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adjust print styles for SW4 figures #372

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4 changes: 2 additions & 2 deletions content/issues/4/sonorous-medieval/index.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ In the project we introduce here[^5] --- the result of a collaboration between a

Let's begin by describing some of the distinctive features of Old Chinese, a language that survives in a corpus of ancient texts that can be dated to the centuries preceding and during the first dynasties of Imperial China, or roughly 476 BCE to 220 CE. These written texts survive either as documents that were transmitted and copied through the millennia, or as recently excavated or otherwise surfaced manuscripts.[^6]

{{< deepzoom tile="https://ids.si.edu/ids/iiif/FS-F1981.4a-e/info.json" class="shadow" alt="Interactive zoomable viewer showing four wooden tablets in clerical script." pdf-img="https://ids.si.edu/ids/iiif/FS-F1981.4a-e/full/full/0/default.jpg" pdf-alt="four wooden tablets in clerical script." height="50em" caption="**Figure 1.** Four Wooden Tablets in clerical script, [Freer Gallery of Art](https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F1981.4a-e/) (accessed August 20, 2023).">}}
{{< deepzoom tile="https://ids.si.edu/ids/iiif/FS-F1981.4a-e/info.json" class="shadow" alt="Interactive zoomable viewer showing four wooden tablets in clerical script." pdf-img="https://ids.si.edu/ids/iiif/FS-F1981.4a-e/full/1500,/0/default.jpg" pdf-alt="four wooden tablets in clerical script." height="50em" caption="**Figure 1.** Four Wooden Tablets in clerical script, [Freer Gallery of Art](https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/F1981.4a-e/) (accessed August 20, 2023).">}}

For heuristic purposes, we use the term "Old Chinese" for the underlying language, and like other stages of the Chinese language family, it is marked by the usage of Chinese characters or glyphs. As a writing system, Chinese glyphs have remained largely stable from the Han dynasty (202 BCE--220 CE) to the present day, with the greatest change occurring in 1956 in the form of the People's Republic of China's script reform and the introduction of simplified characters. A text from the early twentieth century may thus on the surface appear indistinguishable from a genuinely ancient piece of writing. This is in particular the case due to the venerated status of a few classical texts, largely from pre-imperial China, which served as models for later literary forms of writing up until the twentieth century. Existing NLP models for premodern Chinese assume a seemingly enduring and unchanging use of the written language, grouped under the notions of "Literary" or "Classical Chinese" (*wen yan* 文言 and *gudian Hanyu* 古典漢語).[^7] But this understanding of a never-changing and static language is not just ahistorical and incorrect; it also misses the point of what Chinese glyphs inherently represent: like other forms of writing, they are a conventionalized system used to represent the dynamic utterances of a language.

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -314,7 +314,7 @@ The *Jingdian Shiwen* wrestles with some of the same problems we face today, as

The *Jingdian Shiwen* utilizes a relatively novel form of commentary: rather than reproducing the source text in full, it instead lists only what we call headwords, which are short excerpts, ranging from single glyphs to short passages. Each of these short sequences of glyphs is paired with a corresponding annotation. Each headword is distinctive enough to be matched to its location in the full text of the original source. The *Jingdian Shiwen* is thus a semi-structured text that provides sequences of glyphs that can be located in specific contexts in the source texts, and supplies annotations for a specific glyph in the relevant sequence.[^16] By essentially compressing the source texts in this way, the *Jingdian Shiwen* manages to cover almost 900,000 characters of primary-source material in just over 100,000 characters of excerpt. The resulting "compression ratio" is 13:1.[^17]

{{< deepzoom tile="https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/16417478/info.json" class="shadow" alt="Interactive zoomable viewer showing folio from the Jingdian Shiwen with large and small characters." pdf-img="https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/16417478/full/full/0/default.jpg" pdf-alt="Folio view of vertical Chinese script with large characters and half-width notes in a smaller font size" height="40em" caption="**Figure 5.** Folio from 1680 printing of the _Jingdian Shiwen_, with headwords rendered in large glyphs, and annotations immediately following in half-width running in two columns; from [Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University](https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:16416657$80i) (accessed September 3, 2023)" >}}
{{< deepzoom tile="https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/16417478/info.json" class="shadow" alt="Interactive zoomable viewer showing folio from the Jingdian Shiwen with large and small characters." pdf-img="https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/16417478/full/1500,/0/default.jpg" pdf-alt="Folio view of vertical Chinese script with large characters and half-width notes in a smaller font size" height="40em" caption="**Figure 5.** Folio from 1680 printing of the _Jingdian Shiwen_, with headwords rendered in large glyphs, and annotations immediately following in half-width running in two columns; from [Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University](https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:16416657$80i) (accessed September 3, 2023)" >}}

While earlier dictionaries primarily glossed glyphs by providing similar-sounding glyphs to indicate their reading, the *Jingdian Shiwen* employed a rather novel way of indicating pronunciation: the *fanqie* 反切 system.[^18] This method of noting a glyph's phonology separates a syllable into its initial consonant on the one hand, and its rhyme and tone on the other. No longer constrained to providing pronunciations by finding a word that overlapped exactly in sound, the *fanqie* system allowed scholars such as Lu Deming to instead choose common graphs for the initial and rhyme plus tone independently. Given the reliance on the Chinese script, both initial and rhyme plus tone are expressed through a common glyph.

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