University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Paul Vierthaler (University of Leiden), “Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus”

October 11, 2018

“Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus” – October 11, 4pm – 7pm -- Lecture (4 - 5:30) & DH Mixer (5:30 - 7:00) in Wilson 142

 

Paul Vierthaler is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of the Digital Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In his current monograph project, he analyzes how historical events are represented in “quasi-histories" written in late imperial China. In this work, he studies how information transforms in genre- and time-dependent ways across thousands of semi- to un-trustworthy texts. In order to facilitate rapid and rigorous research, Paul is interested in developing and adapting computational methods to analyze and visualize large natural language corpora. In his other work, he has been developing machine learning models to study the authorship of the famous late-Ming novel the Plum in the Golden Vase. Additionally, as a continuation of past work on quantitative bibliographic analysis, Paul is developing an extensible and mineable bibliographic database on public domain Chinese texts, which will be deployed in late 2018 or early 2019. In 2015-2016, Paul was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Boston College. Prior to that, he was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. In 2014, he was awarded a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.

 
Homer Statue
Brooks Hall Commons
4:00 pm