Shuhai Wenyuan interactive internet worktable

There are four major digital library projects in East Asia thatpublish digital versions of parts of the vast pre-modern Chinesecorpus on the World Wide Web. All of these are targeted atprofessional sinologists, with no accommodation for the user who isnot expertly proficient in Chinese. As a result, anyone interestedin seriously engaging Chinese thought must either set aside a fewyears to learn Classical Chinese or remain beholden to thesinologist for both information and interpretation. At ShuhaiWenyuan, a project funded by the National Science Foundation'sDigital Libraries Initiative (Phase II), we strive to capitalize onthe advantages of digitization to allow the non-sinologist entryinto the conceptual world of ancient Chinese thought.

Begun in October of 2000, Shuhai Wenyuan will offer a set ofChinese classics, English translations of these classics, ahyperlinked lexicon, a grammar, a philosophical resource, and asearch engine for rapidly viewing the full contexts of importantterms ina variety a texts. The aim is access--most immediately forscholars and students to be able to read Classical Chinese textswith enough resources that they will be able to reach their ownconclusions about interpretation and then employ the texts inoriginal scholarly pursuits; and in the longer term for teachers tobe able to provide courses in Chinese Philosophy, either online orin the classroom, without having to be concerned about theavailability of appropriate resources.

There are four salient features of Shuhai Wenyuan that we willpresent in our poster:

1. SOFTWARE: As a project developed by humanists rather thancomputer scientists, and as a project intended to be replicated byother humanists, Shuhai Wenyuan employs powerful off-the-shelfdatabase software called 4D. We will demonstrate how this resultsin streamlined and cost-effective administration and modularreplicability without compromising design flexibility,expandability, or data integrity.
2. WORKTABLE: Our user interface employsframes to replicate thescholar's worktable on which one may have open several books atonce for simultaneous perusal. We will demonstrate how side-by-sidetextual viewing enhances the research usability and how theWorktable can be customized by individual users in a variety ofways.
3. TOOLS: A portion of the Worktable is devoted to textual viewingand another to viewing research tools, specifically, a grammar, anencyclopedic lexicon, and a search engine. We will demonstrate howeach of these tools is easily put to work using hyperlinks betweenthe texts and tools and among tools.
4. PHILOSOPHY: One of the most difficult parts of working withforeign language texts is that philosophically-laden terms losetheir conceptual contexts in translation and acquire misleadingconceptual contexts in the target language, so that a term such astian in Chinese inevitably becomes Heaven in English, capitalizedand with built-in Judeo-Christian connotations of an omnipotent,anthropomorphic deity and the promise of salvation.