港大中文學院

School of Chinese Seminar

Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical Text Analysis Unveiling Psychological Dynamics Within Chinese Culture Across Two Millennia

測量已逝去的心靈：歷史文本分析揭示兩千年中國文化心理演變

Ms. Yuqi Chen 陳鈺琪女士 (PhD candidate, Peking University)

日期 Date: 3 June 2024 (Monday)

時間 Time: 11:00-12:30 pm

地點 Venue: CPD-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

語言 Language: English

Abstract:

Humans have been creating texts for thousands of years, expressing their social norms, values, composing poetry, and storytelling within them. Historical texts contain rich yet underexplored sources of psychological data, condensing the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of people who lived in the past. By utilizing the state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods, we developed a pipeline, called contextualized construct representations (CCR), to measure psychological constructs such as collectivism, individualism, norm strength, among others, in classical Chinese corpora. The large-scale historical text analysis unveils both temporal and spatial variations of various psychological constructs and moral values in pre-modern China, demonstrating the complex influences of a variety of factors, including climate, agriculture, conflicts, Confucianism, kinship, etc., on psychology and culture.

人類創造書面文字已有數千年歷史，人们通過文本表達社會規範和價值觀，創作詩歌和故事。作為一種內容豐富但尚未開發的心理數據來源，歷史文本濃縮了生活在過去的人們的思想、情感和行為。通過利用前沿的自然語言處理（NLP）技術，我們開發了一種名為“情境化構念表征”（CCR）的管道，用於測量中國古代文本中的集體主義、個人主義、規範強度等心理構念。大規模的歷史文本分析揭示了各種價值觀的歷時演變和空間分佈，展示了氣候、農業、衝突、儒家思想、親屬關係等多種因素對心理和文化的複雜影響。

Speaker:

Yuqi Chen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Peking University, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. She focuses on applying computational methods, such as natural language processing and social network analysis, among others, to the fields of Quantitative History and Digital Humanities. Her research is particularly centered on quantitative analysis of archaeological data from Early China and pre-modern Chinese texts.

陳鈺琪是北京大學歷史學系博士生，哈佛大學定量社會科學研究所訪問學者。她專注於將自然語言處理、社會網絡分析等計算方法應用於量化歷史和數字人文領域。她的研究特別關注早期中國考古數據和古代歷史文本的定量分析。

All are welcome

Registration: https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4Tnyvr2LMXvjdUG