Social Network and Poetry Novelty of Poets in Tang Dynasty
“群可以诗？”中国唐朝诗人的社会网络与艺术创新
Poets Network in Tang Dynasty (Node Sizes Corresponding the Word Usage Novelty)
Abstract: The relationship between social ties and poetry innovation was mentioned by Confucius in his treatise on Poetry, yet few studies have quantitatively analyzed it at a macro level. Along the lines of the Sociology of art and research on innovation, the author first defines two different modes of innovation in word usage and word collocation, and then examines the correlation between social networks and poetry innovation through a digitalized biographical database as well as computational social science methodologies, including Word2vec and semantic networks. The results show that poets in non-central positions or with little tie with central nodes would have a higher level of word usage innovation, while poets acted as bridges or with little tie with central nodes will have a higher level of word collocation innovation. The author checks the robustness of the results based on the instrumental variable—the total number of nodes in the network. These findings not only verify the hypothesis that “ Socializing facilitated Poetry-writing” in the humanities and the description of collective invention in the Sociology of art, but also argues for the importance of distinguishing between different innovations.
中文摘要：孔子论《诗》时便提及了诗人社会关系与诗歌创新的关联，然而很少有研究对其展开量化的宏观分析。沿着艺术社会学/创新研究中的新发展，作者首先界定了诗歌中字眼使用与字眼搭配的不同创新模式，随后通过一个较为全面的人物传记数据库以及计算社会科学方法（词向量与语义网），检验了社会网络与诗歌创新之间的关联。本研究的数据结果显示：处在人物网络非中心位置以及与网络中心连接更少的诗人，其诗歌中字眼使用创新性的程度会较高；而处在人物网络结构洞位置以及与网络中心连接更少的诗人，其诗歌中字眼搭配创新性的程度会较高。以工具变量为基础的两阶段最小二乘回归（IV-2SLS）也检验了这一结果的稳健性。这一发现不仅检验了人文学科中“群可以诗”的假设以及艺术社会学中集体协作的描述，同时也论证了区分不同创新情形的重要性。