This project explores the recent censorship of two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging platform. Specifically, I am advancing a technographic approach in ways that give agency to bots as not just computing units but as interlocutors and informants. I seek to understand these chatbots through their i…[Read more]

This paper is part of a larger research project that attempts to apply historical social network
analysis to the study of Chinese Buddhist history. The underlying research questions are
whether social network analysis (SNA) metrics can be gainfully applied to Buddhist history,
and whether network visualizations can enable us to better…[Read more]

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the…[Read more]

While analysing lexical data of Western Kho-Bwa languages of the Sino-Tibetan or Trans-
Himalayan family with the help of a computer-assisted approach for historical language
comparison, we observed gaps in the data where one or more varieties lacked forms for certain
concepts. We employed a new workflow, combining manual and automated steps,…[Read more]

Entry to a Deep in Japan Podcast, during which Steve McCarty elucidates the origins of Japan, the Imperial line, and how people viewed their environment from 30,000 years ago to the golden age of the Heian Period. He tells moving legends to rival Sophocles, culminating in a fusion of many religions in a mountain range viewed as a maṇḍala that cou…[Read more]

Through an experiment on a Western Kho-Bwa linguistic dataset, Timotheus A. Bodt and Johann-Mattis List provide evidence for the regularity of sound change.

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the…[Read more]

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of…[Read more]

Powerpoint presentation for the MLA2020 collaborative roundtable “Digital Humanities in Japan and Korea: Approaches and Challenges,” organized by the LLC Korean and LLC Japanese since 1900 Forums. This brief introduction to “Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture” was one of seven presentations by…[Read more]

Efforts on language documentation have been increasing in the past. While the amount of digital data of the world’s languages is increasing, only a small amount of the data is sustainable, since data reuse is often exacerbated by idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the comparability of linguistic data.…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2018. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

While language contact has so far been predominantly studied on the basis of detailed case studies, the emergence of methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and automated word comparison – as a result of the recent quantitative turn in historical linguistics – has also resulted in new proposals to study language contact situations by means of aut…[Read more]

Invited contributions to the Humanist Discussion Group, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, a 2019 compilation of the 1997-1998 series, with outdated information omitted: 1) [Introduction to] gleanings from Pacific Asia, 2) Academic Websites subject to Attribution Ethics, 3) Korea-Japan-U.S. Website copying case closed,…[Read more]

The Nagas since time immemorial were never under any foreign powers. They lived in a state of nature where any principality that ever encompassed them was rudimentary, unscathed and the purest that nature could provide them. Their primordial worlds had endured for generations until the modern century without being bothered and unaware of what was…[Read more]

The fact that “all languages evolve, as long as they exist” (Schleicher 1863: 18f) has been long known to linguists and does not surprise us anymore. The reasons why all language change constantly, however, is still not fully understood. What we know, however, is that language usage must be at the core of language evolution. It is the dynamics amo…[Read more]