Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS

Abstract

MARKUS, a multilingual digital text annotation and analysis platform, allows historians and other researchers to construct datasets from primary sources available to them in full-text digital format. Originally designed for those working with pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts, MARKUS has developed into a multifunctional annotation platform that is particularly suited for the automated annotation, referencing, and visualization of named entities in modern and literary Chinese and premodern Korean texts, but many of its additional annotation features can be used to analyze and read texts in any language, as long as the electronic documents are encoded in the most common standard for language encoding, Unicode. Below I discuss the main goals and methodological features of MARKUS and the allied text comparison utility COMPARATIVUS. I will illustrate these with some examples of how MARKUS has been used in Chinese and Korean historical research.