With the onset of the information era explosion, people are receiving information up to 11 hours or more daily and over 100,000 words of information vocabularies. The amount of data we can assess through a variety of media is unprecedentedly large. Therefore, for humanities research, in addition to the acquisition of digital information, we need to know how to handle information content, how to sort out useful information, and how to organize a context for the information content have become important issues. The digital Archives and Digital Learning of the National Science and Technology Program shoulders the responsibility for perpetuation of national memory. After more than nine years of hard work, they have accumulated a considerable amount of information content. Digitalarchives.tw alone has over 8 million entries of digitized information. Also because of this, “Digital Humanities” research using digitization to process the archived content has become an important issue. For this, our journal is honored to interview Professor Hsiang Jieh of the Research Center for Digital Humanities, National Taiwan University, who has worked in the field of digital humanities for many years and even established the Taiwan Historical Digital Library from a perspective close to humanities research. Let’s follow Dr. Hsiang to learn about the new opportunities that digital humanities research creates for enriching digital archives.

Making Content the “New Tool” of Context

If Content is King, Context is Emperor!

    What is “digital humanities”? In simple terms, it is the analysis of huge historical data by digital technology to be used for humanities research. I believe readers that engage in jobs related to historical research will not be unfamiliar with the saying “searching through the sky and the land of the dead with our hands and feet”. It is said that “Content is King”. Organizing content of historical data through different context can develop new areas of research. In the digital era, the numerous digitally archived historical content can become new materials for researches. The greatest challenge for research now is how to find the relevant context from millions of entries of information. Digital humanities research applies information-mining techniques as the “new tools” for humanities research. They can quickly process, analyze, and find connection or links among millions entries of historical data. In addition to quickly finding the required research “keywords” from a large amount of texts, they can even discover the implicit relations among them, and explore the “new inquiries” that cannot be handled by traditional manual methods. Relying on the progress of information technology, up to ten thousand entries of historical data can be analyzed in a few seconds of time. Also because of this, Dr. Hsiang said with a smile, “we can boldly say that ‘if Content is King, Context is Emperor’!” Digital humanities research is using the latest information technology to systematically present the connection and context between different texts of historical data.

“New Inquiries” Discovered in Content Analysis of Database

Taiwan History Digital Library (THDL) is a database built for research of Taiwan history. Starting out from the core of digital humanities research, Dr. Hsiang leads his team in developing relevant technology to allow this database to conduct full text searches and Metadata searches, and develop more tools to analyze information, supplement observation, and explore. Through the context presented by these tools, researchers can put their hands on “new inquiries” that were impossible in the past. Take ancient leases for an example. Humanities researchers in the past were almost always limited by the information collected and examined each of the several hundred entries of ancient land leases and conducted small range researches. THDL have included tens of thousands of entries of full text ancient leases. Researchers can use the new digital humanities tools to more quickly discover “new inquiries” that were not discovered in the past by keywords search and word frequency analysis. They can also explore whether the temporal and geographic distribution of these ancient leases are closely related to Taiwan’s history of development. These were all difficult with one-by-one manual review of information.

 Fig 1. Temporal distribution of Leases searched for Taipei by THDL

Fig 2. Geographic distribution of leases searched for Taipei by THDL

    A chart of land transfers brings up another interesting question. The “automatic reconstruction of trading relationship from Taiwan lease documents” uses automated technology to figure out the transfer relations for lands that has been sold or divided to others and construct a contextual chart of land transfers with the information of old and new owners of land. The chart of transfer will show the history of development of this piece of land. The complicated lease relations can be illustrated using automated technologies, allowing researchers see the transfer relation in a glance. The largest land transfer chart includes over 100 ancient land leases. It is truly one of the best “new inquiries” for humanities research.     

Fig 3. Chart of Land Transfer Relations by THDL (click to see larger image html)

In addition to the above-mentioned tools for contents, the research tools developed by THDL with digital humanities research as the core also include various “reference tools”, “exploration and analysis tools”, and “relations-mining tools”. Although these tools cannot replace human brain, they help many researchers examine historical data from a vastly different angle and even conduct deeper exploration and discover new inquiries. And because of these, although digital humanities research is in a rudimentary stage internationally, in a short few years, through the digital revolution started in information engineering, it has allowed digital humanities research reared its head in the areas of literature, drama, history, and others. We are all looking forward to the world of fascination presented to us by this new field.    

Fig 4. “Chart of Government Official Positions in Qing Dynasty in Taiwan”, one of the many tools provided by THDL

Integrating Information Engineering and Humanities Research to Create a New Vision

Every time he was asked how he came up with the idea of integrating “Information Engineering” and “Humanities Research”, two vastly different fields, Dr. Hsiang expressed that he had an interest in culture when he returned to Taiwan from the United States to conduct research and he hoped to be connected to the society and conduct research that is beneficial to Taiwan and more practical. “Will there be any difference in the method of doing humanities research in the era of digitization?” This big question led to his dedication to the field of digital humanities research for many years; the “historical information science” using information engineering to research historical material became Dr. Hsiang’s inner ambition. When mathematical logic stepped into the field of humanities research, he used “more people, more convenience” as a starting point to develop practical tools and build easy to use database. The team has constantly explored files and over the years continued to interact and discuss with humanities scholars and make corrections according to their recommendations. They finally achieved brilliant results. Embodied in THDL’s collection of tens of thousands entries of “new materials”, numerous “new tools” provided, and “new inquiries” created are many more possibilities of historical data analysis by digital humanities research. Not only quickens circulation of literature and sharing of resources, digital humanities research also creates a new vision for research for the precious national memory.

Walking through some ten years of Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program at the moment when the national program is coming to an end, Dr. Hsiang expressed his sincere gratitude towards his teammates for their many years of hard work and help in overcoming obstacles. When I asked about his expectations of “digital archives” and “digital humanities”, he responded with full confidence, “Digital humanities research will succeed!” Although digital humanities research is a field undergoing changes, in response to the historical research methods mentioned in Mr. Fu Sinian’s writing “The Purport of the Work of The Institute of History and Philology”, digital humanities research will be able to discover and explore endless “new inquiries” by combining “new materials” brought by digital archives and “new tools” developed by information technology development. Perhaps in several decades, the direction of digital humanities research will be different from the current direction. However, the accumulated results have already showed us a new vision in humanities research.  In this generation of innovative technologies, Dr. Hsiang and team members of the Research Center for Digital Humanities, National Taiwan University sincerely invite every one of us to log into “Taiwan Historical Digital Library” and join the progression of digital humanities research to organize the text context jointly to allow these important national memories to be passed on infinitely.

fig 5. Taiwan Historical Digital Library has a huge collection of Ming and Qing Dynasty files and ancient leases. They also provide many tools for research use.