This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture offers groundbreaking research taking place at the intersection of digital humanities and classical Chinese literary studies. Contributors put forth bold conclusions about the history of traditional Chinese literary culture, showing how the digital humanities can extend philology’s and literary studies’ traditional concerns to reexamine classic literary texts within the contexts of their production, reception, and circulation. Contributors use the tools and metrics of social-network analysis to study literary culture, map the geography of poetry production, and use sophisticated programs to trace patterns of rhetoric and allusion. Rather than purely focusing on theory or methodology, the contributors provide concrete case studies that offer new insights driven by digital tools and databases. The issue envisions a future in which computational technologies are an essential component of any humanistic study.

Contributors. Jing Chen, Timothy Clifford, Yi-long Huang, Chao-lin Liu, Thomas Mazanec, Evan Nicoll-Johnson, Qiao Junjun, Donald Sturgeon, Jeffrey Tharsen, Wang Zhaopeng, Bingyu Zheng, Mariana Zorkina

Thomas Mazanec is Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Jeffrey Tharsen is Computational Scientist for the Digital Humanities and Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Chicago.

Jing Chen is a Research Fellow at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.