Title of Abstract: Chinese Culture in The Great Unread
Name of Mentors: Birgit Tautz, Crystal Hall
Mentors’ Organizations or Departments: Department of German, Bowdoin College; Digital and Computational Studies Program, Bowdoin College
Research Abstract: This study is a topic model analysis on 18th Century German texts about China and Chinese culture. In these texts, Joosep searches for the reasons behind an 18th century discursive shift from positive sentiment about China and Chinese Culture to negative sentiment. Joosep’s work is a continuation of Birgit Tautz and Quyen Ha’s (class of 2018) work, primarily concentrating on extension of the corpus, a revision of methodology, and the development of an automated script for optical character recognition. The summer research was funded by the Gibbons fellowship.
Brandon Lee ’21