Shuhai Wenyuan Interactive Internet Worktable: Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy On-Line

Shuhai Wenyuan Interactive Internet Worktable: Studying
Ancient Chinese Philosophy On-Line

Brian
Bruya

University of Hawaii
shuhai@hawaii.edu

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

There are four major digital library projects in East Asia that publish digital
versions of parts of the vast pre-modern Chinese corpus on the World Wide Web.
All of these are targeted at professional sinologists, with no accommodation for
the user who is not expertly proficient in Chinese. As a result, anyone
interested in seriously engaging Chinese thought online must either set aside a
few years to learn Classical Chinese or remain beholden to the sinologist for
both information and interpretation. At Shuhai Wenyuan, a project funded by the
National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative (Phase II), we strive
to capitalize on the advantages of digitization to allow the non-sinologist
entry into the conceptual world of ancient Chinese thought.
Begun in October of 2000, Shuhai Wenyuan will offer a set of Chinese classics,
English translations of these classics, a hyperlinked lexicon, a grammar, a
philosophical resource, and a search engine for rapidly viewing the full
contexts of important terms in a variety a texts. The aim is access--most
immediately for scholars and students to be able to read Classical Chinese texts
with enough resources that they will be able to reach their own conclusions
about interpretation and then employ the texts in original scholarly pursuits;
and in the longer term for teachers to be able to provide courses in Chinese
Philosophy, either online or in the classroom, without having to be concerned
about the scarcity of appropriate resources.
There are four salient features of Shuhai Wenyuan that we will present in our poster:
1. Software: As a project developed by
humanists rather than computer scientists, and as a project intended to
be replicated by other humanists, Shuhai Wenyuan employs powerful
off-the-shelf database software called 4D. We will demonstrate how this
results in streamlined and cost-effective administration and modular
replicability without compromising design flexibility, expandability, or
data integrity.
2. Worktable: Our user interface employs
frames to replicate the scholar's worktable on which one may have open
several books at once for simultaneous perusal. We will demonstrate how
side-by-side textual viewing enhances the research usability and how the
Worktable can be customized by individual users in a variety of
ways.
3. Tools: A portion of the Worktable is
devoted to textual viewing and another to viewing research tools,
specifically, a grammar, an encyclopedic lexicon, and a search engine.
We will demonstrate how each of these tools is easily put to work using
hyperlinks between the texts and tools and among tools.
4. Philosophy: One of the most difficult
parts of working with foreign language texts is that
philosophically-laden terms lose their conceptual contexts in
translation and acquire misleading conceptual contexts in the target
language, so that a term such as tian in
Chinese inevitably becomes Heaven in English, capitalized and with
built-in Judeo-Christian connotations of an omnipotent, anthropomorphic
deity and the promise of salvation. One of the most significant features
of Shuhai Wenyuan is our work organizing and presenting secondary
literature on key philosophical terms. If one were to research the term
tian in an analog library, it would take
days of paging through book and periodical indexes to find significant
treatments of it in the secondary literature. We are bringing these
resources into our own library, digitizing them, and culling the
relevant passages for inclusion under individual entries in the lexicon.
The textual tools and texts themselves, when combined with our
philosophical resource, allow the novice reader of Chinese thought
unprecedented access to this important body of texts. Instead of
providing the reader with a single limited interpretation of a text, we
offer users the entire conceptual universe of Chinese thought at their
fingertips, allowing them to work creatively from it.

Shuhai Wenyuan is a three-year DLI-2 project with one year remaining as of
7/2002. We project to have all of the Chinese texts and English translations up
by then, a portion of the philosophy resource, the entire grammar, the search
engine, and a portion of the lexicon.
We invite the reader to visit our site at .