“Mapping the Structure of the Feeling of Illness” is a thematic scholarly site developed by Water Drops Dripping in Clear Emptiness (滴水空明) research lab, and encompasses two research projects: “Mapping the Structure of the Feeling of Illness: Illness Writing in Short Stories of the Wei-Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, and GIS” supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (2012-2015), and “Suffering from Illness and Fear of Death: Digital Humanities Research on Illness Narratives in Eminent Buddhist Monk Biographies from Historical Perspective” supported by Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (2019). It was launched officially in July 2020.

  The site is constructed on the elements of “Illness event” and “Illness map”, and presents the illness narratives from the Wei-Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties short stories and eminent Buddhist monk biographies. The short stories come from 35 story collections by different authors and span different epochs, which were edited from lost material bearing specifics of that historical time, and include accounts of men (zhiren), accounts of anomalies (zhiguai), miscellaneous transmissions (zazhuan), etc. The eminent Buddhist monk biographies comprise of four texts: Eminent Monk Biographies, Continued Eminent Monk Biographies, Song Eminent Monk Biographies, Ming Eminent Monk Biographies, encompassing one thousand years of history. We use authority words and text markup to extract the paragraphs relative to the illness narrative, and to construct illness narrative database, which the user can do search on. In addition, we have arranged historical events related to illness using as a reference point official histories, annals, chronological records, gazetteers, to outline the historical discourse in the short stories and the monk biographies, thus setting out the difference in narrative focus pertaining to texts of various nature.

  The application of “event” and “map” to the study of illness narratives is an interdisciplinary attempt combining technical tools and subject matter typical of the digital humanities research, in which we hope to present the focus uniting different epochs and different texts from the illness narratives by means of visualization by graphs and maps. Illness is a universal condition with social dimensions and influence, whose meaning varies according to the roles in the illness event: from the ones who accompany the ill person to the ones who treat him and even the whole society. At times the illness is of the utmost importance in one’s life, and makes the ill person take destiny in his own hands, but most of the time he acts as a side observer, when the illness appears as something distant and obscure passing through life. Despite representing a mood pertinent to ordinary life, the attitude towards illness outlines the distinction between people, and forms a feeling of empathy, which is transformed into a symbol once it enters culture, society, politics, economy where it is a subject of constraints and a continuous reproduction. As a consequence, illness develops into an identifiable characteristic of a long span, a model, or a type of firmly established social relations. The texts under the rubric “Special Issues” uses the database of the site and invites the users to do search into the various representations of illness in ancient Chinese literature and culture.