Paul Vierthaler
@vierth
Chinese Lit, DH, Machine Learning, Dad of twins Assistant Prof of late imperial Chinese literature and interdisciplinary data science at Princeton University
Oh, you sell butterfly wings perfect for a couple of four years old? Love it! They’ll want to wear them everywhere? Hell yeah! Oh they have designs on them made with nothing but sparkles held on by static electricity and a prayer? Straight to jail.
Experimenting with adding a little Elixir Vegetal to a Last Word, and I am extremely pleased with the result!
Reader, it is NOT an easy trip on the light rail. Google maps sent me to an industrial area on the wrong side of a river. Fortunately, I was sorted thanks to a pedestrian tunnel, and after a 1.8km walk I was where I wanted to be.
It turns out the University of Macau is actually in Zhuhai on land leased to Macau, making the Uni technically in mainland China. The mapping error is enough to push the apparent location of the uni from Zhuhai onto Taipa Island. So Google Maps thinks it is an easy trip on the light rail!
My students are always fascinated to learn that in China there is about a 555 meter error between the satellite images on Google Maps and the geographic/mapping labels.
In Athens for a DH workshop and serendipitously caught the grand changing of the guard at the Athens tomb of the unknown soldier
It’s Friday night, and I’ve had a bit of good news. That’s as good a reason as any to open the souvenir from my trip last week!
Home from taking the girls on their first international trip (to Provence and Paris), and they did astoundingly well. It helped that we stayed with friends in Aix. Nothing like keeping 4-year olds entertained like a pool and other kids! Plus I got to restock a bit on my Chartreuse supply.
While I never did get her anything from there, a gift I consider a coup was finding an old copy of Take Ivy years later, which I feel like is such an encapsulation of the style.
The preface shows MUCH more age than the page in the first picture, which is not surprising given that people are way more likely to open volume 1 and read the preface than they are to turn to volume 7 to look at the start of juan 20 (shown in the first picture and the section I am interested in).
This book is dated based on the preface and is thus dated to the gengyin year of the Wanli reign (1590). The blocks were carved by a Cai Chaoguang.
I work with a lot of "old" books, but I guess I don't have much of a nose for the physical age of paper. While clearly old, this book (held in Special Collections at Princeton) just doesn't look 430+ years old to me.
In another of its fun Ming/Modern synchronisities, it is the basis for a classic set of playing cards by Chen Hongshou, often used for drinking games (水滸葉子)!
It’s Friday, the girls are in bed, and the spouse is in the city late for work. Time for some Silksong on the big tv!
The library just acquired a copy of a 1750 map of Beijing for me, and the boxes it is stored in have a lovely cutout of a building from the Palace Museum!
Extremely proud of my former W&M student, now a PhD student at Stanford, Xincheng Hou. He is doing fascinating work on public toilets in Republican China and is creating 3D models in Blender to better understand their spatial logic! #AAS2026
There is a lot wrong in the world, but I married by best friend 14 years ago and that has made all the difference.
@zoeleblanc.bsky.social leading a wonderful conversation on AI and data work in the @princetoncdh.bsky.social Modeling Cultures seminar series
This lady is looking remarkably content and well rested given the size of the GIANT BABY she just birthed.
Could have gone full wall scale with this, but exercised some restraint and just did 48in by 51in
Very honored to host Professors Masahiro Shimoda and Kiyonori Nagasaki @knagasaki.bsky.social at Princeton today to talk about developments in DH in Japanese and Buddhist studies, as well as pedagogy and researcher training!
The girls are in bed and I’ve got a full tank of fuel and a load of vaccines to haul from Kouvola to Cagliari.