Sanguo Yanyi Appearance References

[Sam]

Thanks a plenty, James. Could you also do a search on Zhang Zun, Huang Chong was Li Qiu for me? Again, all three are very minor officers in the novel, and I'm pretty sure they all only appear in chapter 117, but I can't be positive.

[Douglas]

This would certainly be helpful, but to use it to make a bio, like Ma Dai's for instance, could be most punishing.

Still it's better than nothing.

We need this tool.

[James]

I found the most time consuming part of making a biography was recalling all the points at which an officer appeared. I would frequently think they were somewhere, when they really weren’t, and I would often overlook a point at which they did appear. This at least solves that problem.

Tool is still available for anyone that wants to use it.

[ZL181]

Heya guys. I wrote a script to format garbled output from a content authoring program I have, which lets me make nify little appearance listings for officer names as they appear in the Sanguo Yanyi. I can make one of these for any novel-wide search, be it a style name, name, or phrase, and I can also run a regular expression (for example, search for instance of both an officer name and their style).

I’ll be happy to take requests from people that want to make a biography, or for people who have other various nifty reasons for asking for one. As an example, here is Ma Dai, who we have no biography for:

It’s been over 18 years since this script was made by you but is there a chance it is still available? I dug this up from the dusty archives since it could prove useful for your novel project.

[James]

It’s been over 18 years since this script was made by you but is there a chance it is still available? I dug this up from the dusty archives since it could prove useful for your novel project.

Oh, trippy! I don’t even remember this.

It would not be too hard to write again. And I was planning on writing something like this—albeit more involved and future cable—to search the novel translation (as referenced in the project). But it could also be possible to create with a reference, such as the now-offline threekingdoms.com version. Or even traditional Chinese. This is sort of related to something Tiger Talley had requested a while back. A “version search” of the novel, but in that case not just limited to officers. It is a sort of goal, but I get to ponder how something like that might be approached (or not) from an intellectual property perspective.

I wonder what the use would be in the previous form? I’m not sure if anyone is writing Sanguo yanyi biographies right now?

[ZL181]

I wonder what the use would be in the previous form? I’m not sure if anyone is writing Sanguo yanyi biographies right now?

I suppose it would be for searching a list of all their appearances for fun. You never know when someone might need it to make a video that garners hundreds of views or when a certain podcast might reference it.

[James]

I suppose it would be for searching a list of all their appearances for fun. You never know when someone might need it to make a video that garners hundreds of views or when a certain podcast might reference it.

No doubt! I definitely want it to exist. And as a public tool at that.

At first blush, for a public tool, I imagine the initial unpolished novel translation needs to be online. Which I may go ahead and work through sooner than I had previously planned, given circumstances. And as some of the pieces come together in my head I may start building a basic tool which can be expanded upon. I can see how it could be very useful for a pretty wide range of purposes.