Was Poetry Graded Validly?: Text Mining Shipin, a Sixth-Century Chinese Work of Literary Criticism

This paper applies text mining to investigate Shipin (Poetry Gradings), a sixth-century Chinese work of literary criticism. Using a BERT model fine-tuned with masked language modeling on a classical Chinese poetry corpus, we generated embeddings for Shipin’s evaluative remarks on each poet and their own poetry corpora, and explored the relationship between these embeddings and the grades assigned to each poet by Shipin using PCA and machine learning classification. We found that both remarks and poetry provide some justification for the assigned grades, with remarks showing a much closer alignment. A poet’s dynastic period and poetic origin influenced the grades they received in nuanced ways, reflecting Shipin’s preference for poetic styles. The results indicate that Shipin maintained an implicit but consistent standard in grading.