The Textual Platform as Text

• In Event: Digital Humanities Approaches to Chinese Culture, Part 2: New Tools and Literary Networks

Abstract

For some scholars—particularly those whose work abuts the social sciences—digital humanities is nothing more than the opportunity to use new tools to answer the questions they have been pursuing all along. This is not true for me. In half of my academic life, I am co-PI of a large platform development project, The Ten Thousand Rooms, designed specifically as a sinological workspace. But the other half of my academic life is as a theoretically-inflected scholar of early modern Chinese literature. For me the challenge involved in digital humanities has been the interface between these two modes of scholarship, and maintaining within a digital framework a humanistic space that is neither positivist nor empiricist.

In this paper, I will be doing a close reading, not of a pre-modern Chinese source, but of the eight projects (focusing on sets of sources that range from the early period through to the nineteenth century) that have been initiated on the platform by senior sinological scholars. These are largely philological but open to the scholars’ own decisions as to multiple parameters (for example, from full openness on the Wikipedia model to full control; from a single text to multiple texts). What kinds of theoretical argument do projects on the platform make? How are various scholars implicitly making arguments as to what a text is—whether definitive ones, or digital reproductions, or the scholarly debate that accretes over a tradition? I am hopeful that the platform as a whole produces a non-discursive scholarly argument in digital form.

Author

• Tina Lu, Yale University