Reconstructing Silent Voices in Ancient Historiography: Re-reading the Shiji through an Inclusive Artificial Intelligence Lens

Abstract

This article analyzes Sima Qian’s Shiji within the framework of the relationships between power, knowledge, and silence. Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, the study conceptualizes historical silence as a semantic and syntactic phenomenon formed within the internal structure of the text. The theoretical framework is developed in dialogue with the ideas of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jacques Derrida. The research corpus focuses on juan 123 of the Shiji (“Dawan liezhuan”). The analysis employs methods such as token frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and semantic clustering. Artificial intelligence–based analysis is used to identify patterns of repetition and structural linkages in the text, while the findings are substantiated through historical-philological interpretation. The results indicate that silences associated with envoys, the peoples of the Western Regions, and other peripheral subjects are not random in nature. Imbalances in agent–patient relations, the uneven distribution of active and passive verb constructions, and semantic fields clustered around jié (the symbol of envoys), zhōng (loyalty), and Hàn (the imperial center) reveal this pattern. As a result, voice is concentrated at the center, while subjects outside the center remain discursively constrained. Within the scope of the article, silence is not understood as a passive condition in historiography but rather as a discursive mechanism intrinsically linked to power relations. The convergence of digital analytical approaches and classical philological reading is discussed within the framework of critical humanities research.