This article presents technical approaches and innovations in digital library design developed during the design and implementation of the Chinese Text Project, a widely-used, large-scale full-text digital library of premodern Chinese writing. By leveraging a combination of domain-optimized Optical Character Recognition, a purpose-designed crowdsourcing system, and an Application Programming Interface (API), this project simultaneously provides a sustainable transcription system, search interface and reading environment, as well as an extensible platform for transcribing and working with premodern Chinese textual materials. By means of the API, intentionally loosely integrated text mining tools are used to extend the platform, while also being reusable independently with materials from other sources and in other languages.
Although the text of the Zhuangzi 1 seems to present many prima facie skeptical arguments, there has been much debate as to the nature of its skeptical stance, and even whether or not its stance is substantively skeptical at all. 2 Chad Hansen and Chris Fraser have argued that the Zhuangzi does take a substantively skeptical position, but that this position is more nuanced than simply holding skepticism about the possibility of all knowledge. 3 This paper will attempt to build upon Chris Fraser's proposal that the Zhuangzi is skeptical about our ability to know a privileged class of ultimately correct ways of drawing distinctions ( guo shi and guo fei), but does not question our ability to know how to distinguish things in an ordinary, provisional and commonsense sense. I will attempt to engage with both sides of the debate, by firstly accepting that the Zhuangzi takes a substantive skeptical stance, but also arguing that in doing so the text also provides a positive account of how to improve our epistemic position -an account which * Forthcoming in Philosophy East and West 65:3. 1 This paper will focus on knowledge and skepticism in the anthology known as the Zhuangzi, beginning with ideas presented most clearly in the Qiwulun chapter, but will also consider how these ideas cohere with those presented elsewhere in the anthologyincluding in passages that may be later additions to the text by one or more distinct authors or editors. Even where this is so, it still seems useful to ask how -if at all -these ideas fit together, and why they might have been collected together in such an anthology. I shall use the term "Zhuangist" to refer to the broadly coherent set of ideas I identify in this paper -within which there may be some scope for variation -without meaning to suggest that these ideas are uniformly endorsed by all passages of the entire anthology.
Donald STURGEON is College Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research interests include language and knowledge in early Chinese thought, and the application of digital methods to the study of pre-modern Chinese language and literature. His current projects include the adaptation of optical character recognition techniques to historical Chinese documents, the application of machine learning to dating and authorship attribution of pre-modern Chinese texts, and the study of text reuse relationships in the pre-modern Chinese corpus. Since 2005, he has developed and managed the Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org), a widely used online digital library of pre-modern Chinese writing.
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