Du Fu's conspicuous negativity and Li Bai's hidden positivity: a sentiment comparison and exploration.

In the studies of classical Chinese poetry, the comparison between Li Bai and Du Fu is an everlasting topic, yielding many qualitative interpretations, among which a widely known but disputable one is Li's positivity versus Du's negativity. With the development of digital means, distant reading has...

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Published in:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 280 - 296
Main Authors: Meng, Yingying, Wan, Yuwei, Kit, Chunyu
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Apr2024
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Apr2024
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      pub: Oxford University Press / USA
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        atl: Du Fu's conspicuous negativity and Li Bai's hidden positivity: a sentiment comparison and exploration.
      aug:
        au:
          Meng, Yingying
          Wan, Yuwei
          Kit, Chunyu
        affil: Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong SAR, China
      su:
        Li Bai
        Poetry collections
        Chinese poetry
        Optimism
        Sentiment analysis
        Encyclopedias & dictionaries
      sug:
        subj:
          Li Bai
          Poetry collections
          Chinese poetry
          Optimism
          Sentiment analysis
          Encyclopedias & dictionaries
      keyword:
        corpus
        Du Fu
        keyness
        sentiment analysis
      ab: In the studies of classical Chinese poetry, the comparison between Li Bai and Du Fu is an everlasting topic, yielding many qualitative interpretations, among which a widely known but disputable one is Li's positivity versus Du's negativity. With the development of digital means, distant reading has become possible, and the sentiment issue can be further explored in quantitative ways. This research conducts a corpus-based sentiment comparison of Li and Du with a self-constructed sentiment dictionary. The Complete Collection of Tang Poems is used as a representative of Tang poets, and sentiment comparisons are made at the levels of poems, verses, and characters, as well as key characters extracted with the log-likelihood measure. Analyses show that (1) among Tang poets, Du is more negative at all of the above textual levels, while Li is only more positive at the key character level, proving the importance of key characters in readers' perception of sentiment; (2) Li and Du both stand out among Tang poets with a negative depiction of the dark reality and a positive expression of grand ideals; and (3) Li's positivity is largely embodied in his depictions of color, light, and temperature, while Du's negativity is closely related to his psychological description. To conclude, this research has not only determined the sentiment difference between Li and Du but also located its sources in texts with a novel key character-based sentiment analysis approach. Keywords:
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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      custom: © 2019 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities.
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      holder: Oxford University Press / USA
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