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.
