Text Reuse in the Medieval Chinese Public Inscriptions (618-907)

It is commonly known that Chinese premodern authors preferred using a number of allusions originating from classics in their own works, which is certainly a way of text reuse. They sometimes quoted original texts directly, while sometimes substituted some characters or inverted grammatical constructions without changing the original meaning. What I want to study in this paper is to find the network of text reuse covering all the public inscriptions, including those inscribed on steles, walls or bells to which the public had access, in the Tang Dynasty China (618-907). A database including more than 1,000 inscriptions with about 1,000,000 Chinese characters / words has been built as the base of this project. Metadata such as authors, dates and places, have been manually added to each inscription. Based on the metadata, temporal and spatial distribution of the inscriptions will be visually displayed. According to my pilot studies, Confucian canons, especially the Five Classics, were quoted most frequently in th

23-10-2020 11:35 - 12:05