| Overview |
This year marks the third year since the project was carried out in 2021. The goal is to explore the possibilities of making further breakthroughs in the current rich landscape of humanities research by using digital humanities tools to assist in two essential works of the wooden slip study - characters interpretation and restoration of wooden slips.
In the first year, the project aimed to prove the feasibility of the research methods. The Text Model developed by the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures, the text comparison tools provided by the Digital Analysis System for Humanities (DASH), and the Wooden Slips Character Dictionary: The Database of Han Dynasty Wooden Slips from Edsen-Gol, IHP were used to support each step of traditional researchers interpreting and restoring wooden slips. It is hoped to discover possible interpretations from the Han wooden slips of the Institute of History and Philology (IHP) that scholars or experts could not identify, discover the relevance and put together broken pieces of wooden slips. The focus in the second year is the test of Taiwan and China's wooden slips restoration. At the current stage, the research has found that several sets of wooden slips groups could be closely related. History has limited records of local governments in the Han Dynasty. Researchers used to manually catalog and interpret many geographical names, institution names, official titles, and personal names on the Han Wooden Slips. We have now begun using DASH to develop the text tagging functions of authority terms as the research foundation of textual analysis.
In the third year, the digital humanities tools will continue to be optimized based on the abovementioned research results. For instance, we will expand the Text Model's training materials and experiment with developing features like reverse image search and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for wooden slips, hoping to improve the accuracy of recommended characters interpretation by combining texts and images. In addition, the established authority files of the Han Wooden Slips on the DASH will be utilized to devise a pattern retrieval feature for wooden slips, further complementing content classification to identify the relevance of wooden slips. Also, authority-term statistics and visualization tools will be employed to explore issues of archaeological site identification. Hopefully, with the aid of digital humanities tools to support the wooden slip study, the authentic look of the border area in the Han Dynasty can be restored. |
