Procedural challenges: the FAIR principles and PRC electronic resources - a case study of Chinese republican newspapers

Abstract

It is tempting to assume that FAIR data principles effectively apply globally. In practice, digital research platforms play a central role in ensuring the applicability of these principles to research exchange, where General Data Protection Regulation (EU) and Multi Level Protection Scheme 2.0 (PRC) provide the overarching legal frameworks. For this article, we conduct a systematic review of research into Chinese Republican newspapers as it appears in Chinese academic journal databases. We experimentally compare the results of repeated search runs using different interfaces and with different points of origin. We then analyze our results regarding the practical and technical accessibility conditions. Concluding with an analysis of conceptual mismatches surrounding the classification of items as “full-text“, and of a case of total data loss that is nevertheless symptomatic of the limited degree of data re-usability. Our results show structural challenges preventing Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-usability from being put into practice. Since these experiments draw upon our Digital Humanities (DH) research, we include a state-of-the-field overview of historical Periodicals and digitization research in the PRC. Our research on the one hand addresses DH practitioners interested in digital collections, and technical aspects of document processing with a focus on historical Chinese sources. On the other hand, our experience is helpful to researchers irrespective of the topic. Our article is accompanied by a data publication containing sources and results of our experiments, as well as an online bibliography of the research articles we collected.