Home - Quantitative Humanities

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

“The idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.”

Jean-Paul Sartre