Flexible Computing Services for Comparisons and Analyses of Classical Chinese Poetry

As for many civilizations, poetry is an essential part of Chinese literature. Poetry has influenced the development of the literature and language of both classical and vernacular Chinese. Certain of the words that we use today can be tracked all the way back to the Shijing (詩經/shi1 jing1/ [1]), c. 1046BC. Research on Chinese poetry is thus instrumental for understanding Chinese culture, and a lot of invaluable results have been accumulated over the past thousands of years from the study and analysis of Chinese poetry. The availability of digital tools and resources enable researchers to compare and analyze the poetry from certain perspectives that were hard to achieve in the past. In many cases, we can verify the claims of previous researches with solid data, and, in others, we may enrich our understanding of the poetry. The accessibility of increasingly larger datasets strengthens our research potential. In earlier stages of digital humanities, pioneers focused their work on Tang and Song poetry [2]. Now, we can access digitized texts of poems that were published in the periods from 1046BC to modern days. Software tools allow us to study the data from a wide variety of perspectives in an efficient way. Search engines and information retrieval techniques [3] help us extract relevant texts from a large dataset. Then, researchers can employ domain knowledge for advanced studies with the use of additional tools. In this paper, we showcase research results that we achieved by handling the available data with existing tools in flexible ways. We collected nine representative corpora of Chinese poetry, one each for a major dynasty in Chinese history between 1046BC and 1644AD. We list the corpora in Table 1, where we assign an acronym to each corpus for ease of reference [4]. We also show their Chinese names (Collection) and the periods of publication (Time). A collection for the Qing dynasty is unavailable yet because an editorial committee is still working toward the completion of