published in 2021 and another forthcoming in June 2022. To further explore the nature of court literature and better position court drama in the Chinese literary tradition, the project organized an international conference entitled “Conceptualizing Court Literature with New Methodologies” on December 2-4, 2021. Bringing together 16 scholars from around the world, the conference facilitated a stimulating exchange of ideas on Chinese court culture from the Tang to the Qing dynasty (ca. 7th-19th century). Each conference panellist approached the concept of court literature from a different perspective: from the representation of women in the imperial harem to the relations between power and space at court, and from poems written by the emperor to theatre performances at court. Papers selected from the conference will be published in a special issue in the Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (NJCLC) in 2022.
In the first phase (Years 1-2), the project focused on (A) recruiting and training the team members, and (B) building the digital archive.
(A) The project has recruited in total two postdoctoral researchers for the project. Postdoc 1, specialising in Traditional Chinese Literature, joined in October 2020. Postdoc 2, specialising in Chinese digital humanities, was recruited from a competitive field of candidates in 2020 and joined the team in September 2020. The project doctoral student was recruited and joined in Fall 2020, and her research focuses on examining the visual and material representations of imperial power in the “grand plays” at the court of Qianlong. To date, the project has also recruited 8 local research assistants and 3 overseas research assistants to work on various aspects for the project under the guidance of the PI and postdocs.
At the beginning stage of the project, the PI organised a Training Workshop on “Digital Approaches to Pre-Modern Chinese Texts: Theory and Practice” (8-9 January 2020). Participants were given a chance to have a close look at broader issues in the field of Digital Humanities through two presentations by our guest speakers, Donald Sturgeon and Erich Kesse, as well as an introduction to the behind-the-scene groundwork of the TEXTCOURT project.
After recruiting our first group of research assistants, the full project team participated in two eight-week courses organised by the Taylor Institution Library at the University of Oxford, “Digital Editions” and “Introduction to Digital Humanities” between January to March 2020.The former led to the project’s first attempt at creating a TEI-encoded digital edition of a court play. As newer members joined the team, they also participated in the courses subsequently, publishing two other TEI-encoded digital editions of court plays. Links are given in the section “Progress beyond the state of the art…” below.
Throughout the course of the project, the team has regularly held internal research labs (14 in total) and TEI labs (17 in total) to provide a platform for training and to share findings among team members.
(B) In building the digital archive, the TEXTCOURT project team performed the following:
- identified 2,000 drama scripts and associated foreign records related to Chinese court drama. In our database, a “script” is a digitized hardcopy version of a piece of Chinese court drama; a “play” is a term covering multiple scripts/versions of the same dramatic piece. For illustration, the First Quarto edition of Hamlet would be a “script”, as would the Second Quarto edition, First Folio edition, etc.; the “play” Hamlet refers to all the different editions it is found in. The difference is key to understanding our progress in building the digital archive.
- selected 200 plays to form our core database (a representative selection of plays which can be dated to the 1600-1800 period with relative confidence). A further selection of plays have been made available as an extended database- these court plays cannot be positively identified as being from the 1600-1800 period and may have been composed later.
- digitized 165 scripts out of a total of 203 scripts in the core database. We await images from our partners to proceed with the remaining ~40 scripts.
- found 249 foreign records (59 English, 52 French, 2 Latin, 3 Italian and 132 Korean) and digitized these.
- created a website to make our digitized texts available to the public. In addition to full text search functionality, the website groups related texts by keyword, and allows users to quickly view plays that mention an entity (person, place, object or occasion) in common, or which mention an analytical group of related entities (such as musical instruments, places in a particular province, etc.). By revealing links between plays on multiple axes that would otherwise be obscured, the website supports the project aim of relinking the fragmented textual worlds of Chinese court drama.
- Postdoc 1 designed a TEI schema for Chinese court drama to underpin the website. The existing drama TEI schema does not provide for many unique features (such as arias) of Chinese court drama, and so an appropriate tagging system had to be developed to reflect these in XML. The TEI schema also provides for the tagging of entities (people, places, objects, and occasions) and the assigning of these entities to one or more analytical groups in order to maximise the links that can be drawn between the plays in the database
- To reflect on the experiences of database construction and to collectively explore the application of digital methods in the field of Sinology, Postdoc 2 organized an online talk series on computational methods in Sinology.
In Year 3, the project proceeded to the second phase. Building on the newly established digital archive, the team began to use the database for textual research in relation to the four links identified by the project.
Early results, focusing on LINK 1 (textual links among court plays, and between drama and other literary genres) were presented in two journal articles, one published in 2021 and another forthcoming in June 2022. To further explore the nature of court literature and better position court drama in the Chinese literary tradition, the project organized an international conference entitled “Conceptualizing Court Literature with New Methodologies” on December 2-4, 2021. Bringing together 16 scholars from around the world, the conference facilitated a stimulating exchange of ideas on Chinese court culture from the Tang to the Qing dynasty (ca. 7th-19th century). Each conference panellist approached the concept of court literature from a different perspective: from the representation of women in the imperial harem to the relations between power and space at court, and from poems written by the emperor to theatre performances at court. Papers selected from the conference will be published in a special issue in the Nanyang Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (NJCLC) in 2022.
Building on the work carried out in the first two and half years of TEXTCOURT, the project team has produced the following outputs that contribute to our understanding and approach to Chinese court drama texts:
- the first digital editions of Chinese court plays via the Taylor editions website (3 scripts) and our own beta website (12 scripts)
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/wanguo-laichao-andianben/
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/quanshan-jinke/
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/Feng-tianming-Sanbao-xia-xiyang/
https://textcourt.orinst.ox.ac.uk/database/scripts/
- We have developed the beta version of the project database and website and published 12 sample scripts, complete with tagged entities; the structure of the website is complete and it will be populated with more content later this year.
- Journal paper 1 “In Praise of This Prosperous and Harmonious Empire: Sanqu, Ming Anthologies, and the Imperial Court” (2021) reveals textual overlaps between court drama and sanqu songs, thereby highlighting the need to read and study Chinese court drama across genre boundaries.
- Journal paper 2 “Textual Worlds of Court Theater in Late Imperial China” (forthcoming, June 2022) outlines the current challenges faced by researchers in this field and proposes a new textual approach towards studying late imperial Chinese court drama.
- Journal paper 3 “TEXTCOURT: Developing a Digital Approach to Chinese Court Drama” (under review) provides an overview of the project focusing on the creation of the database, namely the transcription of the dramatic scripts and the production of structurally marked-up texts following the guidelines of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). It also presents some of the preliminary findings based on applying computational methods to the literary data collected in the archive.
- A conference, “Conceptualizing Court Literature with New Methodologies” was held in December 2021 and a special journal issue on Chinese court literature is scheduled to be published in 2022. The journal issue will be the first bilingual journal dedicated to the study of Chinese court literature, spanning from the 7th to the 19th century. It shows how court drama draws from multiple sources, delves into the changes in court literature and examines late imperial Chinese court drama with a longue durée approach.
- A volume of English translations of Chinese court drama is currently in the proposal stage with translation work due to start in autumn 2022.
The project is expected to move into Phase III in Year 5, during which the focus will be on completing and disseminating the research outputs. The team will hold an international conference in Oxford to publicize the results, and present the data on the digital platform.
- the first digital editions of Chinese court plays via the Taylor editions website (3 scripts) and our own beta website (12 scripts)
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/wanguo-laichao-andianben/
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/quanshan-jinke/
https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/Feng-tianming-Sanbao-xia-xiyang/
https://textcourt.orinst.ox.ac.uk/database/scripts/
- We have developed the beta version of the project database and website and published 12 sample scripts, complete with tagged entities; the structure of the website is complete and it will be populated with more content later this year.
- Journal paper 1 “In Praise of This Prosperous and Harmonious Empire: Sanqu, Ming Anthologies, and the Imperial Court” (2021) reveals textual overlaps between court drama and sanqu songs, thereby highlighting the need to read and study Chinese court drama across genre boundaries.
- Journal paper 2 “Textual Worlds of Court Theater in Late Imperial China” (forthcoming, June 2022) outlines the current challenges faced by researchers in this field and proposes a new textual approach towards studying late imperial Chinese court drama.
- Journal paper 3 “TEXTCOURT: Developing a Digital Approach to Chinese Court Drama” (under review) provides an overview of the project focusing on the creation of the database, namely the transcription of the dramatic scripts and the production of structurally marked-up texts following the guidelines of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). It also presents some of the preliminary findings based on applying computational methods to the literary data collected in the archive.
- A conference, “Conceptualizing Court Literature with New Methodologies” was held in December 2021 and a special journal issue on Chinese court literature is scheduled to be published in 2022. The journal issue will be the first bilingual journal dedicated to the study of Chinese court literature, spanning from the 7th to the 19th century. It shows how court drama draws from multiple sources, delves into the changes in court literature and examines late imperial Chinese court drama with a longue durée approach.
- A volume of English translations of Chinese court drama is currently in the proposal stage with translation work due to start in autumn 2022.
The project is expected to move into Phase III in Year 5, during which the focus will be on completing and disseminating the research outputs. The team will hold an international conference in Oxford to publicize the results, and present the data on the digital platform.