Event

Abstract:
This talk will discuss two on-going projects that apply quantitative analysis to issues in the study of early Chinese religion. One project concerns the issue of the degree to which early China had a concept of mind-body dualism. The results of a series of studies, ranging from qualitative team coding to fully automated analysis, will be presented that take advantage of the fact that the Chinese textual corpus is largely digitized, allowing us to “read” it in entirely new ways. The second project concerns a massive database of religious/cultural history that is being constructed in order to subject functionalist theories of religion to more rigorous and comprehensive testing than has previously been possible, as well as allowing scholars to ask questions about cultural transmission and the contours of religious concepts and affiliations in a new way.

All members of the Penn community are welcome!