TEXTCOURT: Developing a Digital Approach to Chinese Court Drama

TEXTCOURT：建立一種針對宮廷戲劇的數位研究方法

10.6853/DADH.202210_(10).0001

Tian Yuan Tan；Ewan Macdonald；Ming Tak Ted Hui

Chinese court drama ； digital humanities ； Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) ； 中國宮廷戲 ； 數位人文 ； 文本編碼規範（TEI）

數位典藏與數位人文

10期（2022 / 10 / 01）

1 - 31

英文;繁體中文

Court theater was a core part of Chinese court and performance culture for centuries, flourishing in China's last two imperial dynasties, Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911). Dramatic performances took place on multiple occasions such as imperial birthdays, weddings, state rituals, and seasonal festivals. Despite its significance for understanding Chinese court and performance culture, Chinese court drama texts have never received adequate attention. There are several reasons for this: the vast quantity of texts and the difficulty of accessing them; the low status of these texts in Chinese literary history as "authorless" performer's texts and "meaningless" court panegyrics; and the lack of any existing analytic framework to study anonymous Chinese performance texts at such a large scale. Although some of the Qing court dramatic texts are reprinted in recent large-scale publication projects, many of these texts are still kept in separate archives and depositories around the world. To bring together such a vast amount of materials and develop an approach that will allow us to probe into this valuable resource, the TEXTCOURT project is creating the first digital archive dedicated to Chinese court drama. This paper will provide an overview of the project focusing on the creation of the database, namely the transcription of the dramatic scripts and the production of structurally marked-up texts following the guidelines of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). It will also provide suggestions on how the database could be used to pursue new types of research questions and present some of the preliminary findings based on the application of computational methods.

宮廷戲劇一直是中國表演文化的核心部分。在明朝（1368-1644）和清朝（1644-1911）兩代，宮廷戲蓬勃發展。兩朝往往會在皇室成員的壽誕、婚禮、外交儀式和節令慶典時搬演這些劇目。然而，即使這些劇本能讓人更進一步瞭解中國的宮廷文化，但這些劇本卻始終沒有得到充分的認可。究其原因，這些宮廷曲本數量太多，且又散落在各個地方，因此人們很難訪查相關的著作；而且，這些文本在中國文學史上的地位不高，往往會被視為歌功頌德的著作，並因其沒有具名的作者而被加以唾棄。目前學界也缺乏任何研究框架來分析數量如此龐大的佚名的中文戲曲文本。儘管最近一些大型出版項目重印了不少清廷戲曲，但許多明清的宮廷戲曲仍散見於世界各地的圖書館之中。為了匯集這些珍貴的材料，探尋研治這些戲曲的方法，TEXTCOURT計劃試圖創建第一個專門用於收集中國宮廷戲曲的數位資料庫。本文將概述這個研究項目的重點，闡明數據庫創建的過程與局限，並說明本項目如何按照TEI（文本編碼規範）轉錄劇本的內容、製作附有標記的戲曲文本。本文接着將介紹一些可套用於本數據庫的數位方法，並說明本計劃的一些初步發現。

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