An Engaging Environment for Ancient Chinese Texts: An Introduction to ctext.org

https://openmethods.dariah.eu/2023/09/26/an-introduction-to-ctext-org/ OpenMethods introduction to: An Engaging Environment for Ancient Chinese Texts: An Introduction to ctext.org 2023-09-26 06:49:43 The Chinese Text Project is a well-established resource in Sinology, providing open access to a large number of ancient Chinese texts. As a digital medium, it utilizes crowdsourcing, linked data, knowledge graph and other computational technologies to provide an interactive interface for users who are interested in ancient Chinese texts. Beyond its main aim of providing open access to Chinese literature and philosophy texts, the project features an integrated Chinese character dictionary tool, images of scanned source texts, a search function for parallel passages, and much more. In terms of structured data, the project’s data wiki contains a wealth of records on entities such as persons, locations, and works. Ulrike Wuttke Blog post Annotating Capture Chinese Commenting Contextualizing Crowdsourcing Relational Analysis knowledge graph Philosophy Sinology wiki

Introduction by open methods guest editors (DH2023, Graz) Yaming Fu, Radu Tulai, Viktor J. Illmer

The Chinese Text Project is a well-established resource in Sinology, providing open access to a large number of ancient Chinese texts. As a digital medium, it utilizes crowdsourcing, linked data, knowledge graph and other computational technologies to provide an interactive interface for users who are interested in ancient Chinese texts. Beyond its main aim of providing open access to Chinese literature and philosophy texts, the project features an integrated Chinese character dictionary tool, images of scanned source texts, a search function for parallel passages, and much more. In terms of structured data, the project’s data wiki contains a wealth of records on entities such as persons, locations, and works.

The strength of the tool lies in providing a friendly environment for interacting with ancient Chinese texts and a comprehensive filtering system based on diverse categories.

“中國哲學書電子化計劃是一個線上開放電子圖書館,為中外學者提供中國歷代傳世文獻,力圖超越印刷媒體限制,通過電子科技探索新方式與古代文獻進行溝通。收藏的文本已超過三萬部著作,並有五十億字之多,故為歷代中文文獻資料庫最大者。” Source: https://ctext.org/zh

“The Chinese Philosophical Books Electronic Project is an online open access e-library that provides Chinese and foreign scholars with access to Chinese handed down texts through the ages and seeks to transcend the limitations of the print media by exploring new ways of communicating with ancient texts through electronic technology. The collection of texts has exceeded 30,000 works and contains as many as 5 billion words, making it the largest database of Chinese literature through the ages.” Chinese translated into English with DeepL

“The goal of this site is to present accurate and accessible copies of ancient (in particular pre-Qin and Han dynasty) Chinese texts in an organized and searchable format, and to make the best possible use of modern technology to aid in the study and research of these texts, so making them accessible to the widest possible audience.” Source: https://ctext.org/introduction 

棄母姜嫄 (列女傳). © Chinese Text Project 2006–2023. (Featured image) (Might be public domain)
The summary data used to create this visualization can be downloaded as a GraphViz (.gv) file suitable for use with various network visualization tools including Gephi.
Credits
The parallel passage function required a considerable amount of time and effort to create – please appropriately acknowledge any use of this data in your research. The techniques used to create this data are described and evaluated in the following paper, which you may wish to cite when making use of the data:
Donald Sturgeon. 2017. Unsupervised Identification of Text Reuse in Early Chinese Literature. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Link to Ctext tool: https://ctext.org/

Tutorials: https://dsturgeon.net/tutorials/

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