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East Asian Studies · History of knowledge · Digital Humanities

New Pattern Lab feature for MATHesis

I added a new work-in-progress feature to my MATHesis website today. The new Pattern Lab (Open project link ↗) uses Christopher Cullen’s edited Chinese text, translation, and annotation of the Sifen li1 as a case study.

It offers a preliminary comparison tool for identifying similarities among procedural structures and tracing how technical terms function across a manually annotated set of chunks.

The aim is to build an explainable and reproducible framework for extracting structural patterns from Chinese calendrical and astronomical writings. Instead of relying on black-box similarity, the tool uses manually curated annotations as a controlled reference layer, allowing procedural operations, parameters, outputs, and term roles to be compared and checked against the source text.

Footnotes

  1. Cullen, Christopher. 2017. The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning: Three Ancient Chinese Astronomical Systems. Routledge. ↩