The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) invites scholars seeking funds for research and writing to apply for Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies fellowships and grants. The following three fellowships are offered: flexible, short-term fellowships, long-term research fellowships, and travel grants.
The Philosophy Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is calling for applications for its Ph.D. programs that start from Fall 2020. The CUHK has a world-renown program in philosophy, equally strong in Chinese philosophy, analytic philosophy, and Continental philosophy. In the QS Subject Rankings in the most recent three years, it is ranked as the best philosophy program in Asia (it was ranked at the 30th, 34th, and 28th world-wide respectively in the last three years).
At Steve’s request I have agreed to help prepare a guidance “page” on how to cite Chinese philosophy-related texts (classical and post-classical), and how to use the citations you see. But I don’t know much about that, so please send help!
Donald Sturgeon reports that thanks to the support of Harvard Yenching Library, over 5 million pages of scanned materials from the Yenching Library collection have been added to the Library section of the ctext.org site, including high quality images from the Chinese Rare Books Collection. See http://ctext.org/library.pl?if=en&collection=139. Approximate transcriptions created using the ctext.org OCR procedure have also been added to the Wiki, making these materials full-text searchable. In future he hopes to collaborate with other libraries to include materials from their Chinese language collections.
Hilde De Weerdt writes: A belated new year present for all who work with classical Chinese texts.
The MARKUS platform has gone through a major update during the past few months. You can now create an account, upload content, add customized tags and comments and notes of different kinds, select which reference sites you want to display, convert Chinese to western dates, and, last but not least, import text directly from your ctext.org account. We have added new videos to show most of these features under “HowTo.” More will be added and Chinese translations of these will be added as well.
News from Donald Sturgeon, who has used optical character recognition to provide extraordinary searchable access to pre-modern Chinese texts online:
A major update to the site has been made by applying OCR to over ten million pages of transmitted texts stored in the Library, linking scanned texts where possible to digital editions that follow them. Over 3000 existing texts have been successfully linked, allowing side-by-side display and textual searching of scanned texts.
Additionally, around ten thousand new texts and editions have also been transcribed for the first time using OCR. While these transcriptions inevitably contain many errors, they make it possible for the first time to search the scanned texts and immediately locate information within them. All newly transcribed texts have been added to the Wiki – please help by correcting errors when using these resources.
For further details, please see the OCR instructions.
MARKUS is an on-line tool that allows users to upload a file in classical Chinese and tag personal names, place names, temporal references, and bureaucratic offices automatically, and that’s just for starters. It looks powerful and helpful; check it out here. Hilde de Weerdt describes some recent updates to MARKUS here.
Chad Hansen has created a MOOC on edX called “Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought,” available here. Here is some copy from the course description:
Think along with Classical Chinese masters as they explore and debate how and where we can find ethical guidance in nature.
We make ethical or behaviour guiding right / wrong judgments all the time but have you ever wondered where Ethics comes from, what it is about and why it is important? This course provides an introduction to traditional Chinese ethical thought and focuses on the pervasive contrast in the way Chinese and Westerners think about ethical guidance or guidance concerning what is right and what is wrong, good or bad. Traditional Western orthodoxy uses the metaphor of a law – in its most familiar popular form, the command of a supernatural being backed by a threat of eternal punishment or reward – to explain ethical guidance. The Classical Chinese philosophers by contrast were all naturalists. They talked about ethical guidance using a path metaphor – a natural dào…
