Chinese Phonological Databases and Intertextual Networks for Comparative Philology and AI

Reconstructing premodern sound systems and identifying forms of intertextuality have been significant concerns of scholarly communities around the world for centuries. With the advent of digital corpora and computational tools, new avenues for research into historical phonology and intertextuality at large scale have recently emerged. We have been developing open-source large-scale approaches to premodern Chinese phonology and intertextuality, enabling new forms of algorithmically based research as a means to identify networks of relationships between texts, textual communities, traditions and sources. These methods provide new ways to identify and quantify the development of literary forms and intellectual history over the longue durée, deriving new insights into the sources and histories of many of our most classic works, long obscured by time, space and/or lack of prestige.