Sinographia Diachronica (SinDia)
Vision & Mission — The Civilizational Memory of the Sinographic World
Across the long river of history, the Chinese script has never been merely a writing system. It is a technology of memory — a vessel that preserves how past generations sensed the world, shaped meaning, and understood life and cosmos.
It records each moment of transformation: the rise and fall of dynasties, the arrival of new religions, the encounters among cultures, and the continual re-encoding of language and thought.
The vision of Sinographia Diachronica (SinDia) is to awaken this millennia-deep intelligence in the age of AI.
We aim to construct a comprehensive semantic and cultural map where classical writings, Buddhist translations, vernacular texts, modern online discourse, inscriptions, manuscripts, and multimodal artifacts intersect within a single computational universe.
Our Conviction
SinDia rests on a conviction: When the history of language is re-woven into computationally visible structures, the deeper architecture of civilization becomes traceable, interpretable, and imaginable. To understand the history of language is to open a path toward understanding how human consciousness shapes itself across centuries.
Our Missions
1. To weave a linguistic continuum that spans thousands of years
From oracle-bone inscriptions and early imperial documents, to medieval Buddhist translations, to late imperial literature, and to contemporary digital communities, SinDia's mission is not simply to collect data but to connect, compare, and reconstruct. Our goal is to build a “diachronic observatory” where the life cycles of linguistic forms can be seen with clarity.
2. To create tools that prepare the Sinographic world for an AI future
SinDia develops computational instruments designed for the unique ecology of the Chinese script:
- Glyph tokenization and glyph embeddings to capture the co-evolution of form and meaning
- Component-level analyzers that reveal the internal logic of characters
- Construction search for permutation-sensitive patterns (e.g., same-morpheme different-order structures)
- Models and simulations of semantic change, integrating cultural, cognitive, and statistical perspectives
These tools transform historical evidence into navigable landscapes of meaning.
3. To bridge AI and the Humanities in order to illuminate the “historical mind”
SinDia investigates how writing, cognition, and cultural memory intertwine:
- How concepts emerge, shift, stabilize, or dissolve
- How writing systems mediate collective thought
- How meaning survives the centuries
Our mission is to reveal how language becomes a medium through which civilization remembers.
4. To foster a multidisciplinary and transregional community for the Sinographosphere
SinDia brings together scholars from linguistics, AI, neuroscience, history, philology, cultural studies, and computational humanities. It also reaches across the broader Sinographosphere—to Sinitic varieties, neighboring scripts, textual networks, and cross-regional cultural flows—building a shared methodological and conceptual platform for future research.
At its core, SinDia is an inquiry into the deep time of language. Tracing the shifts in characters, words, and constructions is ultimately a way of tracing how thought is preserved, how culture is remembered, and how consciousness unfolds along the long arc of history. SinDia seeks to set these buried forces back into motion – to understand how the past thought, and to help us imagine how the future might think.
Join Us!
Contact: Prof. Shu-Kai Hsieh, shukaihsieh@ntu.edu.tw
About Our Team
Prof. Dr. Shu-Kai Hsieh
PROJECT LEADER
Professor, Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Wei-Ling Chen
Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Lang-Ching Yeh
Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Deborah Watty
Research Assistant ,Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Micah Kitsunai
M.A. in Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Yu-Hsiang Tseng
Post-doc researcher, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Yongfu Liao
M.A. in Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan