Diving into the cultural past, owing to the use of big data

Photo: YAP CHEE HONG/The Star

KUALA LUMPUR: Prof Dr Huang Yi-Long (pic) stepped into at least 50 libraries in various countries, flipping through tens of thousands of ancient records and reading materials, to conduct his research on Dream of the Red Chamber.

He spent 12 years producing three books and 55 papers, published in journals, on his research on the novel considered one of the four great classics of Chinese literature.

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“I started in 2010 when the use of big data was not as common.

“There were limited resources and restricted access to online materials from public libraries.

“Whenever I heard that a library might have the information and data I needed, I would go to it.

“It was so difficult to get material, and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was useful,” said the professor from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

But that difficulty is behind him now.

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Last year, Prof Huang published a book titled Redefining Qing Dynasty Naming Taboo: E-Textual Research as a Sinological Method.

This time, it only took him 18 months to write the book of over 500 pages with 15 billion words, thanks to technology.

“With big data, I can easily search for related and useful material and download them for my research,” he said on his keynote address on “The Dialogue between Digital and Traditional” at the international conference on the “Development and Future of Sinology in the 21st Century”.

The two-day event was held in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of Universiti Malaya’s Chinese Studies Department.

Prof Huang, who has a PhD in astronomy from Columbia University, now places his research focus on Chinese history, China-Europe cultural interaction, the history of Chinese science and others.

“It makes our job so much easier. We can access tonnes of material for free,” he said.

Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, is an important literature of 18th century novelist Cao Xueqin.

Noted for its noble ideas and aesthetic values, this masterpiece tells the stories of the wealthy and aristocratic Jia clan, which fell from grace.

The literature has gained significant intellectual interest and research, with the creation of a new discipline called “Redology”.

In 2016, former transport minister Tan Sri Chan Kong Choy donated his 40 years worth of worldwide collection of the novel, which consists of some 6,000 items of literary works including calligraphy works, paintings and manuscripts in more than 10 languages, to his alma mater, Universiti Malaya which set up its Dream of the Red Chamber Research Centre in 2018.