Volume 9, No.3

Set within the narrative space of Beijing’s hutong neighborhoods, Tie Ning’s short story How Long Is Forever portrays emotional tensions and cultural representations in everyday urban life. This study adopts computational literary criticism, applying a Naive Bayes classifier to quantitatively analyze the distribution and intensity characteristics of “Beijing-flavor culture” in the text. Through constructing a cultural lexicon, conducting feature engineering, and training the model, we generate a “Beijing-flavor heat curve,” extract key cultural symbols, and elucidate their functions within the narrative structure. The computational approach provides a quantitative perspective for Beijing-flavor literary studies, revealing a non-uniform distribution pattern where intensity peaks cluster significantly in passages of dialogue and scene description. Quantitative evidence demonstrates precise alignment between cultural zeniths and narrative turning points, highlighting Tie Ning’s anchoring of locality through traditional symbols while constructing a comparative framework of modern psychological detachment. This methodology confirms computational models’ efficacy in capturing diffuse cultural elements, establishing an objectively quantifiable paradigm for regional literary research.

This study employs methods of computational literary criticism to conduct a digital humanities analysis of Tie Ning’s novel, Clumsy Flower, examining the characteristics of the urbanization process it portrays. Through text preprocessing, word-frequency statistics, LDA topic modeling, and recurrent neural network–based sentiment analysis, the novel is partitioned by historical period into four stages of urbanization for quantitative analysis. The findings indicate that the urbanization process in Clumsy Flower exhibits a nonlinear, fluctuating trajectory of “isolation-emergence-interaction-return,” with war functioning as the key rupture variable. Sentiment analysis shows that text related to urbanization is dominated by negative sentiment, and the degree of negativity intensifies as urbanization advances. This study provides data-supported literary evidence for understanding the complexity of rural urbanization in China during the first half of the twentieth century.