Detecting Eastern and Western Names in the Latin Corpus of the SERICA Project – With Special Regard to the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) as a Case Study

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the role of ICT within the SERICA (Sino-European Religious Intersections in Central Asia. Interactive Texts and Intelligent Networks) Project, especially by focusing on the corpus of Latin texts we are progressively building. Particular attention will be paid to the annotation of Named Entities (NEs) through Recogito from a very peculiar 17th century Latin text, entitled Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (CSP) and edited by the Jesuits Prospero Intorcetta, Christian Herdtrich, François de Rougemont, and Philippe Couplet in 1687. Despite including the translation of three Confucian texts (Daxue, Zhongyong, Lunyu), the CSP contains various references to Graeco-Hellenistic and Roman literature, and this comes as unsurprising since the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum (1599) was indebted to pagan classical authors. Yet the reception of ancient Latin literature can be further investigated by resorting to digital technologies. The annotation and the extraction of NEs allow in fact to take into account an extensive amount of data and to establish a first mapping concerning the impact of classical antiquity on the CSP, so as to detect which authors were mentioned more often and to reflect on their pattern of distribution within the work.