可視性社會關係網絡輔助文學流派界定方法探析－以桐城派文人群體為例

Traditionally, for the research on ancient Chinese literary schools, collection of works was often used by researchers in previous studies to conduct comprehensive analyses. With close reading of great amount of literature and historical records can shade light on the genesis and evolution of the ideas in different literary schools, the composition of their members, as well as influential literary figures and their relationships. Although the method of literature review can provide in-depth analysis of the lineage of literary schools, researchers are often limited to reviewing a few key writers in a literary school due the amount of works that need to be closely examined. This leads to the result of only being able to draw a few ＂lineages＂ in a literary school and not being able to conduct the analysis of the ＂plane,＂ namely, the interconnections of all the members that constitute the whole literary school. Now there is the question whether we can make up the weakness by adopting the method of social network analysis (SNA). In this study, Gephi, a SNA visualization tool, was adopted to generate the graphs of social network based on the relationships between teachers and students, relatives, prestige, and between common friends among the 1,202 people mentioned by Liu Shengmu in his work, The History of Tongcheng School, and the results were compared to the results gained by conducting a literature review. The feasibility of using digital humane tools to generate visual diagram of social network as the aid for defining literary schools was investigated. The strengths and weaknesses of adopting SNA in literary research, especially in defining groups of writers, were also included and provided as reference for relevant studies in the future.