Citation and other scholarly matters of textual reuse

Description

Citation is a central practice in East Asian scholarship, whether in historiography, philosophy, religion, exegesis, or the sciences. It is fundamental to questions of knowledge, epistemology, and authority. In this sense, citation constitutes both a foundation of knowledge and an instrument of legitimation: it allows scholars to substantiate or defend specific positions and underpins hierarchies of evidence – e.g., between ancient texts, modern experience, and revelation. Finally, citation plays a key role in establishing a scholar’s authority among peers, insofar as its use simultaneously demonstrates mastery of a codified language, provides access to the past (and, in some cases, to a reality conceived as ultimate), and enables the scholar to (re)draw the trajectory of human knowledge, whether conceived as progressive or regressive.

The project aims to integrate analyses of the use of citation across a variety of East Asian fields and regions. In its initial phase, however, it is anchored in the exegetical (zhu 注, shu 疏, etc.) and encyclopedic traditions of imperial China.

The project is structured around three major lines of inquiry:

The first line of inquiry concerns the integration of scientific knowledge (astronomy, astrology, mathematics, botany) into Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist commentarial traditions. The questions raised by such forms of citation are numerous. A central issue is what these bodies of knowledge contribute within their context of citation: are they drawn from contemporary specialized literature, so-called popular science, personal experience, or earlier commentaries? Their positioning – often distinct from the specialized literature of the period – invites reflection on how commentators reconcile the epistemology and historical understanding of these forms of knowledge with those of a sacred text and its exegetical tradition. When a cited passage is recontextualized in this way, it undergoes semantic or heuristic transformations that warrant close analysis. Finally, such knowledge may function as initiatory learning embedded within a general curriculum, raising, at both the individual and collective levels, questions of polymathy, mixed academic lineages, and social and citation networks.

The second line of inquiry focuses on the specific modalities of citation, reuse, and modified integration of textual sources across different genres. It naturally engages with long-standing questions in traditional sinology, such as citation practices, authorial culture, the concept of ‘plagiarism’, and the stability and accessibility of authoritative texts. At the same time, the contributions of statistical and computational approaches in this area are particularly promising. By drawing on large corpora and text mining, it becomes possible to identify instances of textual reuse, to propose comprehensive comparisons of textual variants, and to produce network analyses. This line of inquiry will therefore welcome projects in the digital humanities that combine computational methods with the concerns of the traditional historian.

The third line of inquiry focuses on the sources of citations and on the role of encyclopedias (leishu 類書 or their equivalents) in the circulation and selection of passages excerpted in other texts – particularly those of an exegetical or argumentative nature. This line of inquiry is especially well suited to digital humanities projects, which make possible the systematic identification of cited sources and the large-scale detection of citations within encyclopedic compilations.

Collective activities

The ‘Citations’ program is structured around two complementary components:

Collaborative clusters. Working meetings dedicated to specific collaborative projects will be held according to their own schedules. Current clusters include:

• DIDACT (Digital Investigation of the Duren jing and Its Commentarial Traditions), directed by Daniel P. Morgan and Johan Rols, analyses commentaries to the Duren jing using computational methods in order to study textual reuse, citation networks, and the genealogy of textual versions. The project aims to understand how Daoist masters transmit and reformulate bodies of knowledge and practice – such as astronomy, ritual, inner alchemy, and salvation – through a tradition of successive commentaries and reinterpretations.
• The Lit-Reasoning / 文學構思, arising from a collaboration between Chiang Tao-Yi and Marie Bizais-Lillig, explores the ways in which citation structures argumentation in Tang regulated fu (lüfu). The project aims to demonstrate that, while citation has an undeniable formal impact on the fu – particularly on its rhythm – this learned artifice also generates semantic depth and guides the discourse. This study is made possible by digital humanities methods that allow for the systematic identification of sources, their classification, and the analysis of their contexts of use.

Public activities

An ‘internal methodological seminar’, held four to five times per year, will enable members of the program to present and discuss the methodological choices and tools – particularly computational ones – of specific projects, as well as to share epistemological questions and concerns.

The program will also be enriched by a series of invited lectures by external speakers. Priority will be given to scholars visiting Paris, France, or Europe.

Finally, a small-scale international workshop focused on a specific topic will be held annually in Paris. It will bring together researchers from the CRCAO and international partners.

Some of these international workshops will lead to collective publications in specialized academic journals.