Color Aesthetics and Social Networks in Complete Tang Poems: Explorations and Discoveries

The Complete Tang Poems (CTP) is the most important source to study Tang poems. We look into CTP with computational tools from specific linguistic perspectives, including distributional semantics and collocational analysis. From such quantitative viewpoints, we compare the usage of “wind” and “moon” in the poems of Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫). Colors in poems function like sounds in movies, and play a crucial role in the imageries of poems. Thus, words for colors are studied, and “白” (bai2, white) is the main focus because it is the most frequent color in CTP. We also explore some cases of using colored words in antithesis(對仗) pairs that were central for fostering the imageries of the poems. CTP also contains useful historical information, and we extract person names in CTP to study the social networks of the Tang poets. Such information can then be integrated with the China Biographical Database of Harvard University.