The application of digital humanities in the stylometric analysis for the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經)
Résumé
The recitation has been a cultural practice to tokenize verses in order to craft poetic language. My research is focused on the effect of such practice in The Book of Odes' readings at the level of hemistich. The question is how do we handle literary rhythms which could be engendered during corpus’s reading and establish a non-semantic connection between patterns. In order to trace back rhythmic phenomenons in the text, I propose to focus on repetitious elements like syntactic formula and other frequent combinations of sinograms. A full analysis allows revealing dynamic patterns in a targeted string by the contrast of occurrence. We thus propose an experimental method of reading which sets forth two aspects: on one hand the frequent pattern that creates the dominant rhythm and on the other hand the rare pattern that constitutes the mean ideas. Based on such inquiry, we would be able to evaluate the language style distance between authors, anthologies, dynasties, regions...etc. This approach also gives a new perspective to review some mystical literary phenomenon. Such as the ambiguous connection between verses produced with the « incentive process (Xing 興) »: a fundamental process of the classical literary theory.