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Ancient Chinese literature studies has witnessed rapid and topical changes in the technical context. Due to the overall slow increase of research subjects, the growing demand for research outcomes and the increasing refinement of traditional paradigmatic research have created a need for methodological innovation to promote sustainable development in this field. The digital research methodology offers advantages such as processing and storing large amounts of data, fast computing speed, intuitive presentation, and high intelligence level. These align well with the characteristics and concerns of research in this field. Against these multiple backgrounds, digital humanities have emerged as a novel and significant catalyst for academic growth in this domain. Its primary objective is to digitize research objects by converting natural language texts into machine-readable code and storing them in various databases. This facilitates more economical, efficient, stable, and intelligent storage, dissemination, retrieval, and analysis through digital means. This trend has also prompted a shift in thinking within ancient Chinese literature research towards new approaches that address key issues effectively; two main aspects reflect these changes.
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The first change lies in the meta-text studies. The digitization of ancient books not only facilitates access to research materials, but also profoundly influences researchers' conceptual frameworks. Can we approach the truth of humanities through computational methods, as implied by the term "humanities computing" in digital humanities? With this notion in mind, academic endeavors such as "database kaozheng考證" and "quantitative analysis" have significantly enriched the prevailing methodologies that have long relied on "close reading of texts" and "qualitative analysis". Particularly, advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and relationship extraction technology enable computers and artificial intelligence (AI) to solve problems previously dependent on textual interpretation, such as literary style, poetic rhyme and rhythm, allusions usage, and motif writing through statistical and quantitative analyses. The establishment of a comprehensive database encompassing writers and their works enhances the convenience of integrating literary texts with behavioral(xiren繫人), chronological(xinian繫年), and geographical(xidi繫地) aspects for interdisciplinary research purposes. Furthermore, some of the quantitative outcomes are also presented by visualization methods, with notable achievements in recent years being the creation of diverse "literary maps" through the amalgamation of geographic information system (GIS) and literary geography.
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The second shift in research resides in the subtext. Throughout the process of literature acceptance, Chinese classics have been extensively annotated and commented(pingdian評點) upon. Despite their varying content, these meta-textual additions reflect different understandings of the same text by readers with diverse knowledge backgrounds across different historical periods. By utilizing digital means to retrieve and organize these independent annotations, we can simplify labor-intensive tasks such as annotation, collation, and deduplication that were once costly endeavors requiring significant manpower. This approach also activates new possibilities for text reorganization, allowing researchers to freely select and quantitatively analyze interpretation and commentary results while rapidly evaluating differing views and conceptual changes. Based on this premise, scholars employ it as a tool to analyze and present the process of classicization, academic history, and hermeneutic style in literary works.
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These innovative research ideas demonstrate extraordinary ambition and courage while greatly enriching our understanding of this field's paradigmatic methods; they have sparked profound thinking among scholars seeking to reinvent ancient traditions.