Retrieving Information from Digital Texts in East Asian Studies

The emergence of large open-access collections of digitized East Asian texts has had a revolutionary effect on how scholars interact with primary sources. Beyond facilitating simple search, these collections also offer exciting new opportunities to ask questions at a previously impossible scale. Yet the field has been relatively slow to adopt computational methodologies, partially due to the technical difficulty in doing so. Fortunately, a variety of new tools that facilitate computational text analysis are coming online, making it simpler than ever to embark on projects that require quantitative analysis. In this article, I discuss three such initiatives that are opening the doors to new avenues of research by putting exciting, and relatively easy to use, tools in the hands of interested scholars.