A Chinese Ancient Book Digital Humanities Research Platform to Support Digital Humanities Research

Abstract

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 digital humanities analysis tools to support humanists on interpreting texts and exploring characters' social network relationship. Moreover, the advancement of digitization technologies for the retrieval and use of Chinese ancient books is arising an unprecedented challenge and opportunity due to the development of international Chinese study. For these reasons, this paper presents a Chinese ancient books digital humanities research platform (CABDHRP) to support historical Chinese studies. In addition to providing digital archives, digital reading, basic search, and advanced search functions for Chinese ancient books, this platform still provides two novel functions that can more effectively support digital humanities research including an automatic text annotation system (ATAS) for interpreting texts and a character social network relationship map tool (CSNRMT) which can show the character relationships as a knowledge graph with triples containing two character names and their corresponding relationship attribute for exploring characters' social network relationships. This study adopted DSpace, an open-source institutional repository system, to serve as a digital archives system for archiving scanned images, metadata, and full texts to develop the CABDHRP for supporting digital humanities research. To understand the research participants' perception when interpreting the historical texts and character social network relationships with the support of ATAS and CSNRMT, the semi-structured interviews with 21 research participants were preceded. An automatic text annotation system (ATAS) embedded in the reading interface of CABDHRP can collect resources from different databases through linked data (LD) for automatically annotating ancient texts to support digital humanities research. 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' social network relationships 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 interest and awareness of Chinese ancient books.