Take one simple idea, and take it seriously. — Charlie Munger

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

• Peng, Anqi, and Xi Chen. (2024). “‘New Wine in Old Bottles’: Ethical Literary Criticism, Adaptations and Angela Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood.”  English Language and Literature Studies 14(1): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v14n1p9.

• Peng, Anqi. and Tao, Shilong. (2023). “The Destigmatization of ‘Evil Woman’: Hulijing as a Modern Sphinx in the ‘Good Hunting’ of Love, Death & Robots (2019).” Cogent Arts & Humanities 10(2): 228-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2023.2289249. 

• Tao, Shilong., Anqi Peng, and Xi Chen. (2021). “‘Being So Caught up’: Exploring Religious Projection and Ethical Appeal in Leda and the Swan.” Religions 12(2): 107-128. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12020107. 

Digital Humanities Projects in Progress 

Project 1: English Literature: Gothic Romance

This project employs computational methods—topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and lexical tracking—to trace the evolution of patriarchy and female agency in British Gothic fiction through a corpus of The Monk (1796), Frankenstein (1818), and Jane Eyre (1847). Quantifying a theme richly explored in feminist scholarship, our topic model identifies three distinct thematic clusters: “The Gothic of Immediate Sensation”, “The Gothic of Philosophical Reflection”, and “The Dynamics of Social and Psychological Interaction”. These chart a historical shift from bodily coercion to internalized conflict. These patterns substantiate a “victory in defeat” trajectory: while patriarchal power is never fully overthrown, its systemic failures, lexically and affectively traced, consistently create space for female consciousness. We demonstrate how digital methodologies uncover latent narrative and emotional structures, revealing the Gothic’s critique of power within the evolving language of the novels themselves. 

Project 2: Chinese Literature: Wang Wei 

Wang Wei (700-761), a paragon of the High Tang period, is revered as the “Poet-Buddha” for his serene landscape poetry and paintings. Traditional scholarship often takes this Zen Buddhist persona as a given. This study, however, argues that his philosophical identity was not static but evolved dynamically through a complex negotiation of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, a trajectory precipitated by his personal experiences of political disillusionment. Moving beyond purely close-reading methods, this paper employs a Digital Humanities (DH) framework to objectify and visualize this evolution. We construct a diachronic corpus of Wang Wei’s poetry and documented paintings, tagged according to his early, middle, and late career periods. Through computational analysis—including targeted keyword frequency tracking and topic modeling—we quantify the shifting presence of core vocabularies associated with Confucian engagement, Daoist non-action, and Buddhist detachment. Our data reveals a clear progression: early works are statistically dominated by Confucian themes of service and heroism; the middle period shows a marked rise in Daoist imagery, reflecting his semi-reclusive life; while his final years are characterized by the pervasive dominance of Zen Buddhist lexicon and themes of emptiness. This data-driven approach provides macroscopic, empirical evidence for the long-held hypothesis of his philosophical transformation. Furthermore, the project examines the intertextuality of his poetry and painting, demonstrating how this philosophical metamorphosis is aesthetically expressed across media. By integrating quantitative DH analysis with qualitative interpretation, this research offers a more nuanced and evidence-based narrative of Wang Wei's intellectual journey, enriching our understanding of the fluid synthesis of the “Three Teachings” in Tang dynasty culture.