The Chinese Text Project (CTP; ) is a

digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...

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 (Simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese: 中国哲学; Traditional Chinese characters, traditional Chinese: 中國哲學) refers to the philosophical traditions that originated and developed within the historical ...

. 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.

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, usually in the context of a monarchy, monarchical system, but sometimes also appearing in republics. A dynasty may also be referred to as a "house", "family" or "clan", among others. H ...

. 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 a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

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, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilization ...

, 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 created using Optical Character Recognition, and edited and maintained using an online crowd-sourcing wiki system. Textual data and metadata can also be exported using an

Application Programming Interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

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

text mining Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or 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 extracting information from differe ...

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 ci ...

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