Riding the wind of rebirth

"To give a simple example, the word 'Dongpo' appears at any time in historical texts. Only when it is used as a subject or object, and the predicate is an action that a person can perform or accept, can we roughly determine that the 'Dongpo' here refers to a person."

"So we can roughly judge that the sentence 'getting drunk with Dongpo' is related to Su Shi, but 'getting drunk with Dongpo', Dongpo is not the object, so we let the program think it has nothing to do with Su Shi."

"Of course, there are also ambiguous sentences, such as 'Dongpo has fields'. This type of sentence needs to be further judged, which involves a whole set of syntactic analysis logic."

"In the end, we will get a group of sub-tags related to Su Shi, as well as a group of people who are more closely related to him, such as 'Su Xun', 'Su Zhe', 'Wang Fu', 'Song Renzong', 'Empress Dowager Cao', 'Zhang Dun', etc."

"We will temporarily block this type of character label, and only use the previous three labels of 'Shi', 'Zizhan', and 'Dongpo' to determine the sub-labels, and start searching in the library." Zhou Zhi operated and explained skillfully: "Look, in the end we will get thousands of data related to Su Dongpo."

"Of course, what I showed to the teachers were previous projects. These were the results after calculation. The actual calculation process still takes some time. It's impossible to do it this fast."

"We can divide these thousands of records into several categories." Zhou Zhi tapped on the keyboard, and thousands of records were divided into several colors.

"One category includes time, one category includes location, and one category includes official position." Zhou Zhi tapped the keyboard again, and the three categories of data began to be rearranged and aggregated: "Based on the changes in Su Shi's official position and place of employment, the reign titles of the Song Dynasty, the changes in the characters and numbers used, etc., we can sort out these thousands of records into a "Biography of Su Dongpo" and, based on this, a "Collection of Dongpo's Anecdotes."

"These two books are of great significance for studying Su Dongpo's life, official career, friends, relatives, political allies and enemies, thoughts and ideas, etc. They are very useful reference books."

"Now that we have completed these two steps, we are analyzing the poems in the Complete Works of Su Dongpo to determine the period in which his poems were written."

"For example, his "Presented to Liu Jingwen", we can see from his memorials and notes that he met Liu Jingwen in the fifth year of Emperor Zhezong's Yuanyou reign when he was in Hangzhou. In the fifth year of Yuanyou reign, Su Shi reported to the court that Liu Jingwen was already 58 years old, praising him as a 'generous and extraordinary man'. Combined with the context of the poem, it should have been written in the late autumn and early winter of the fifth year of Yuanyou reign."

"There are many such analysis functions, and we have even made many new discoveries. The background of his poem "Remembering the Past with Ziyou at Minchi" is clear at a glance in the search data."

"Su Che was appointed as the governor of Minchi at the age of 19, but he passed the imperial examination before taking office and was later transferred to another position. Therefore, the nostalgia is not about this old time, but about the time when Su Shi and his two sons went to Beijing to take the imperial examination in the third year of Jiayou. They passed by Minchi and wrote a few poems on the wall while staying in a monk's house."

"In the sixth year of Jiayou, the two brothers passed the imperial examination together. Su Shi was appointed as the magistrate of Fengxiang. Su Zhe saw Su Shi off to take up the post. They parted ways in Zhengzhou. Because Su Shi had to pass by Minchi, he thought of his brother's old work and took it out to write a poem in response to his brother's."

"Therefore, the date of this poem can be determined. It was written in the sixth year of Jiayou when he was appointed to Fengxiang as an official."

"Thus, we can reshuffle Su Shi's poems and create a 'Chronological Study of Su Shi's Poems and Lyrics'." "In the past, if you wanted to get the three works 'Su Dongpo's Biography', 'Su Dongpo's Anecdotes' and 'Chronological Study of Su Dongpo's Poems and Lyrics', you would need a scholar who had done a deep study of Su Dongpo and spent his entire life writing them. It was inevitable that there would be many errors in the writing. Now, with this engine tool, we can easily extract them from a huge amount of data."

"And once the tool is mature, we can also analyze a large number of Song Dynasty figures at the same time, and get Ouyang Xiu's Biography, Ouyang Xiu's Anecdotes, Ouyang Xiu's Poetry and Prose Chronological Study; Sima Guang's Biography, Sima Guang's Anecdotes, Sima Guang's Poetry and Lyrics Chronological Study; Wang Anshi's Biography, Wang Anshi's Anecdotes, Wang Anshi's Poetry and Lyrics Chronological Study."

"Of course, in addition to these, there are many other difficult problems in Song Dynasty research, and we are also trying to solve them using this kind of method."

"For example, the complexity of official positions in the Song Dynasty is the highest among all feudal dynasties, but the search algorithm for this is also the simplest and clearest. The "Officials" section of various historical materials also describes it in great detail."

"However, in addition to the official titles that would appear in official documents during the Song Dynasty, each official position would be replaced by various pronouns in a large number of daily interactions, conversations between superiors and subordinates, and correspondence between friends, making the situation even more complicated. For example, the official title of a prefect should be the governor of a certain prefecture, but in correspondence, it was often replaced by the previous dynasty's 'prefect' or 'dayin'."

"Based on the rank of the official, the titles are divided into 'zhi', 'chong', 'quanzhi', 'quanchong', 'quanfaqian', etc.;"

"In addition, there is 'remote governorship', which gives members of the royal family a nominal title of local governor, but they don't go there at all. They just stay in the capital and receive a salary according to their official position."

"There is another situation, that is, although they have been appointed to local posts, they are not allowed to sign official documents. They are exiled to a certain place and supervised by local officials. They are not allowed to leave the state. This is a kind of house arrest with the rank of position retained. For example, Bai Juyi was the Sima of Jiangzhou and Su Dongpo was the Tongpan of Huangzhou. They are of this kind."

"To this end, we are searching for materials from the Song Dynasty to create a dictionary of official positions in the two Song dynasties. In the future, we will also extend this tool to other dynasties."

"This is the liberal arts project we can think of so far, which is built on the basis of three development applications: digital library, search engine, and big data analysis. Limited by our vision and knowledge, this is what we are doing now. We also hope that experts can join our project to discover more and better projects, make full use of the digital library, and contribute to our liberal arts project."

"From ancient times to the present, the commodity prices of all dynasties are difficult to quantify." An old man sitting next to Gu Youwen said, "In ancient times, circulation was not smooth. For example, in the Song Dynasty, there were three relatively large economic zones, namely Bianjing, Hangzhou-Yangzhou, and Shuzhong."

"Because of the inconvenience of transportation, the prices of the same goods in different places are not uniform." The old man continued: "For example, in the Song Dynasty, iron coins and Jiaozi were still used in Shuzhong, and in other places, due to the shortage of money, salt permits also played a considerable role in currency."

"In addition, due to the different harvests over the years, the price of a dou of rice could fluctuate from as low as seven wen to as high as several guan. This drastic fluctuation also brought great obstacles to determining the level of economic development in that era."

"It would be great if we could get a price chart of various commodities in various regions and eras during the Song Dynasty." (End of this chapter)