Welcome to my new blog, where I will be looking into some aspects of digital sinology.

I am currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. I am exploring the Zhuangzi 莊子, a classic of early Chinese literature, with a focus on the commentary of Lin Xiyi 林希逸. In the course of my research I have developed an interest in the digital humanities and especially the digital tools available for the organisation, study, and presentation of Chinese texts. This includes the use of Scrivener as a receptacle for large bodies of text and as a platform for advanced searches using regular expressions. Over the next few weeks I will demonstrate the benefits of using Scrivener, including a few practical videos. Over time I will unpick some more advanced features but the initial steps are not hard and quickly offer gratifying results.

Also, dealing with rare Chinese characters and character variants is proving an interesting challenge. Most of these are still absent in even the latest fonts and I am exploring ways of addressing this through the creation of new glyphs. It’s expanded my technical understanding but is also creative and fun. So expect some thoughts about that here.

My approach has evolved largely through self study and experimentation, but this has only been possible because of all the people out there who have freely shared their knowledge and expertise (I will add a resource page with links to what as helped me soon). So I establish this blog as a space to talk about my own methods and processes, hopefully speeding up other people’s learning curve. I would welcome any feedback about the usefulness of these materials, or any tips if you are aware of better tools and methods out there!

Peter Francis Smith