Announcement_3

I’m honored to be invited to deliver a talk for the School of Chinese at The University of Hong Kong.

Title: Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical Text Analysis Unveilling Psychological Dynamics Within Chinese Culture Across Two Millennia.

Abstract: Humans have been creating texts for thousands of years, expressing their social norms, values, composing poetry, and storytelling within them. Historical texts contain rich yet underexplored sources of psychological data, condensing the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of people who lived in the past. By utilizing the state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods, we developed a pipeline, called contextualized construct representations (CCR), to measure psychological constructs such as collectivism, individualism, norm strength, among others, in classical Chinese corpora. The large-scale historical text analysis unveils both temporal and spatial variations of various psychological constructs and moral values in pre-modern China, demonstrating the complex influences of a variety of factors, including climate, agriculture, conflicts, Confucianism, kinship, etc., on psychology and culture.