Poetry Evaluation and Gender Portrayal in Medieval Chinese Texts

Early medieval Chinese texts are known for their interpretive richness, inviting a wide range of sometimes conflicting readings. The development of Transformer-based language models allows us to revisit these texts and examine them comparatively within a shared semantic space. This presentation introduces two case studies: one on poetry evaluation in the work of literary criticism Shipin 詩品 (Poetry Gradings), composed in the early sixth century, and the other on gender portrayal in epitaph verses from the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 C.E.). The results reveal nuanced yet consistent patterns in both cases, which become most visible within a relational space by simultaneously comparing a large corpus of texts, an endeavor made possible through computational methods.

Wenyi Shang is an assistant professor in the School of Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. He received his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in 2019, and his Ph.D. in information sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024. His research focuses on digital humanities, where he both works as a humanities scholar specializing in medieval China, applying computational methods to revisit longstanding questions in the social, political, cultural, and literary history of the period, and works with humanities scholars as a methodologist and disciplinary translator, engaging in topics across humanities disciplines.