Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies

Hsieh-Chang Tu

DocuSky is a research platform developed by the NTU Research Center for Digital Humanities that enables users to build personal textual databases that support search and analysis over texts. The texts are organized as a set of documents. Each document contains metadata that describe properties of the text, and a document can contain markup to support fine-grained text analysis.

In this workshop, we shall introduce DocuSky and illustrate its power by several use cases. In particular, we discuss an interesting application whose goal is to construct a DocuSky database for text-aligned reading. Figure 1 illustrates an example that aligns texts from The Four Gospels (四福音書). Each column displays documents from a gospel, and those with the same topic are aligned for comparative reading. The database of this example actually contains 8 sets of documents, 4 in Chinese and 4 in English. A user can use the left control panel to choose which sets to show in the right area.
During the practical session of this workshop, we will use the first three chapters of The Four Gospels as an example to practice, step by step, how to construct a DocuSky database for text-aligned reading. A participant is expected to know how to use a text editor (such as Notepad) and Excel. They should also know some Chinese for better understanding of the tool used to convert data from Excel to DocuSky. After the workshop, one should be able to construct a complete database functioning as the one shown.