Information Systems As/In Chinese Literary History

Date: 3 June 2019
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: UVA Special Collections
Lecturer: Jack W. Chen - Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Virginia

Literary histories tend to be organized by authors, representative works, and genres, which foreground and construct narratives of unfolding literary style across time. However, the history of literature cannot be complete without an examination of the informational technologies that have made this history possible, from graphemes and sentences, to lexicons and encyclopedias, and from anthologies and newspapers, to libraries and databases. This talk will define the concept of informational technology as applied to literary and cultural history, with a focus on the grapheme, the lexicon, the anthology, and the encyclopedia.