2023 Showcase

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Document Type

Video

Abstract

Interrogation historically serves as a tool of justice to pinpoint truth in narratives and to mete out punishment. In our project, we look at two types of interrogative genres: Chinese fictional detective novels and archived Spanish Inquisition trial records. The project of importing and translating western knowledge and the justice system is frequently used to measure the process of modernization in the late Qing and republican era of China. Interrogation reflects a crucial distinction between the rule of man and the rule of law as a ground of modern civilization, which brings about the comparative perspective on the legal viewpoint on interrogation between western countries and China in the pre-modern era. Similarly, the violent interrogation methods of the Spanish Inquisition, such as the employment of torture, are used to show the disparate justice systems in the Enlightened British Empire versus the religiously fervent Spanish Empire. Our project investigates how to use R script to recognize the genre and the cultural background of interrogation. Our corpora include archival examples of interrogation in historical records of the Spanish Inquisition as well as fictional examples of interrogation in a significant Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An. In comparing these sets of corpora, we uncover a number of problems in employing the syuzhet package. While we expect a negative value of the interrogative sentences, the values do not always coordinate with our understanding of the texts and the most negative interrogations. Our study reveals that the syuzhet package evaluates sentence on a modern understanding of the sentiments of words when we are using an early modern dataset. We test this hypothesis of whether modern sentiment values can accurately analyze early modern corpora by using the syuzhet library in R to codify a variety of early modern corpora based on their sentiment value. Our corpora range from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and both corpora are translated nearly two hundred years later. Notably, the translator of Dee Goong An, however, emphasized that this work achieved the “modern Western standards” of the detective novel. Our investigation also takes into account the question of translation by evaluating the differences in the translations and original texts. Through our study, we hope to improve the syuzhet package to apply to corpora that are translated and have a different set of sentiment values from the early modern period. Our comparisons intend to yield a more comprehensive expression of the modern legal concept in the Western and Chinese context.

Publication Date

4-18-2023

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