HIST4702 (2023-24) Digital History Project: 火攻挈要
Intellectual Origins and Impact: Investigation through Text Mining
Introduction
In the text mining project, 《火攻挈要》 Huo gong qie yao is situated in the wider context of the history of knowledge. Our group compared Schall’s book with contemporary works on artillery, three in Chinese and one in French.
We concluded that Huo gong qie yao was significantly distinct from the Chinese books we examined, whilst its partial similarity with the French work regarding gunpowder ingredients suggested a multilingual approach to tracing the sources that Huo gong qie yao derived from.
Moreover, despite the Ming-Qing transition, this seemingly outdated late-Ming monograph reattracted professional audience after the First Opium War, as demonstrated in our comparison between Huo gong qie yao and chapters from 《海國圖志》Hai guo tu zhi.
This project was assisted by CTEXT, an online library designed for text mining of pre-modern Chinese texts, and Voyant-Tools, a web-based application for text analysis capable of processing different languages.
Intellectual Origins
Impact
