A Chinese ancient book digital humanities research platform to support digital humanities research
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-10-2018-0213 |
| Pages | 314-336 |
| Author | Chih-Ming Chen,Chung Chang |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
A Chinese ancient book digital
humanities research platform to
support digital humanities research
Chih-Ming Chen
Graduate Institute of Library, Information and Archival Studies,
National Chengchi University, Taipei City, Taiwan, and
Chung Chang
Research Center for Chinese Cultural Subjectivity, National Chengchi University,
Taipei City, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –With the rapid development of digital humanities, some digital humanities platforms have
been successfully developed to support digital humanities research for humanists. However, most of them
have still not provided a friendly digital reading environment and practicable social networkanalysis tool
to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters’social network relationships.
Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books
is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. For these reasons, this paper aims to present a
Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical China
studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search and advanced search
functions for Chines e ancient books, this p latform still provid es two novel functions th at can more
effectively support digital humanities research, including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS)
for interpreting tex ts and a character social n etwork relationshi p map tool (CSNRMT) for exp loring
characters’social n etwork relationships.
Design/methodology/approach –This study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository
system, to serveas a digital archives system for archiving scannedimages, metadata, and full texts to develop
the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities (DH) research. Moreover, the ATAS developed in the
CABDHRP used the Node.js framework to implement the system’s front- and back-end services, as well as
application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by different databases, such as China Biographical
Database (CBDB) and TGAZ, used to retrieve the useful linked data (LD) sources for interpreting ancient
texts. Also, Neo4j which is an open-sourcegraph database management system was used to implement the
CSNRMT of the CABDHRP. Finally, JavaScript and jQuery were applied to develop a monitoring program
embedded in the CABDHRP to record the use processesfrom humanists based on xAPI (experience API). To
understand the research participants’perception when interpreting the historicaltexts and characters’social
network relationshipswith the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, semi-structured interviews with 21 research
participantswere conducted.
Findings –An ATAS embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different
databases through LD for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. It allows
the humanists to refer to resources from diverse databases when interpreting ancient texts, as well as provides a
friendly text annotation reader for humanists to interpret ancient text through reading. Additionally, the
CSNRMT provided by the CABDHRP can semi-automatically identify characters’names based on Chinese word
segmentation technology and humanists’support to confirm and analyze characters’socialnetwork r elationships
from Chinese ancient books based on visualizing characters’social networks as a knowledge graph. The
CABDHRP not only can stimulate humanists to explore new viewpoints in a humanistic research, but also can
promote the public to emerge the learning interestand awareness of Chinese ancient books.
Originality/value –This study proposed a novel CABDHRP that provides the advanced features,
including the automatic word segmentation of Chinese text, automatic Chinese text annotation, semi-
automatic charactersocial network analysis and user behavior analysis, that are differentfrom other existed
EL
37,2
314
Received26 October 2018
Revised28 December 2018
11February 2019
Accepted12 March 2019
TheElectronic Library
Vol.37 No. 2, 2019
pp. 314-336
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-10-2018-0213
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
digital humanities platforms. Currently, there is no this kind of digital humanities platform developed for
humaniststo support digital humanities research.
Keywords Digital archives, Digital humanities, Automatic text annotation,
Character social networks analysis, Chinese ancient books
Paper type Technical paper
1. Introduction
Digital humanities (DH) is work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities
disciplines (Drucker et al.,2014). It includes the systematic use of digital contents and tools
in the humanities disciplines and makes possible new kinds of teaching and research. In
recent years, DH has received particular attention in both the humanities and computer
science fields. Particularly, academic libraries, such as Research Libraries UK and National
Central Library of Taiwan,have started to develop infrastructure to support DH research,as
well as close collaboration between librarians and researchers is disclosing new
opportunities for librarians to actively collaborate in DH research (Cassella, 2017;
Kamposiori, 2017). DH is an interdisciplinary field and is concerned with the intersection of
computer science, knowledge management and a wide range of humanities disciplines
(Steiner et al.,2014). Humanities research involves the analysis, comprehension, production
and sharing of a huge amount of digital sources. Moreover, humanists in the DH field rely
heavily on using digital tools, such as text mining(Widlöcher et al., 2015), annotation (Chen
and Tsay, 2017;Sato et al.,2016), social networks analysis (Uboldi et al.,2013), geographic
information systems (GIS) (Kallaher and Gamble, 2017) and natural language processing
(NLP) technologies (Brookeet al.,2015) to analyze data from digital sources to extract useful
information, clues and find new knowledge. However, although a lot of digital tools have
already been developed for supporting DH research, many of these tools do not properly fit
the needs of the humanities community due to technical difficulties or scientific objectives
(Picca and Egloff, 2017). Furthermore, different types of humanists have considerable
differences in their knowledge of the collections, requiring varying levels of support, and
every individual humanisthas their own particular interests and priorities.
In recent years, Chinese ancient books are presenting an unprecedented challenge and
opportunity due to the rise of international Chinese study around the world. To increase
research efficiency and production,there have been a lot of international Chinese studies to
explore issues about Chinese culture, religion, economy, and politics through Chinese
ancient books or literatures with the support of DH tools. For example, Hsiang et al. (2012)
was inspired by Imperial Court documents from the Ming and Qing dynasties because a
memorial often quotes earlierImperial Edicts as the directives for the actions being reported,
while an Imperial Edict may cite earlier memorials as reasons for issuing the decree. Their
study, thus, explored the citation relation among the Imperial Edicts and the memorials
through the developed DH tool based on Taiwan-relatedImperial Court documents from the
Ming and Qing dynasties archived in the Taiwan History Digital Library (THDL) (http://
thdl.ntu.edu.tw/index.html). Moreover, land deed research played a unique role in the
modern Chinese history. Land deeds were the only proof of ownershipin pre-1900 Taiwan.
They are indispensable for the studies of Taiwan’s social, anthropological and economic
evolution. Based on a large amount of historical land deeds, Chen et al. (2013) developed a
DH tool to discover two important relations –successive transactions and allotment
agreements involving the same property–as well as presented a notion of land transitivity
graph to capture the transitivity embedded in these land deeds’transactions. Also,
Chan et al. (2015) presented a spatiotemporal model based on a geographical information
Digital
humanities
research
315
To continue reading
Request your trial