ubuntu2004
How Has Scholarship on China Changed?
Description:
This project came about due to my research interests in China and being interested in what position China has played in the development of the academic study of religion. So, I thought that if I wanted to be able to answer that question, I would need data from a source that was well established in the field. At that point, I knew that the Journal of Religion had been around since the 1880s, and Jstor has the Data for Research opition, so I thought why not pull data from Jstor specifically from the Journal of Religion that deals with China. Well, jstor only gave me data from 1921-2015, I assume this is due to copyright laws, but I not hundred percent sure on that. And, the data that Jstor gave me 664 xml files and ngrams. So, my first task was to figure out what I could do with this data. This file before you is after the fact--I'm pulling in everything that I done, into hopefully one nice and clean jupyter notebook.
What Type and Quantity of Scholarship on China was the Journal of Religion Publishing?
Description:
What intriques me here is that no type of scholarship with 'China' is being published from this journal in 1973 & 1974. While the main concentration of Scholarship takes place in the 1920s, with 1922 having the most publications at 27 with 25 being articles. So, my question, that I am unable to answer currently, is what is going on at this time for an increase interest in China?
If people are publishing about China, what is China in relation to?
What is most common word over time?
Top Ten Words Over Time
Top Fifteen Words Over Time
Description:
So, it seems that earliery on you will find "Christian," "Christianity,"and "Church" in the top ten and top fifteen words. Which helps confirm some of my suspicions that people are only interested in China early on for the purpose of Missionary work. But without the ability to do a close reading of the documents, I can't confirm this. Because, Jstor doesn't give you that type of data.
Now, at this point in this project, I wasn't sure what to do, because a part of this assignment was to do three different analysis techniques, and I couldn't figure out how to do a different analysis with the data that Jstor gave me. Now, I'm not saying you couldn't, I'm saying that I wasn't sure what I could. Plus, I spent several hours trying to things, so I was done with this data. And, I thought to myself, well why don't you use an older text so that you can look at how scholars/authors are representing China. So, I was going to use Russell Betrand's The Problem of China, because it was published in the year 1922, but I guess either the text file is too large or I don't have enough memory, because the word count function basically broke trying to run using that document. So, I decided to use the book An Australian in China by George Ernest Morrison, originally published by 1895.
Representations of China in An Australian in China
What are the most common words?
What are the topics of this book?
Is China being portrayed negatively or postively?
Description:
So, I have never read this book before, but what strikes me of interest is that mission is used 147 times, missionary is used 96 times, and opium is used 93 times. Which tells me that this book takes place a little after the second opium war. And, since the story is supposed to be recounting someone time in China, I'm guessing they saw the impact of opium wars.
Description:
Here are twenty topics in ten words.And, I think that these topics help make sense of the top twenty words!
Description:
So, its seems as though this book doesn't portray China in either a negative or positive light, but mostly neutral. Though, I am curious because it was published in 1895, if the sentiment analysis is picking up certain descriptions and accurately deciding whether its negative or positive, like I know this book uses Chinaman, which isn't positive. So, I'm curious if I could train the sentiment analysis function specifically for this time and if, I were to do so, would that change the values.
Closing Thoughts
I think I got more questions than answers with this project. And, I'm not sure if I could consider it done, like now I want to know what was happening in the 1920s for academia, how can I train a sentiment analysis for the 1880-1920s period, should I change my jstor data to all data, so that I can get a better picture of what people where talking about, and how would I do a close reading of these jstor documents?
There's a lot to think about, but I think that this project has been very useful for me in learning some python!