This repository contains code, data and experimental materials for:

Han, S. J, Kelly, P., Winters, J., & Kemp, C. (2022). Simplification is not dominant in the evolution of Chinese characters. Open Mind.

Folder Structure

analysis

This folder contains all of our analysis code, packaged into notebooks for either Python or R.

data

This folder contains all of our data, including our raw image data. Because our datasets are extremely large, this repository only contains a sample of each dataset in order to illustrate its file structure. Important files such as the full CSVs for character complexities are also missing due to their size.

A complete folder with the same file structure can be found on Zenodo

data_generation

This folder contains all of our Python code for scraping, processing and evaluating our image datasets. Please refer to its README for details on how to run our pipeline.

experiment

This folder contains all of the materials for our behavioural experiment, including data and source code for experiment

figures

This folder contains all of the figures for both the main paper and the supplementary materials.

tables

This folder contains tables presented in the supplementary materials.

complexity_change_shiny

Code for a Shiny app that allows users to visualize changes in complexity over time for individual characters.

root level scripts

'generate_sample_data_folder.py': generates the 'data' folder within this repo, which holds a sample of our full dataset (sample of 20 images of 20 characters for every period/dataset). This is provided for convenience.