Cultural Psychology Analysis on Ancient Chinese Archive

Abstract

With the developing of big data analysis technology and the digitization of ancient Chinese books, we are able to do more thoroughly psychology-related analysis on Chinese history, culture and people. It is an opportunity that we can have a glance at Chinese behavioral and psychological variation from 2000 years ago to the beginning of the nineteenth century. We aim at figuring out the change of the mental process of Chinese people through the past 2000 years and how the mind and behavior are shaped by the specific culture at each stage, based on the analysis of behavior and psychology, with the usage of big data and artificial intelligence techniques. In this paper, we construct the Ancient Chinese Archive (ACA), beginning with twenty-five official dynastic history books. The timeline begins with the pre-Qin period and ends with Qing dynastic. Our selection contains about 27 million Chinese characters (except punctuations). For better observation of the variation tendencies through every period, we merge some books into one period and divide all the dynasties into 9 parts. In each period, we count the frequency of some keywords such as Xiào (孝, filial piety), Lǐ (禮/礼, proper rite), etc., which represent Chinese social morality and culture ethics. We analyze the change process of the word frequency through time and areas and try to find out the explanation of these trends.