Words Matter
Words make all the difference. Especially when dealing with texts. The word clouds below bring home the point that the differences lie in the subtelies of the records. At first glance, the one character that stands out in each collection is "人" (engl. "person; people; human"). At second glance, it becomes obvious that the characters directly surrounding the central one through to the periphery are what differentiates the word clouds from each other.
Wordclouds
All About Humans
The wordclouds in the gallery to the right have been created with the goal in mind to learn more about the types of beings that appear in various zhiguai collections. They have thus been based on the most frequent words in each collection, leaving aside stopwords (frequent grammatical particles and verbs among others) with little information regarding the nature of beings involved in the story.
The most common being emerging from the wordclouds is the human (人). This makes sense because all stories are told by humans and generally it is a human that experiences something strange (or at least noteworthy), which is then recorded in a collection made by humans for humans. Moreover, many entries begin with a description of the person involved in the story by mentioning their name, their origin, or their profession, official title and position.
But what about beings other than humans? Since it appears almost self-explanatory that humans (or at least the character for human, 人) make up a large portion of the texts, what more can we learn about those involved in records of the strange?
Humans and Beyond
Serving as an example of going beyond humans in zhiguai, here we can take a look at the wordcloud for Zibuyu excluding the characters 人 and zi 子. The exclusion of these two characters (the latter of which often means "master" or "son" depending on the context) allows for closer examination of the characters next in line in terms of frequency in the collection.
Here, the character wo 我 (engl. "I", "me") moves into the center, closely followed by gui 鬼 (engl. "ghost", "spirit"), nü 女 (engl. "woman", "female") and shen 神 (engl. "god", "deity"). Even though these are just single characters based on word counts disregarding the exact context they appear in, these words reveal some of the important beings mentioned in Zibuyu: the narrator (in this case synonymous with the compiler, Yuan Mei himself), ghosts, women, and gods. For someone familiar with zhiguai, this may not come as a surprise as these beings are typical protagonists in other collections as well. However, wordclouds such as the ones presented here appear promising and contain potential for meaningful comparisons across collections in future studies.