Abstract
The Automating Data Extraction from Chinese Texts Project aims to provide humanists and social scientists with a means of transforming 2200 years of Chinese texts into structured data. The project will fully develop an open-source platform that allows its users to apply sophisticated text-mining techniques, hitherto the domain of information scientists, to a wide variety of historical and literary texts. Users interested in biographical data, for example, will be able to tag and extract personal names, dates, place names, official titles and postings, kinship ties, and other social relationships. The platform will be tested against 2000 local histories spanning an 800-year period and 19,000 letters and 500 notebooks dating from the seventh through the thirteenth century. Data extracted from the sample repositories will be used to enrich text-mining applications and will also be made available in English and Chinese for research through open-access online databases and data archives.
