AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter 1:2 (June 1998)
The Confucian E-Text Project: Summary of Current Status and Future Plans
by Steve Angle
URL: http://www.wesleyan.edu/~sangle/etext/cep.html
The Confucian E-Text Project has been underway
sporadically for three years, with the aim of presenting electronic
versions of Song through Qing dynasty Confucian texts on the Internet. The
texts prepared to date are collected on the Chinese Philosophical Etext
Archive. To date we have used
Chinese OCR (DanQing Professional for UMAX) to input the texts, and they
are formatted in simple HTML. We have used Big-5 encoding. The texts can be
downloaded or searched using a browser's built-in find command.
Our plans for the future are much more ambitious. Briefly, we envision the
following:
- More texts.
- Better input methodology: we will scan one version and have another
keyboarded, then compare and collate the two editions, producing our own
final version. This should improve accuracy and solve lingering copyright
worries.
- Texts will be SGML tagged, probably using TEI Lite. They will be
downloadable in this format, and/or...
- Texts will be converted to and made searchable with KE Texpress
.
- Texts will be integrated with a version of Chuck Muller's Classical
Chinese Lexicon. Click on a
character and a window will pop up with dictionary (and perhaps eventually
other) data.
- As it becomes fully implemented on all platforms, we will convert to
Unicode, probably starting in Summer 1999.
At least some of these changes will begin over Summer 1998, but the extent
to which we will be able to carry them out depends (of course) on funding.
We have our fingers crossed.
© AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 2 (June 1998).
URL http://asiandoc.lib.ohio-state.edu/v1n2/dbs/confucian.html