Explore Mindfulness without Deflection: A Data Art Based on the Books of Songs

The Book of Songs is regarded as the origin of Chinese literature and has had a prolonged impact on Chinese culture, aesthetics, and morality. In this work, we analyze its 305 poems from different dimensions. We aim to learn how poetic imageries connect abstract themes and subjective emotions at the micro level, and how the poems connect people today and their ancestors in understanding the universal, everlasting, and poetical human life at the macro level.

“The Odes are 300; one expression sums up all: ‘mindfulness without deflection.’” [2] Assembled by Confucius about 3,000 years ago and recorded from 1100 BC to 500 BC, the Book of Songs consists of 305 poems in three genres: Songs, Odes and Epics, and Hymns. They portray the whole society of the Late Zhou Dynasty, from ballads and folk customs to sacrifice, banquets, and the musical dance of nobility.

Many of its language styles and underlying thoughts are substantially the same as those we experience today, especially the euphemistic style of Chinese culture, which uses natural creatures and phenomena as comparisons and metaphors. Herbage, trees, birds, livestock, insects, and fish form a vast imagery database shared across the East Asian cultural circle. They are the bridges between abstract themes and subjective feelings, and a time tunnel connecting people today with their ancestors.

Working with experts in Chinese language and literature, we labeled the 305 poems in four dimensions, Functions, Themes, Emotions, and Rhetorical Devices, and cross-validated the labels against authoritative studies. Paintings by Hosoi Jun from the Qing Dynasty inspired the color selection and the designs of the pictorial. We then computed statistics for each dimension and the relationships among imageries, and designed and revised the visual representations iteratively.

Poem Flow. At the macro level, an enhanced Sankey diagram [3] presents six dimensions of all 305 poems: Genres, Functions, Themes, Imageries, Emotions, and Rhetorical Devices. Node height encodes the number of poems in a category, and flow width the number of poems shared by two categories. Three sunburst diagrams on the left show the sections and subsections within each genre. The whole takes the form of a traditional Chinese arch bridge with its reflection in the water.

Imagery Glyph. At the micro level, the most frequent imagery from each of six categories, proso millet, mulberry, swallow, horse, pest, and black bream, is drawn as a glyph showing how it connects abstract themes with subjective emotions. A word cloud in the shape of the arch bridge presents the frequently used plant and animal imageries; the size of each character is the number of poems it appears in. The paintings follow traditional illustrated editions of the Book of Songs [6, 7, 9–12, 15].

Songs is the genre with the most poems; it records stories and lyricism among the plebeians, and these poems usually open with natural scenes or domesticated animals, which is why so many of them flow to the Inspiration function. Love-songs are the most frequent theme, both as stories of young people and as a metaphor for the relationship between monarch and subjects. The emotion distribution is balanced between positive and negative sides, and emotions are most diverse under Simile and Borrowed Analogy, where people express love or satire euphemistically to avoid offending others.