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<p>Confucian identity, the儒 (<i>Ru</i>) groups or individuals in Chinese philosophical and intellectual traditions, is deeply contested in its modern nomination. Though nominally linked to the philosopher Confucius, Confucian identity is largely generalised as an ethnocultural identity of the Chinese or East Asians. This controversy is compounded by the subjectivity of Confucian hermeneutics and New Confucians’ rejection of positivist paradigms. To address these methodological challenges, this study investigates the construction of Confucian identity in global Anglophone discourse by integrating approaches from corpus linguistics (CL), digital humanities (DH), and the discourse-historical approach (DHA). By culturomics tracing and corpus indexing the lexical nominations of ‘Confucian’ and ‘Confucians’ (Confucian(s)), this study demonstrates how digital knowledge infrastructures like Google Books Ngram Viewer (NV) ethnoculturally rather than philosophically contribute to conceptualisations of Confucian(s). NV (July 2024) is the latest dataset and the online application of Google Books, the largest digitised corpus of global publications. Through NV (1973–2022, eng_2024), the study extracts 260 collocates and 214 words of dependency relations with Confucian(s). Based on the collected 474 keywords, 14 salient semantic domains are further uncovered via USAS tagging in LancsBox. Through DHA’s nomination strategy regarding categorisation, deictics, and anthroponyms, the findings show that Confucian identity is primarily ethno-historically or geopolitically defined by external discourse rather than philosophically self-identified by contemporary New Confucians. Based on the dual triangulation in methods and data, this research reveals that modern Confucian identity is largely represented by Western-centric discourse, raising concerns about the digital normalisation of bias. This study also exemplifies the value of integrating quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches, offering a synergy model for philosophical and/or identity studies.</p>

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Nominating Confucian(s) in Ngram Viewer: a DH-CL approach to Confucian identity in Anglophone discourse

  • 期刊论文

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月8日

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  • Xugui Gui,
  • Sheena Kaur

摘要

Confucian identity, the儒 (Ru) groups or individuals in Chinese philosophical and intellectual traditions, is deeply contested in its modern nomination. Though nominally linked to the philosopher Confucius, Confucian identity is largely generalised as an ethnocultural identity of the Chinese or East Asians. This controversy is compounded by the subjectivity of Confucian hermeneutics and New Confucians’ rejection of positivist paradigms. To address these methodological challenges, this study investigates the construction of Confucian identity in global Anglophone discourse by integrating approaches from corpus linguistics (CL), digital humanities (DH), and the discourse-historical approach (DHA). By culturomics tracing and corpus indexing the lexical nominations of ‘Confucian’ and ‘Confucians’ (Confucian(s)), this study demonstrates how digital knowledge infrastructures like Google Books Ngram Viewer (NV) ethnoculturally rather than philosophically contribute to conceptualisations of Confucian(s). NV (July 2024) is the latest dataset and the online application of Google Books, the largest digitised corpus of global publications. Through NV (1973–2022, eng_2024), the study extracts 260 collocates and 214 words of dependency relations with Confucian(s). Based on the collected 474 keywords, 14 salient semantic domains are further uncovered via USAS tagging in LancsBox. Through DHA’s nomination strategy regarding categorisation, deictics, and anthroponyms, the findings show that Confucian identity is primarily ethno-historically or geopolitically defined by external discourse rather than philosophically self-identified by contemporary New Confucians. Based on the dual triangulation in methods and data, this research reveals that modern Confucian identity is largely represented by Western-centric discourse, raising concerns about the digital normalisation of bias. This study also exemplifies the value of integrating quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches, offering a synergy model for philosophical and/or identity studies.