Since its preparatory office was established in 1955, the Institute of Modern History (IMH) of Academia Sinica has made every effort with regards to collect historical materials, including government documents, personal papers, and institutional materials, the aim of which is to provide a solid foundation for modern historical research. IMH Archives is renowned for its foreign ministry and economic ministry collections and has attempted to add to their value by using the tool of digital humanities so as to extend the concept of openness and application to the areas of society and culture. In recent years, IMH Archives has participated in two digital value-added projects of Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures, namely, the Post-war Rural Demobilization and Resources Reorganization Project (2019-2020) and Increasing Agricultural Production: Modern Chinese Agricultural Promotion and Added-Value Project (2021-2022,) continuing to research agricultural topics, the scope spanning the post-war period to pre-Second Sino- Japanese War period.

This project, namely, Agriculture as the Foundation: ROC Agricultural Economy Value-added Project (1940-1949) 3-phase project (2023-2025), has the collections of the Department of Agricultural Affairs and the Department of Rural Economy housed in the IMH Archives as the research subjects, conducting a digital value-added project on the study of agricultural economy and management talents in modern China by researchers within and beyond IMH. The current trend in digital humanities research is to conduct a descriptive analysis of the content described in traditional files and move in the direction of Big Data to apply it. The collections contain materials from 1940 to 1949 on agricultural loans, farm operations, agricultural produce forms, and reports on the rural economy. The aim is to sort the subject materials and classify, calculate and mark them. Complemented by the topics of six sub-projects: planned agriculture, talent that studied overseas, post-war peasant’s associations, agricultural experiments, agricultural loans, and state-run farms, a complete bird’s eye view of the agricultural economy of Mainland China in the war and post-war period will be obtained.

The Project will be divided into two directions: the first is the transcription of funding forms such as agricultural loans, agricultural produce, land rent, and famine relief to establish the Agriculture Statistical Data Databank; the second is integrating the social network, resources maps, salary funding and other databanks of the earlier stage to provide a statistical research platform. The aforementioned results will be matched with focus items from the collections such as area distribution charts, popular science illustrations, farm tools, factory design drawings, water resources engineering and topographic maps and stories told through the Open Museum method, bringing online openness and accessibility fully into play with a research orientation. All in all, this study team and IMH colleagues will use metadata column analysis and sorting to mark the significant data, keywords, personal names, and geographical information in the archive collections, attempting to go in the direction of Linked Open Data (LOD) and, ultimately, display the timeline of the Agricultural Price Databank for observation of changes in personnel, events and objects in the ROC period; this is an original approach compared to conventional quantitative analysis and economic history research. The core aims of Digital Humanities are collecting, teaching, researching, and displaying. This project aims to develop from a simple databank to combining with tools such as Social Network, equation functions, and added value charts to allow it to evolve into a more mature “agricultural knowledge bank.”