Welcome to qh · china, a place where quantitative conceptuality meets Chinese humanities.

[under construction]

What is qh?

“Quantitative Humanities” is a set of scholarly disciplines which can be characterized by the following keywords:

  • Experimentation: probing literary and visual texts with digital tools and statistical methods
  • Text-centrism: considering literary artifacts as more than mere anecdotes reflecting extra-textual forces and ideologies
  • Quantification: reinterpreting narrative phenomena as vectors, frequencies, distances, and networks
  • Big Data & Small Data: reading large corpora, single novels, and tiny paragraphs
  • Multidisciplinarity: combining natural language processing with cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanistic methodologies: close reading, genealogy, structuralism, aesthetic theory, etc.
  • Limits of computation: identifying what stories can tell us about the world and ourselves that matrix multiplications cannot

Random Quote

“过去一家人碰到一块,说闲话的时候多。现在不是,到一块就是辩论无产阶级文化大革命的问题。父子之间、兄弟姐妹之间、夫妻之间,连十几岁娃娃和老太大,都参加了辩论。”

“In the past, when a family gathered, they spent most of the time chatting casually. That’s not the case anymore. Now, whenever they come together, it’s to debate the issues of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Between fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives—even kids in their teens and elderly grandmothers—everyone joins the debate.”

 

毛主席视察华北、中南和华东地区时的重要指示

The Important Instructions Given by Chairman Mao During His Inspections of North China, Central-South China, and East China