MARKUS – Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind

https://openmethods.dariah.eu/2020/10/11/markus/ OpenMethods introduction to: MARKUS - Comprehensive tool with the needs of non-Latin script users in mind 2020-10-11 08:52:38 East Asian studies are still largely underrepresented in digital humanities. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the relative lack of tools and methods which could be used smoothly with non-Latin scripts. MARKUS, developed by Brent Ho within the framework of the Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective project led by Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University, is a comprehensive tool which helps mitigate this issue. Selected as a runner up in the category “Best tool or suite of tools” in the DH2016 awards, MARKUS offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well. Alíz Horváth https://dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus/beta/ Blog post Analysis Annotating Archiving Capture Chinese Commenting Content Analysis Creation Data Discovering Dissemination English Enrichment File Georeferencing Information Retrieval Korean Linked open data Machine Learning Manuscript Mapping Metadata Migration Named Entities Persons Preservation Preservation Metadata Research Activities Research Objects Sharing Storage Text Translation Visualization Asia Chinese digital humanities Internet Archive Korean Language acquisition Leiden University linked data MARKUS migration Multilingualism non-Latin script Sociology of language tagging text analysis text comparison visualization

Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Alíz Horváth): 

East Asian studies are still largely underrepresented in digital humanities. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is the relative lack of tools and methods which could be used smoothly with non-Latin scripts. MARKUS, developed by Brent Ho within the framework of the Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective project led by Hilde De Weerdt at Leiden University, is a comprehensive tool which helps mitigate this issue. Selected as a runner up in the category “Best tool or suite of tools” in the DH2016 awards, MARKUS offers a variety of functionalities for the markup, analysis, export, linking, and visualization of texts in multiple languages, with a special focus on Chinese and now Korean as well. As the creators summarize their concept,

In MARKUS you can automatically tag a range of entities (personal names, place names, temporal references, and bureaucratic offices, etc.) in Chinese and Korean texts. You can also upload your own list of key terms or use in-built keyword discovery functionality to tag texts in any language. You can then read a document while checking a range of reference works, or compare passages in which the same names or keywords appear. You can also export the passages you have tagged in one or more files, alongside data links to biographical, geographic and other datasets, and use the exported data for further analysis in linked text analysis and visualization platforms and other software.

A video tutorial in multiple languages and in multilingual use cases is available here: https://dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus/beta/video.html

In an OpenMethods Spotlight post, you can read an interview with Hilde De Weerdt about MARKUS, scholar-led tool development, and the representation of Asian languages & non-Latin scripts in Digital Humanities.

Source: MARKUS and Hilde De Weerdt (2020): Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2020.23

 

Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200722233454/https://dh.chinese-empires.eu/markus/