The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A Big Data Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based...
Authors: | ; ; ; |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2017]
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In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2017, Volume: 85, Issue: 4, Pages: 985-1016 |
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Chinese language
/ Religious literature
/ Body
/ Conception
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RelBib Classification: | AA Study of religion BM Chinese universism; Confucianism; Taoism KBM Asia |
Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
Summary: | This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative distinction between mind and body. In a series of follow-up studies, we show how three different machine-based techniques—word collocation, hierarchical clustering, and topic modeling analysis—provide convergent evidence that the authors of early Chinese texts viewed the mind-body relationship as unique or problematic. We conclude with reflections on the advantages of adding “distant reading” techniques to the methodological arsenal of scholars of religion, as a supplement and aid to traditional, close reading. |
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ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfw090 |