Author Archives: digital

The Google n-gram viewer allows real-time searching of the frequencies of words and word sequences over time across a large corpus of texts digitized as part of the Google Books project. Without getting into the debate as to whether things … Continue reading →

The China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) describes itself as “an online relational database with biographical information about approximately 328,000 individuals as of May 2014, primarily from the 7th through 19th centuries”. A joint project of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese … Continue reading →

While at Beijing Airport recently, I connected to the official airport wifi service, and noticed something strange when visiting ctext.org: A large floating advert had appeared at the bottom right of every page of the site, obscuring much of the … Continue reading →

This post is a little off-topic, but perhaps will help people Googling with the same problem. A trivial issue nearly prevented me from being able to determine the status of my Hong Kong visa application online. The reference number I’d … Continue reading →

The Ming Qing Women’s Writings (明清婦女著作) site provides a carefully curated database of women’s writing from the Ming, Qing, and Republican periods of Chinese history. The database contains a wealth of information about authors and individual texts (and poems) within … Continue reading →

The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s subscription-based CHinese ANcient Texts (CHANT) website has recently undergone some renovation. The new interface appears to largely follow the layout and functionality of the previous version, although there seem to be a few puzzling … Continue reading →

Titled “Digital Resources for Sinologists 1.0“, this post by Holger Schneider and Jeffrey Tharsen gives a useful overview of digital dictionaries and other online tools for Chinese, many of which will be of interest to Sinologists, as well as offering … Continue reading →

The ever-popular Wordle, like many tools designed to work with digital corpora, can be used on Chinese text with minor tweaking. Wordle takes a text and ranks the words in it in order of frequency, then produces a tag cloud … Continue reading →

A huge though largely unsorted list of Chinese language web sites and resources related to the study of early China has been assembled here: http://ctext.org/discuss.pl?if=en&thread=3223065

Yintong is an online database of characters in the Guǎngyùn 廣韻, a dictionary dating from 1008 C.E., created by David Prager Branner. The database has the following main functions: Lookup by character, returning information about the fǎnqiè associated with the … Continue reading →