in progress
When did people's belief that hard work pays off begin to weaken?
One view holds that after industrialization, technology and the business cycle came to matter more and more to how a person fared, the causal link between effort and reward weakened, and people in turn stopped believing that effort is rewarded. This project counts, in long runs of texts arranged year by year, how often words for effort and diligence appear together with words for reward, success and getting rich, and in what tone, to see in which year this belief began to weaken and how fast, and sets the result against the dates of industrialization, economic crises and automation.
Where it stands：Approved on 31 October; the opening study is under way. The English yearly corpora are sufficient, with books and newspapers both freely available. For simplified Chinese, the Google Books corpus is usable only from 1980; whether earlier years can be studied depends on how many characters a year the BCC corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University holds and whether it can be exported by year, which is still being checked
in progress
How much of Wang Yangming's view of the world came from the classics, and how much from practice?
Wang Yangming formed his way of understanding the world by reading the classics; he also handled a great deal of practical business while campaigning in southern Jiangxi and suppressing the rebellion of the Prince of Ning. This project divides his writings into three kinds, teaching, official documents and letters, measures how far the vocabulary of each lies from the Four Books and Five Classics, and asks whether the vocabulary of his official documents moved towards that of his teaching after the campaigns. It asks only what the material can show, and does not speculate about what he would have been had he not read the classics.
Where it stands：Approved on 31 October; the opening study is under way. The memorials and official dispatches in the main collection of his complete works, 223 pieces, have been listed (the dispatches in the supplementary collection are not yet listed), and 121 of them can be dated to the year by the original notes under their titles, including pieces whose year follows the preceding one. Of the documents dated by these notes, only 6, 4,795 characters, come before the southern Jiangxi campaign of 1517; some pieces dated only by their place in the collection may also fall before it and are being checked one by one against his chronological biography. The planned comparison of before and after the campaigns therefore has little material on the earlier side, and the opening report will have to find another way to compare
