Article The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China 5 Edward Slingerland,* Ryan Nichols, Kristoffer Neilbo, and Carson Logan This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual 10 analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, “close” textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the “strong” holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative distinction between mind and body. In a series of follow-up 15 studies, we show how three different machine-based techniques—word collocation, hierarchical clustering, and topic modeling analysis—provide *Edward Slingerland, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. E-mail:
[email protected]. Ryan Nichols, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton, CA. Kristoffer Nielbo, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. Carson Logan, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Most of this work was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Partnership Grant on “The Evolution of Religion and Morality” awarded to E.S., with some performed while K.N. was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), which is supported by the National Science Foundation, and E.S. was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. We would also like to thank the anonymous referees at JAAR for very helpful comments that have made this a much stronger paper.