Shuhai Wenyuan interactive internet worktable: studying ancient chinese philosophy online

There are four major digital library projects in East Asia that publish digital versions of parts of the vast pre-modern Chinese corpus on the World Wide Web. All of these are targeted at professional sinologists, with no accommodation for the user who is not expertly proficient in Chinese. As a result, anyone interested in seriously engaging Chinese thought must either set aside a few years to learn Classical Chinese or remain beholden to the sinologist for both information and interpretation. At Shuhai Wenyuan, a project funded by the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Initiative (Phase II), we strive to capitalize on the advantages of digitization to allow the non-sinologist entry into the conceptual world of ancient Chinese thought.

Begun in October of 2000, Shuhai Wenyuan will offer a set of Chinese classics, English translations of these classics, a hyperlinked lexicon, a grammar, a philosophical resource, and a search engine for rapidly viewing the full contexts of important terms in a variety a texts. The aim is access--most immediately for scholars and students to be able to read Classical Chinese texts with enough resources that they will be able to reach their own conclusions about interpretation and then employ the texts in original scholarly pursuits; and in the longer term for teachers to be able to provide courses in Chinese Philosophy, either online or in the classroom, without having to be concerned about the availability of appropriate resources.

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

• SOFTWARE: As a project developed by humanists rather than computer scientists, and as a project intended to be replicated by other humanists, Shuhai Wenyuan employs powerful off-the-shelf database software called 4D. We will demonstrate how this results in streamlined and cost-effective administration and modular replicability without compromising design flexibility, expandability, or data integrity.

• WORKTABLE: Our user interface employs frames to replicate the scholar's worktable on which one may have open several books at once for simultaneous perusal. We will demonstrate how side-by-side textual viewing enhances the research usability and how the Worktable can be customized by individual users in a variety of ways.

• TOOLS: A portion of the Worktable is devoted to textual viewing and another to viewing research tools, specifically, a grammar, an encyclopedic lexicon, and a search engine. We will demonstrate how each of these tools is easily put to work using hyperlinks between the texts and tools and among tools.

• PHILOSOPHY: One of the most difficult parts of working with foreign language texts is that philosophically-laden terms lose their conceptual contexts in translation and acquire misleading conceptual contexts in the target language, so that a term such as tian in Chinese inevitably becomes Heaven in English, capitalized and with built-in Judeo-Christian connotations of an omnipotent, anthropomorphic deity and the promise of salvation.

One of the most significant features of Shuhai Wenyuan is our work organizing and presenting secondary literature on key philosophical terms. If one were to research the term tian in an analog library, it would take days of paging through book and periodical indexes to find significant treatments of it in the secondary literature. We are bringing these resources into our own library, digitizing them, and culling the relevant passages for inclusion under individual entries in the lexicon. The textual tools and texts themselves, when combined with our philosophical resource, allow the novice reader of Chinese thought unprecedented access to this important body of texts. Instead of providing the reader with a single limited interpretation of a text, we offer users the entire conceptual universe of Chinese thought at their fingertips, allowing them to work creatively from it.