Exploring Guangxu-era missionary activities in Taiwan from Chinese Recorder, Dan-Hsin Archives and Ming-Qing Taiwan Administrative Archives through DocuSky

In this paper we use materials in two languages from three different archives and using the DH platform DocuSky to consolidate them. The three archives are Dan-Hsin Archives, Ming-Qing Taiwan Administrative Archives, both in Chinese, and the Chinese Recorder, in English. We use the missionary activities in Taiwan during Guangxu era(1875-1908) as an example.We first retrieve documents of Guangxu era from these three sources and combine them into one corpus on DocuSky. The latter involves reorganizing the metadata, tags and connecting meaningful terms. Tools in DocuSky enable us to analyze the documents even from different sources and languages. We use two examples to show the efficacy of our method. First, we show the different perspectives from missionaries and Chinese during the Sino-French War(1885) revealed from the documents. We also show how DocuSky’s DocuXML format can easily link to Palladio to show social network among foreign missionaries and native believers.