About Henry Jacobs
Contributor for Sinology
Henry Jacobs is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) program at Harvard University, where he studies Early Chinese cultural and intellectual history. His research broadly concerns the reconstruction of Early Chinese ritual and music, divination practices, and text cultures using palaeographic and archaeological materials. A central concern of his scholarship is the relationship between evolving media technologies (including ritual and music) and Early Chinese intellectual and religious developments. Some of his recent projects include an investigation into the musical dimensions of Late-Neolithic Chinese jades in collaboration with the Harvard Arts Museums Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, and a re-examination of Late Shang 商 (ca. 1200-1046 BCE) written culture using digitized oracle-bone inscription databases. His involvement with digital humanities stems from a methodological interest in the power of corpus analysis to reveal hitherto unrealized patterns among excavated texts but also extends to their utility in musicological research and archaeological reconstructions.
The Digital Orientalist 