Improvement of Oracle Bone Inscription Recognition Accuracy: A Deep Learning Perspective

Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in handwriting recognition. Oracle bone inscriptions (OBI) are the earliest hieroglyphs in China and valuable resources for studying the etymology of Chinese characters. OBI are of important historical and cultural value in China; thus, textual research surrounding the characters of OBI is a huge challenge for archaeologists. In this work, we built a dataset named OBI-100, which contains 100 classes of oracle bone inscriptions collected from two OBI dictionaries. The dataset includes more than 128,000 character samples related to the natural environment, humans, animals, plants, etc. In addition, we propose improved models based on three typical deep convolutional network structures to recognize the OBI-100 dataset. By modifying the parameters, adjusting the network structures, and adopting optimization strategies, we demonstrate experimentally that these models perform fairly well in OBI recognition. For the 100-category OBI classification task, the optimal model achieves an accuracy of 99.5%, which shows competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. We hope that this work can provide a valuable tool for character recognition of OBI.

Textual Research on the Litigation Office in the Northern Song Dynasty

During the period of Yuanyou and Yuanfu in the Northern Song Dynasty, “litigation offices” were established respectively. Although the names of the two are the same, the purpose of setting is completely opposite. The party dispute where the litigation was located played a very negative role in the change from political opinions to mood disputes, and accelerated the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty.

"Not Resembling" in Ni Zan's Landscape

This essay will discuss the extent to which Ni Zan puts "not resembling" into practice in his landscape paintings, considering the modular aspects of Ni Zan's work. Firstly, the compositions depicted in Ni's and later imitators' work will be analyzed and compared. Then, the brushworks of Ni will be closely observed by selecting individual objects from several paintings. And finally, the author engages with textual research on Ni's painting theories.

The Understanding of Islamic Moderation (wasatiyyah al-Islam) and the Hadiths on Inter-religious relations in the Javanese Pesantrens

The Wasatiyyah of Islam has been described as the value of moderation in Islam, emphasizing justice, balance, and tolerance. The Quran and al-Hadith contain these values, but they are often misunderstood and misapplied. The pesantren or Islamic boarding school, is an educational institution close to the community and it plays a key role in instilling the moderate values of Islam. This article aims at discussing the moderation of Islam in relation to other religions and religious communities as taught through the hadith and as understood among the teachers and students of three pesantrens in central Java. It investigates the teachers’ and students’ views of Islam as a religion among other religions, and their attitudes as the pesantren community toward other religious believers. It combines textual research employing a mukhtalif al-hadiṡ approach and living or lived hadith research. It argues that the hadiths on inter-religious relationship are understood as a necessity to be just towards faith, which means that one should believe that his own faith is correct but should keep tolerant towards other faiths. This means giving others the right to choose and implement their own faiths, behaving in a balanced way, and conducting healthy competition in various fields, especially the proselytization or dawah. With this textual understanding, the students have generally been quite well informed about the values of Islamic moderation and they seek to apply it in their religious and social life. The students have learned about the hadiths on interreligious relations and the moderate values primarily from their teachers although they have read directly from books and sometimes from social media. Wasatiyyah Islam digambarkan sebagai nilai moderasi dalam Islam, menekankan keadilan, keseimbangan, dan toleransi. Al-Qur'an dan al-Hadis mengandung nilai-nilai ini, tetapi sering disalahpahami dan diterapkan secara salah. Pesantren merupakan lembaga pendidikan yang dekat dengan masyarakat dan berperan penting dalam menanamkan nilai-nilai moderat Islam. Artikel ini bertujuan membahas moderasi Islam dalam kaitannya dengan agama dan umat beragama lain sebagaimana diajarkan melalui hadis dan sebagaimana dipahami para guru dan santri di tiga pesantren di Jawa Tengah. Artikel ini menyelidiki pandangan siswa tentang Islam sebagai agama di antara agama-agama lain, dan sikap mereka sebagai komunitas pesantren terhadap pemeluk agama lain. Ini menggabungkan penelitian tekstual yang menggunakan pendekatan mukhtalif al-hadiṡ dan penelitian hadits hidup (living or lived hadith). Artikel ini berargumen bahwa hadis-hadis tentang hubungan antarumat beragama dipahami sebagai keharusan untuk bersikap adil terhadap keimanan, yang berarti bahwa seseorang harus percaya bahwa imannya sendiri benar tetapi harus tetap toleran terhadap agama lain. Ini artinya memberikan hak kepada orang lain untuk memilih dan menjalankan keyakinannya sendiri, berperilaku seimbang, dan melakukan persaingan yang sehat di berbagai bidang, terutama dakwah. Dengan pemahaman tekstual ini, para santri secara umum telah terinformasi dengan baik tentang nilai-nilai moderasi Islam dan mereka terus menerapkannya dalam kehidupan keagamaan dan sosial mereka. Para siswa telah belajar tentang hadits tentang hubungan antaragama dan nilai-nilai moderat terutama dari guru mereka meskipun mereka telah membaca langsung dari buku dan kadang-kadang dari media sosial.

Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion: Jesus, Constantine, and the Containment of Global Revolution

For sociologists, Jesus Christ and the associated Catholic Church are generally seen are regressive, conservative, and authoritarian. For this reason, Sociologists avoid reading the Bible as a textual research source. Overcoming sociological resistance, however and examining the Christian New Testament reveals a story much different than expected. While the Church may certainly be conservative, regressive, authoritarian, even predatorial, Jesus Christ and his apostles were not. Exegesis of Christian gospels reveals not a gentle shepherd of sheeple, but a revolutionary Christ that is neither conservative, gentle, nor passive—an impassioned and committed revolutionary set on progressive social change and fundamental revision of elite power structures. Keywords: Religion, Christianity, Jesus Christ, Critical theory, Narrative analysis.

Fó (佛), Pwuche (仏体), and Hotoke (保止氣)

The aim of this article is to discuss how the Chinese loanword fó (佛) was incorporated into pre-Old Korean (pre-OK), Old Korean (OK), and Western Old Japanese (WOJ) on the basis of textual research using various primary sources from China, Korea, and Japan. The author proposes that two routes exist to explain the borrowing of the Chinese word fó (佛) into pre-OK, OK, and WOJ: one route from the Six Dynasties to the Korean Three Kingdoms period to Japan's pre-Nara period, and one from the Sui and Tang dynasties to the Unified Silla and Koryŏ periods.

Documents and Writing: A Textual Research on Yang Fuye’s Records

Yang Fuye is the largest folk worship among the people in southern Zhejiang, and he has been worshiped for more than a thousand years. At present, however, there is no exact statement about who Yang Fuye is and what his deeds in his life are. There are few historical materials about Yang Fuye, posing many difficulties in the investigation of Yang Fuye. With the popularization of the database, the Chinese local chronicles library was used, and the scope was limited to Zhejiang. The historical records of Yang Fuye recorded in the local chronicles were searched, and then the inscriptions and related system history were used for textual research. It was found that there is common information about Yang Fuye. There are certain discrepancies in historical data. Combined with the exquisite records of Yang Fuye’s historical records in local chronicles and inscriptions, we hope to explore so as to have a better understanding of Yang Fuye.

“The Party Leads Everything”

Chapter 2 explores the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) role in China’s grand strategy. First, it focuses on the CCP as a nationalist party, one that emerged from the patriotic ferment of the late Qing period and has sought to restore the country to its rightful place. Second, it focuses on the CCP as a Leninist party, one that has built centralized institutions—blended with a ruthless amorality—to govern the country and achieve its nationalist mission. Together, it argues, the Party’s nationalist orientation helps set the ends of Chinese grand strategy, while Leninism provides an instrument for realizing them. Finally, the book focuses on the CCP as a producer of paper and a subject of research, noting how a careful study of the Party’s own voluminous publications can provide insight into its grand strategic concepts. It then outlines much of the textual research strategy employed in the rest of this book.