The Chinese Text Project (CTP; ) is a

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital me ...

project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books related to

Chinese philosophy Chinese philosophy originates in the Spring and Autumn period () and Warring States period (), during a period known as the "Hundred Schools of Thought", which was characterized by significant intellectual and cultural developmen ...

. It aims at providing accessible and accurate versions of a wide range of texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, and the site is credited with providing one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of classical Chinese texts on the Internet, as well as being one of the most useful textual databases for scholars of early Chinese texts.

Site contents

Texts are divided into pre-Qin and Han texts, and post-Han texts, with the former categorized by

school of thought A school of thought, or intellectual tradition, is the perspective of a group of people who share common characteristics of opinion or outlook of a philosophy, discipline, belief, social movement, economics, cultural movement, or art movement. ...

and the latter by

dynasty A dynasty is a sequence of rulers from the same family,''Oxford English Dictionary'', "dynasty, ''n''." Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1897. usually in the context of a monarchical system, but sometimes also appearing in republics. A ...

. The ancient (pre-Qin and Han) section of the database contains over 5 million Chinese characters, the post-Han database over 20 million characters, and the publicly editable

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

section over 5 billion characters. Many texts also have English and Chinese translations, which are paired with the original text paragraph by paragraph as well as phrase by phrase for ease of comparison; this makes it possible for the system to be used as a useful scholarly research tool even by students with little or no knowledge of Chinese. As well as providing customized search functionality suited to Chinese texts, the site also attempts to make use of the unique format of the web to offer a range of features relevant to

sinologists Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to the ex ...

, including an integrated dictionary, word lists, parallel passage information, scanned source texts, concordance and index data, a metadata system, Chinese commentary display, a published resources database, and a discussion forum in which threads can be linked to specific data on the site. The "Library" section of the site also includes scanned copies of over 25 million pages of early Chinese texts, linked line by line to transcriptions in the full-text database, many creating using Optical Character Recognition, and edited and maintained using an online crowd-sourcing wiki system.https://cpianalysis.org/2016/06/08/crowdsourcing-apis-and-a-digital-library-of-chinese/ , China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham Textual data and metadata can also be exported using an

Application Programming Interface An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how t ...

, allowing integration with other online tools as well as use in

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

and

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

projects.

References

External links

Chinese Text Project

中國哲學書電子化計劃

Chinese Text Project
at

Douban Douban.com (), launched on 6 March 2005, is a Chinese online database and social networking service that allows registered users to record information and create content related to film, books, music, recent events, and activities in Chinese c ...

{{Portal bar, Language, China Discipline-oriented digital libraries Digital humanities Chinese classic texts 2006 establishments