Introduction: This post introduces two tools developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, LoGaRT and RISE with a focus on Asia and Eurasia. […]The concept of LoGaRT – treating local gazetteers as “databases” by themselves – is an innovative and pertinent way to articulate the essence of the platform: providing opportunities for multi-level analysis from the close reading of the sources (using, for example, the carousel mode) to the large-scale, “bird’s eye view” of the materials across geographical and temporal boundaries. Local gazetteers are predominantly textual sources – this characteristic of the collection is reflected in the capabilities of LoGaRT as well, since some of its key capabilities include data search (using Chinese characters), collection and analysis, as well as tagging and dataset comparison. That said, LoGaRT also offers integrated visualization tools and supports the expansion of the collection and tagging features to the images used in a number of gazetteers. The opportunity to smoothly intertwine these visual and textual collections with Chinese historical maps (see CHMap) is an added, and much welcome, advantage of the tool, which helps to develop sophisticated and multifaceted analyses.
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Author: Alíz Horváth
OpenMethods Spotlights showcase people and epistemic reflections behind Digital Humanities tools and methods. You can find here brief interviews with the creator(s) of the blogs or tools that are highlighted on OpenMethods to humanize and contextualize them. In the first episode, Alíz Horváth is talking with Hilde de Weerdt at Leiden University about MARKUS, a tool that offers 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.
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.