Distinguished Lecture in Taiwan Studies: Context Discovery in the Taiwan History Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions - Held at McGill University -Ministry of Education Republic of China (Taiwan)

Distinguished Lecture in Taiwan Studies: Context Discovery in the Taiwan History Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions - Held at McGill University

Date: 2014-04-17

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Distinguished Lecture in Taiwan Studies: Context Discovery in the Taiwan History Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions - Held at McGill University

The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Canada (TECO in Canada) began collaborating with McGill University to promote excellence in the teaching and research in the field of Taiwan Studies in 2012. It aimed to assist post-doctoral scholars in the Department of East Asian Studies to enhance and expand their Taiwan Studies related contributions. This will also enhance general professional and academic development of this field.

This collaboration includes an annual Taiwan Studies related public lecture being held at McGill University. This year’s lecture, held on April 11 and followed by a reception, was titled “Context Discovery in the Taiwan History Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions”. It was hosted by Professor Robin Yates, from the Department of East Asian Studies and the guests included Cheng-Kie Cheng, Director of the Education Division of TECO in Canada; Jennifer Ho, President of McGill Taiwanese Graduate Student Association; and Andy Wei and Tina Tsai, co-presidents of McGill Taiwanese Student Association.

The lecture was presented by Prof Hsiang Jieh, Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at National Taiwan University (NTU) and of NTU’s Director of the Research Center for Digital Humanities and a Research Fellow of the Institute of Information Systems of Academia Sinica. Professor Hsiang and his research team at NTU have built the Taiwan History Digital Library (THDL) making an enormous treasure trove of materials widely available. Professor Hsiang shared the challenges for the establishment of THDL and the solutions they arrived at in his lecture.

In 2003, National Taiwan University Library (NTUL) embarked on a major effort to systematically collect and digitize over 80,000 Taiwan related historical documents. The documents, from a wide range of sources, include imperial court archives, local and central judicial and administrative records, personal records of high-ranking officials, travel journals, diaries of influential people, and land deeds which were selected by historians. They were then typed, punctuated (classical Chinese did not have punctuation!), proofread, and supplemented with metadata records. The current collection is approximately 150 million Chinese words (characters), all in full text and searchable. This is about 80% of all primary Chinese historical materials on or from Taiwan dating from before 1895.

Such a collection, of such a variety of documents and such magnitude, has never been available in searchable full text form before.

These are the materials in the Taiwan History Digital Library, built by Professor Hsiang and his research team to make them easy to be accessed. This will provide an exciting playground for anyone interested in pursuing research of Taiwanese history, scholars and laypeople alike. In addition to full-text and metadata searches, it has built-in reference tools to further facilitate its use. These include a Chinese-Gregorian calendar converter, corpus of names of people and locations, and charts of the evolution of local administrative structures, with names of the officials and the duration of their terms. THDL will profoundly help advanced research in Taiwanese history and sets a model for similar endeavors in other fields.